WonderQuest
with April Holladay

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The first people move into the Arctic

Summary

Before people could survive in the Arctic, they needed a technology to handle the cold. Folks managed that in Siberia. Then the Ice Age actually fostered eastward migrations by opening a huge strip of land between Siberia and Alaska.

First plants colonized the newly bared land. Animals came to eat the tundra plants. Human hunters trailed the animals into the New World. Some became Eskimos, who innovated new tools and weapons. Eventually, Eskimos became successful whalers, followed the bowhead whale as it migrated east, and settled the Arctic.

Ice flowed south in great sheets but slowly enough that plants and animals adapted. So did people, using technology. Eons later, the ice melted, glaciers retreated, and seeds blew into the bared land. Grazing animals wandered north, eating the new growth. Hunters, animal and human, trailed the plant eaters. As the ice moved, so people moved.

Eskimo Girl, Umanak, Greenland, 1896, Watercolor by Russell W. Porter (U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, NARA)

Almost two million years ago ice covered the northern land, miles thick, pushing frigid fingers into southern lands: Kentucky, the Pyrenees, the Caspian Sea. Creatures migrated, changed, or died. Plants huddled; low lichens and tough midget plants edged into strips beside the glaciers. Animals took the opposite tack and grew bizarrely big to keep the body core warm: the wooly mammoth, the primeval bison, and the cave bear. However, these giants didn’t survive when the land warmed again. Others—the caribou, musk oxen, hares, lemmings, and wolves—evolved so well they still roam the Arctic tundra.

Humans Adapt

About 1.25 million years ago, erect humans, though not yet modern man, reached northern Africa, Asia, and Europe—but not beyond the ice sheets that still lay heavy on the land. These early humans lacked the technology for surviving cold but were developing what they needed. Already they talked and hunted together.

People have language, stone tools, cooperative hunting skills, fire, and warm fur clothes. At last, they can venture north into cold country. Gradually, small bands of hunters follow game and settle in Europe, nestling homes almost against the Scandinavian ice sheet: 50,000 to 35,000 years ago.

By 40,000 BP., humans (Homo sapiens) entered Siberia from the west and south. European peoples straggled over passes in the southern Ural mountains into Kazakhstan and on to eastern Siberia through Altai Mountain passes of Mongolia. Folks from central and southern Asia braved passes in the Altai mountains. Chinese and Mongolians headed into east Siberia.

In another 15,000 years, they wander into northern Siberia and settle near the Arctic Ocean. They don’t stop. Siberians cross the Bering Sea by land, by ice, by boat.

Around 300,000 years ago some primitive hunters (Neanderthal) made a stab at settling in caves around the Altai mountains of Mongolia. They didn’t get farther than southern Siberia and didn’t stay long. Some of them retreated south and survived. Others apparently could not return and either froze or starved. It was a brave effort but humans weren’t ready yet and wouldn’t be for more than 200,000 years.

Arctic Time Line:  (time is in years before the present, BP).

America in Waves

Seventy-five thousand years ago, the American continents had no people. Then the oceans dropped 330 feet (100 m) to expose a bridge between Siberia and Alaska: an ice-free chunk of land twice the size of Texas. Winds lift spore and seeds to carry life onto the bridge. Lichen and low-growing plants take root. A soft spongy tundra carpets the bridge.

Land bridges formed like this: During the Ice Age, the volume of glacier ice tripled. Glacier ice comes from snow. The atmosphere gets snow water by evaporating ocean water. Transforming 10 million cubic miles (45 cu km)of water to ice, lowered the oceans and bared the land like a drying puddle exposes mud clumps. The emerging land formed a bridge. Other bridges formed too, connecting England with France and Southeast Asia with Indonesian islands.

Between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago, waves of Mongolian peoples followed mammoth and bison herds across the bridge.  The animals, not content with scanty tundra sedges, headed south looking for richer fodder. Herds swept down the western corridor into the rangelands of North and South America. Trailing hunters became the first Americans.

