The Thule expansion

In two centuries a people moved from Alaska to Greenland — over five thousand kilometres through some of the most inhospitable country on Earth. It is among the fastest documented settlement movements in human history, and it was driven by technology rather than numbers.

Who they were

The Thule are the ancestors of today's Inuit in Canada and Greenland. The name comes from Thule in north-west Greenland, where the first finds were made.

Timeline

900

the Thule culture takes shape at the Bering Strait

1000

large-scale whaling; a surplus of food and materials

1200

the eastward expansion begins

1300

the Thule have reached Greenland

1300

the Dorset culture vanishes almost entirely

1350

encounters with Norse settlers in Greenland

1450

the Little Ice Age; whale routes shift, settlements move

1721

Danish colonisation of Greenland begins

The technology that made it possible

Four things, and they worked together:

**The umiak**

an open skin boat up to ten metres, large enough to take a sixty-tonne bowhead whale

**The kayak**

the one-man boat for seals and hunting in open water

**Dog teams**

transport over ice with a load, far faster than on foot

**The toggling harpoon**, whose head turns under the skin and cannot be shaken loose

One bowhead is around sixty tonnes. It feeds a whole settlement for months, gives lamp oil through the winter, and bone for house frames where no timber exists. A people who can take whales need not follow the prey — they can settle.

Dorset, who vanished

In the eastern Arctic the Thule met the Dorset, who had been there two thousand years. The Dorset had neither bow, nor dog team, nor large boats.

It was long assumed they were absorbed. Genetic studies from 2014 showed otherwise: the Dorset left practically no trace in today's Inuit population. They disappeared as a distinct people within a few generations. How is unresolved — displacement, disease, climate change, or all of it.

In Inuit oral tradition they are called the Tuniit, and are described as large and strong, but shy.

The meeting with the Norse

The two groups overlapped in Greenland for around two centuries. Norse objects — chain links, boat rivets, a cast bronze weight — have been found at Thule sites far north of the Norse settlements. Inuit tradition remembers the encounters.

The Norse settlements were gone by the fifteenth century. The Thule remained.