| Ancient Greenland mystery has a simple answer, it seems |
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Page 2 of 2 A slowly cooling climate in 1300s In the late 1300s, Norse Greenlanders likely experienced this process in reverse, their farms squeezed by advancing glaciers and truncated summers. It's no accident, anthropologists say, that the cold-adapted Inuit were spreading south in this period, their hunting territory eventually overlapping with the Norse. Scholars have wondered why the Norse failed to adapt, dropping agriculture in favor of hunting and fishing, like the Inuit. Turns out, they did - up to a point. An analysis of the bones of Norse buried at Brattahlid and other Norse sites found that early settlers ate a diet consisting of 80 percent agricultural products and 20 percent seafood; from the 1300s, the proportions reversed. But there were limits to their adaptations. Archaeological excavations indicate that the Norse never adopted the harpoons, kayaks, and fishing gear their Inuit neighbors used so successfully. And while there are plenty of seal bones in Norse dumps, virtually no fish bones have been recovered, leading some to argue that they never took advantage of the ample fish resources in the streams and fjords, even in times of famine. Gisladottir, a native of Iceland, scoffs at the notion, pointing out that Norse in other lands ate fish in quantity. "Of course they ate fish," she says. "One common way of preparing cod was to gut it, dry it, and then cook it in a pot for three or four hours and eat your porridge, bones and all." Fish or no fish, the Norse collapse was apparently in slow motion. Eva Panagiotakopulu, a paleoecologist at the University of Edinburgh, has put together what happened to two of the Norse's more northerly farms with the clues left behind by the flies, lice, and beetles that lived in their sod-walled houses. Although located on the same fjord, she says, the farms met different ends. Insect species can be highly specialized, allowing scientists to determine what livestock were present (certain lice live only on sheep, others only on goats), whether a building was occupied (some flies could only survive winter inside heated homes), and where food (in the form of decaying meat) was present. Together, their remains provide a record of events on the farms. Two farms, two different fates "In one, everything was going fine until the very end, and then they abandoned it, taking their food and supplies with them," Ms. Panagiotakopulu says. "In the other, it seems the farmers were trapped in their house during a very long winter, ate their livestock, then their dog, and then died in their beds," prompting the flies to move from larder to bedroom. Still, society apparently carried on: Somebody later removed and presumably buried the farmers' bodies. Other sites also show an orderly abandonment, not an apocalyptic end. "You don't find bodies in and around the ruins," says William Fitzhugh, director of the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. "People are being properly buried in church graveyards right up into the 15th century, so it doesn't look like they were wiped out by marauding Inuit or other big disruptions." Another indication of an orderly retreat: no valuables such as crucifixes, chalices, or chandeliers at church sites, items often found in early medieval churches elsewhere in Scandinavia. "Nothing has ever been found of any real value, just everyday items," says forensic anthropologist Lynnerup. "To me that indicates they left over an extended period." Dr. Lynnerup's genetic studies of modern Inuit from across Greenland has put another theory to rest: that the Inuit absorbed the Norse. Their mitochondrial DNA (inherited from mothers only) show no European admixture. Archaeological evidence at medieval Inuit sites backs this up, suggesting contact between the two peoples was limited to minor barter. "During the same time period, a lot of Norse settlements in Iceland and northern Norway were being abandoned, but nobody writes big books about that," Lynnerup says. "I'm not sure that the Norse saw Greenland as being very different from the fjords they came from in Norway, and leaving it was no more stressful than abandoning a hamlet in Norway." His theory: In the 1300s and 1400s, Greenland's youths voted with their feet, leaving until the colony could no longer support itself. The last few left. "I imagine this old Norse man standing in his sodden, graying field with a couple of scrawny cattle and saying to his son, 'One day, this will all be yours,' " he says. "And the son gets on the next ship to Reykjavik." Copyright: AXcessNews.com |
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