Today, many winters are cold enough to freeze solid the shallow sea separating the two land masses. Then, Eskimos sled across the 55 miles of frozen sea to visit kin on the other side.

Siberians crossed the Bering Sea after the Mongolians. Some reached northern Alaska and headed into the Yukon. These hardy folk became the first Eskimos, called Tuniits, and pioneered the High Arctic from Canada to northern Greenland and Labrador. They were the first people to actually live, year-round, in the bitter cold of the American Arctic.

Natives Follow Ice and Caribou

As the glaciers melt and bare the land 11,000 years ago, bison hunters come north.  They find caribou and follow the migrating herds into the tundra. Come fall, they trail the caribou back to sheltering forests for the winter.

The natives occupy the Barren Grounds between Hudson Bay and the Great Bear Lake by 8000 BP. They still call this country home thousands of years later.

Seals and walruses, as well as caribou, lured natives north from the New England coast. By 9000 BP, these maritime peoples reach the southern coast of Labrador. They, like the Barren Ground and Great American Plains natives, left archeologists a peculiarly shaped fluted spear point.

By the way, the Labrador natives buried their dead in stone crypts that they then heaped high with boulders: the most sophisticated burial practice known anywhere then.

The North American Drift warms Lapland with tropical waters from the Gulf of Mexico. Although almost entirely north of the Arctic Circle, Lapland has the longest ice-free coastline of polar lands.

The Lapps (55,000 population) or Sami (for people as they call themselves) are short, broad-headed folk with dark eyes and dark hair who moved into the northern forests of Lapland by 8000 BP. They may have come across the Ural Mountains or followed ice and caribou north.

Earliest accounts say the women and men wore skin clothes sewn with sinews 2,000 years ago and fished and hunted caribou, bear, fox, wolverine, and beaver. Hunters speeding on skis, which they invented, could overtake animals.

Paulus Diaconus, a Roman historian in 700 AD, could scarcely believe what he thought he saw. These wild Sami leap on wooden shoes rather than walk! He wrote. Other accounts swore Sami slid on the ground like snakes.

By 1,000 BP wild game dwindled from Sami forests. So, Samis tamed caribou. They harvested milk, meat, and, most importantly, skins. By 1496 AD Sami used reindeer to pull sleds.

Samis still live in their ancient lands but they are a minority. Mining, lumbering, and dam building threaten their culture with extinction.

Making a living:  The nature of the Arctic dictates how people make a living no matter where they live around the pole. They all hunt sea mammals, land animals, and fish. Most hunt seasonally. Therefore, they are a people on the move. In the north, oceans yield more food than land since sea animals feed farther south where the Sun shines more.

Northern folk share similar technology evolved to meet similar demands: tailored skin and fur clothing, houses built partly underground, skin-covered tents, and skin- or bark-covered boats. In the tundra they use sleds and in the taiga: toboggans, skis, and snowshoes. Dogs carry loads and pull sleds in both hemispheres. They work stone similarly. They all used metals before the Europeans came. They even shared the same loose, casual social groups necessitated by their constant moves. All believed in an a spirit world of life and death importance.

Eskimo Woman, Umanak, Greenland, 1896, Watercolor by Russell W. Porter (U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, NARA)

Tuniit ancestors, in waves of extended families, struggled across the Arctic from Alaska to Greenland: on foot. By 4000 BP, they had evenly settled the Arctic. See the map of Figure 10.4. In some ways, it was easy. The climate was warmer then than now. Along the coast, they found great piles of driftwood for their open fires: bonanzas from Siberia. They shot musk oxen and seals who had never experienced two-legged hunters adept with bow and arrow.

The people knew, from Siberian ancestors, how to make warm skin clothing, make sharp cutting tools and weapons from stone, and how to read the land. They pitted this knowledge against the Arctic as day by day they advanced. Sometimes they stayed if they found good hunting. They’d pitch tent on high ground—an exposed beach of fist-sized gravel—with a good ocean view and settle for a while.

