Some 4500 years ago, as the Great Pyramid of Giza was being erected and the Indus Valley civilisation hit its peak, a group of Arctic peoples migrated to a region of northern Greenland now known as Inutoqqat Nunaat, or the “land of the ancient people”.
They were the northernmost culture on Earth at the time, living just 800 kilometres from the North Pole, but little else has been known about their diet, customs and strategies for survival in this polar climate. Now, that is starting to change.
On 30 July, researchers with the set off an expedition to understand this ancient civilisation. “It’s a mystery,” says at the British Antarctic Survey, who was part of the expedition. “So little is known about them.”
Advertisement
These peoples lived in lakeside tents fixed in place by stone rings that remain eerily untouched to this day. Previous expeditions have found small tools, including microblades, suggesting that they hunted musk ox on land and char in the lakes, while hearths and mid-passages – stone structures that run through the centre of the rings – provide a glimpse of how they kept warm during sunless winters that lasted six months. Miniature tent rings set up at some sites might be the remains of children’s toys, similar to dollhouses, opening a window into the domestic lives of these peoples.
“These dollhouses are all matching colours with matching stones in the centre,” says Perren. “You can imagine families here. To have 4000-year-old dollhouses, sitting on this landscape, is just insane.”
On this year’s expedition, the team extracted new sediment cores to learn about the past climate and conducted a brief survey of archaeological features at the site.
The people who migrated out of the Canadian Arctic 4500 years ago split into two groups: one that went across northern Greenland, called the Independence I culture, and another that went down the west coast of Greenland, called the Saqqaq people. The Wandel Dal Project is focused on the Independence I group, which is named after Independence Fjord, a formation near their settlements.
Unlike later cultures that lived in Greenland, including the Thule, ancestors of the Inuit peoples, the Independence I culture didn’t travel with dog sleds and would have roamed the vast wilderness on foot. Their inland migration may have been buoyed by a period of warmer and wetter weather, says at the National Museum of Denmark, who isn’t involved with the Wandel Dal Project. “Wandel Dal might have been greener at the time of the arrival of Independence I,” he says. “In 2500 BC, there was more open water and probably large stocks of musk ox that had never been hunted by humans.”
But favourable conditions in this part of the world are ephemeral. About 700 years after these peoples first appeared, they mysteriously vanished.
A second culture, known as Independence II, emerged about 1000 years after the first, but it also disappeared in around 100 BC. Untangling the deep cultural history of the region has been complicated by the near-total absence of any human remains.
“Independence II appear to have arrived during a period of cooling conditions, so evidently the climate is not the sole factor conditioning human life,” says Jensen.
Those working on the Wandel Dal Project, which includes many Greenlanders, were also at the mercy of the unpredictable weather in the High Arctic, a region where the landscape is largely barren. The team relied on hardy Twin Otter planes and helicopters to reach the field site, but blustering storms limited the latest expedition to just four days instead of two weeks.
With the sediment cores the researchers collected, they hope to reconstruct the climatic and environmental shifts that may have shaped the lives of the region’s ancient peoples, with plans to release more detailed findings next year.
“The High Arctic environment, with its cycles of light and darkness, cold and ice, was not just a backdrop for survival, but a landscape full of resources that the Independence I people skillfully exploited,” says at the University of Greenland, who is not part of the project. “Their ability to hunt, as well as to store and preserve food, indicates a deep understanding of the environment and its cycles.”
Perren and her colleagues felt a sense of respect and connection to the Independence I people during their fieldwork, despite being separated from them by thousands of years.
“There’s something about being in these sites where you’re camped and where these ancient people lived, looking at the same views and trying to understand how they lived, what the environment was like and how it changed,” Perren says. “It’s pretty magical.”
