Free Republic

New research and technologies may end up changing the way we think about early Arctic history, upending the assumption that the ancient ancestors of today's Inuit people learned how to spin yarn from Viking settlers. It has long been assumed that the ancient Dorset and Thule people learned how to spin yarn from Norse settlers who arrived in Newfoundland some 1,000 years ago, according to the Canadian press. “There’s a lot we don’t know,” said Michele Hayeur Smith of Brown University in Rhode Island and lead author of a recent paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Hayeur Smith and...

The earliest people in the North American Arctic remained isolated from others in the region for millennia before vanishing around 700 years ago, a new genetic analysis shows. The study, published online Thursday, also reveals that today's Inuit and Native Americans of the Arctic are genetically distinct from the region's first settlers. Inuit hunters in the Canadian Arctic have long told stories about a mysterious ancient people known as the Tunit, who once inhabited the far north. Tunit men, they recalled, possessed powerful magic and were strong enough to crush the neck of a walrus and singlehandedly haul the massive...