Dress:  An Eskimo, dressed for winter travel, looked almost as wide as high in his bulky double parkas made of caribou skin. He wore the inner one with the fur facing his body and the outer one with the hair facing away. Most inland folk wore parkas slit up the side to just above the waist and fringed. The 6-inch fringe decorated the front apron and over the tail flap, like a long jacket with side vents. The front hung to mid-thigh but the back reached to the back of his knees: an insulated seat cushion. Western Inuits attached wolf ruffs around their hoods; eastern ones didn’t.

His pants, made also of caribou skin, were big, floppy, and came to just above the knee. Underneath he wore leggings from ankle to thigh and a long stocking of soft skin. His feet were clad in caribou slippers, low-cut and soft, covered by two pairs of caribou boots, the first with hair side in and the second with hair side out. Hair covered the sole, too, so that layers of hollow caribou hair insulated his feet against the frigid snow. The Eskimo caribou clothing is lighter and warmer than anything else yet devised.

A complete outfit of inner and outer garments weighs no more than four or five pounds if made from the proper skins. Smart Europeans (the ones that survived) quickly discarded their inadequate wools and dressed in Eskimo furs.

When they decided to stay a while, they built a fireplace patterned on an ancient Siberian model (which, by the way, the Samis used, too). Living in oval tents, summer and winter, they needed a central hearth where all could stay warm and cook. They divided the extended family tent in two with a central hearth made of stone. People from both sides of the tent could reach the hearth. They extended the hearth at both ends with a raised food compartment to the rear and a fuel cubby in front. To boil food, they dropped hot stones into skin bags.

Eskimos really did eat raw seal blubber-all they could. (It tastes like fibrous beef fat soaked in bacon grease.) They also ate great quantities of raw meat and fish. After all, they practically subsisted on meat and fish alone. They managed this dietary feat by eating as much raw stuff as possible so they didn’t kill the vitamins their bodies needed by cooking. European sailors who died of scurvy could have lived had they only known what the Eskimos knew.

This lifestyle worked but gave marginal existence. So, Neolithic geniuses devised needed improvements. Shooting an arrow or throwing a spear at a seal only to have him disappear with the imbedded weapon was catastrophic. You could starve that way. Some innovative hunter created the first harpoon.

He flung it at a seal; the head broke away as the point pierced the animal. He held a line attached to the harpoon head. The seal promptly submerged below the ice to escape but the crafty hunter reeled in the wounded animal. A vast improvement.

A harpoon from the Tuniit culture. (Robert W. Park)

Hunters soon were pulling in walrus, narwhal, and the beluga whale. They may have sallied forth in kayaks although they still lacked big boats.

The climate cooled about 3,500 years ago to present conditions causing the Tuniits to innovate shelter and heating improvements. They buried part of the home and built sod walls above. Some savant invented the seal-oil lamp, a bowl containing burning oil that radiated a warm glow throughout the shelter. The lamp made an open hearth obsolete, since one could also cook over the lamp.

One thing remained: a dwelling easily built (by a skilled snow cutter who could cut the right sized pieces and fit the tricky top blocks together), reasonably warm (even without a fire), and ideal for a family that needed to make frequent winter moves after seals. They invented the snow house by 3,000 BP. That, combined with the seal lamp, gave them hot meals in snow huts. Life was better.

The Tuniit culture and its forerunners lasted from 5,000 to 1,000 BP. For 4,000 years, they were the sole occupants of most of the Arctic. Their civilization died probably due to repeated failures in the caribou or seal hunts, about the time Norsemen and Inuits penetrated their land.

Survival custom:  Eskimos didn’t push Grandma out on the ice floe to freeze when she was too old to sew. Eskimos valued elders for their wisdom, knowledge of taboos and customs, and ability to tell a good story. It is true, however, when a family was literally starving, an elder might decide to wander out in a storm so the others could live. But all believed her soul would return when the next baby was born. She hadn’t really died—just moved on.

When waves of Siberians came to the New World about 5000 BP, some people kept traveling—the Tuniits—to pioneer the Arctic. Others—the Inuits—stuck around the coast, fought with each other, and warred and traded with others. Out of this turmoil emerged a superior Arctic technology. From the bones, teeth, and skins of animals, Inuits fashioned a better way of life. They invented:

Dogsled travel opened the Inuit’s world (Rear Admiral Harley D. Nygren, NOAA Corps, Tigvariak Island Alaska North Slope, Spring 1949)

With these innovations, the Inuit’s way of life opened like a blossom. In a day, a man could now easily race across 40 miles of Arctic stillness to the tune of swishing runners and panting dogs. He could glide his stable umiak onto a bowhead for the kill and eat well for the whole winter. At day’s end he could enter a warm pithouse, loll on stone platforms covered with cushy furs, and toast his toes against a glowing soapstone lamp.

Hunting the bowhead, successfully, made the Inuit a rich man.

So, having invented the tools, he went after the bowhead. The climate cooperated. About 1000 BP, the warming land opened leads in the ice of the Beaufort Sea and Amundsen Gulf. The bowhead migrated east through the leads and the Inuits tailed their treasure from a home base in northern Alaska. Whole families piled in umiaks, took off after their livelihood, and settled the Arctic along the way. They reached Labrador about 750 years ago. Their rich and comfortable culture dominated for 500 years and then declined, with the weather.

Boating in the Arctic is no place to get wet. A woman’s sewing skills kept the people dry and warm as they shifted to a marine life. She sewed sealskin into waterproof boots taking exquisite tiny, tight stitches with sinew thread. Where the seam must be waterproof, she overlapped two skin pieces, first sewing one piece in place, overlapping the second, and sewing it in place. When water tried to penetrate the double line of stitches, the caribou thread swelled, sealing the stitches.

Five hundred years ago, Earth cooled—the Arctic with it. Ice advanced and closed leads. European whalers began to hunt whales in the western Atlantic, leaving fewer to migrate west into Inuit waters. The Inuits — no longer able to hunt the economic foundation of their society—changed their lives.

Many folks in the High Arctic died trying to adapt. Survivors abandoned the area and moved east into northwestern Greenland where they eked a living hunting seals and gathering bird eggs.

Wife lending to strangers:  Eskimos did lend their wives to strangers, but for a good reason: to stay alive. Back in the old days, the Eskimos had no government to keep the peace because they moved around too much to form such structures. A man’s avenging kin was his safety net. The threat of reprisal would keep a potential criminal in line.

However, an Eskimo who left his homeland to trade or hunt also left his safety net. He was among strangers who might want his dogteam and would kill to get it. So he made a home-away-from-home safety net by taking his wife. Once they arrived at the new place, the man quickly arranged a wife exchange with a local resident. That made him kin to all his wife-exchange husband’s family. That family was bound to avenge any injury done to him so he was safe.

In the central Arctic, summer ice increased so much that Inuits gave up hunting the bowhead whale and turned to the interior for food. Fishing inland waters and hunting caribou, they scrounged only small stores for the winter. When these provisions ran out, they followed the ringed seal.

Firm ice—the ringed seal’s favorite habitat—expanded and lasted longer into summer as the climate cooled. Inuits who switched to breathing-hole hunting did well; others did not. Reluctantly, they abandoned their fine winter homes and lived in snow houses on the ice. They could build a snow house in about an hour so moving was no great chore. When they ran out of seals in one place, they moved to another.

Inuits dropped whale-hunting technologies. Culture, art, and mythology shrank. Most Inuits were living at a subsistence level when European explorers arrived.

Climate changes affected southern Labrador’s Inuits the least.

Civilization Comes

Five hundred years ago, the first Europeans meet the Inuits. A tall ghostly ship with sails flapping glides into a southern Labrador inlet. Inuits gather on shore. They have never seen a European ship before. These Basque fishermen are the first. The Inuit call the strangers "qallunaat" or bushy eyebrows.

European and American whalers hunted Arctic waters until they took almost all the whales. Between 1848 to 1885, whalers killed 10,000 whales in the Bering Sea.

At the same time, explorers hunted for a Northwest Passage to the Orient.

Whalers and explorers brought goods to trade: guns, cloth, metal, tools, and utensils. They also brought a different way of life and thinking: clocks, musical instruments, and dances. Finally, they brought unintended scourges: disease, tobacco, and alcohol. Beginning in the mid 1860s, Eskimos from Siberia and St. Lawrence Island (off the Alaskan coast) served as crew aboard whaling ships: a start into another world.

Rubbing noses:  Eskimos don’t kiss; they rub noses. A Scots fur trader describes it. The girl reaches up and brings your face down to hers and holds the side of her nose against yours. That shows affection. But then she presses her nose against yours and rubs it slowly back and forth. That not only is considered passionate—it is!

As the whales vanished, fur trading picked up. The Hudson Bay Company built a network of trading posts over the Arctic. Furs made a better living so Inuits trapped. This made more money but required more too. A trapper needed 13 to 20 dogs to pull traps, skins, and supplies. Whereas a hunter needed only three or four. A trapper spent three quarters of his time supporting the dogs. Each hundred-pound dog ate as much as a man—four or five pounds of meat a day: every day.

Missionaries came next to convert Inuits to a new belief. Many switched over but still observed the old taboos and customs.

By 1920, the big exploring surges tapered off. In the Mackenzie delta, Inuits, by the hundreds, died from epidemics.

Some Inuits, in remote areas of central Canadian Arctic, had never seen a white man as late as 1900. While, along the Labrador coast (where Europeans first landed), Europeans had either pushed out the Inuits or mingled with them.

The North-West Mounted Police (later called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, RCMP) arrived to keep law and order. The Mounties always got their man and soon blood feuds died out among the Inuits.

Inuits, quick to adapt to whatever life throws their way, have adjusted to civilization in a couple of generations.

Now days you might see an Inuit train engineer working for the Great Slave Railway. He puts out the cat at night and sets his alarm for six o’clock in the morning. Inuit children eat cornflakes for breakfast at Cambridge Bay and talk about the movie they saw last night.

The U.S. explorer, Robert Peary, got to know the Inuits over the 20 years he explored with them. They got to know him, too, as they all risked their lives together. They came to call the North Pole (about which they cared nothing), "kingmersoriatorfigssuak" or "the place where one eats dogs". Now, the word means "hot dog stand."

The least you need to know

• The first people into the Arctic entered northern Siberia about 12,000 BP
• They had language, fire, fur clothes, and sharp stone tools.
• Oceans dropped to expose a land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska.
• Mongolians crossed the land bridge to the American Arctic in waves. They settled North and South America and became the American Natives.
• American Natives followed receding glaciers north to the tree line.
• Samis arrived in Lapland about the same time. (8000 to 4000 BP)
• Siberians crossed the land bridge later (5000 BP) and became the New World’s Eskimos.
• One wave of Eskimos, the Tuniits, spread across the Arctic from Alaska to Greenland. They were the first peoples to live in that land the year around. Their society survived for 4,000 years.
• Another group of warring, trading Eskimos---the Inuits--- exploded with ideas and invented: big boats from which to hunt gigantic whales, dogsleds and harnesses, the compound bow, and sod homes for the winter.
• The Inuits spread evenly across the Canadian and Greenland Arctic lands. They displaced the few Tuniits left in 1000 BP.
• The Inuit economic base was the bowhead whale.
• The Little Ice Age (500 BP) caused difficulties in hunting the bowhead whale and, therefore, the Inuit society to go downhill.
• Inuits adjusted successfully to civilization but at much cost to individuals. Thousands died from epidemics.
• Eskimos traded their wives with strangers for good reason (insurance against murder).