The Vikings – Newly discovered evidence is upending our understanding of how early settlers made a life on the island — and why they suddenly disappeared
Amid that calamity, so the story goes, Greenland’s Vikings–numbering 5,000 at their peak–never gave up their old ways. They failed to learn from the Inuit, who arrived in northern Greenland a century or two after the Vikings landed in the south. They kept their livestock, and when their animals starved, so did they. The more flexible Inuit, with a culture focused on hunting marine mammals, thrived.
That is what archaeologists believed until a few years ago.
Well, it did fit a convenient narrative.
Gee whiz Kate, you mean it used to be WARMER in Greenland than it is now? Then it got too cold, and they all up and left?
But but but, that’s unpossible! This is the warmest the Earth has ever been! CNN told me so!
My cat’s temperature smells like cat temperature.
Interesting article. It brought to mind a debate I was having not long ago about the fossil records and how such records depend so much on who is looking at them and how they interpret them. The person I was debating with could not accept that an idea could ever be wrong.
Fascinating stuff. Since the Vikings didn’t adjust to the changing conditions it tells me that they were often near the brink of disaster. New ideas and technology comes from, in part, from having enough spare time where energy isn’t devoted to survival. When things turned bad they couldn’t adapt because they had no opportunity to figure out they needed to – then it was too late.
…or in other words, they were dependent on other countries’ placing high value on their one asset; sea lion tusks. Once that market was taken over by elephant ivory they had nothing to trade and hadn’t developed their own means of producing certain necessities.
Sounds like an anti-globalist parable to me.
I doubt that the weather drove them out. It probably didn’t help but they were there to hunt walrus. Judging by the fact they cleaned up and closed up the houses they probably thought they would be back when the market improved, except the market never improved. Canada is full of old mining, logging and farming towns that were boarded up and left until the money was better. I doubt the Vikings were any different. Money talked as loudly six hundred years ago as it does now.
Off topic but….
FULL EVENT: President Donald Trump Speech at CPAC 2017 (2/24/2017)
http://commoncts.blogspot.com/2017/02/full-event-president-donald-trump.html
I terms of time they were there as long as from Cabot to present day.
It states in the article that the settlement disappeared around the same time that plague wiped out half the population of Norway. Maybe they just returned to Norway to take advantage of the new cheap real estate opportunities.
Thanks. Great read.
And a lesson too.
CAS
I believe The Farfarer by Farley Mowat; published as i sit here and recall, (loaned my copy to another Old Guy), y’all will find Mowat has exponded and developed a twin thesis.
Who developed what and at what time frame will probably become a moot point if the Smithonian has established the New narrative as the current meme.
Anyways Farley Mowat is diligent in researching His “Novels?” and I recommend “The Farfarer” as a great read and an insight previously not brought to the masses before 2009. cheers;
Gotta love how they try and bring it back to climate change/environment instead of the most Likely reason – the drying up of the ivory market. Certainly conditions for growing may have gotten difficult but they did persist after the climate improved. It wasn’t until the demand for their realm for being there – ivory – plummeted.
And this is by no means an isolated happening.
I watched a program on TV regarding the disappearing Vikings and was struck how the program blamed the disappearance of the Vikings on the Christian faith of the Vikings. Seemed kind of funny at the time.
“the climate cooled because of the volcanic eruption in Indonesia.”
Yeah, it was just that volcano that cooled the climate for 180 years until they left, had nothing to do with the sun.
Yeah, that’s it.
So back in the early days of climate change (warming! boo, hiss), people(s) were able to go abroad because of a lack of sea ice and then establish a home in a formerly frozen place, a growing season, breed livestock and hunt sea mammals to feed themselves.
When the climate changes in the opposite direction (cooling! can’t happen, not happening, etc.) then they do their best to adapt for a while but they aren’t quite able to for a number of reasons (lack of firewood, furnaces, greenhouses and kerosene space heaters..) they leave for warmer climes. Or perish.
Now, (he says), what would be a preferable situation to be in?
Hardly Knowit? Really?
The Norse left their settlements on Greenland and North America for a variety of reasons, not just one. The well documented cooling climate at the end of the Medieval Warming would have been a significant factor. There was little reason to adapt to an Inuit lifestyle when they could easily sail back to geothermally-heated Iceland and wait for the next warm spell.
So global warming caused them to prosper and global cooling caused them to perish.
Is there something we can learn from that?
I’ve been in the Canadian arctic a number of times. The Inuit consider Mowat a fool.
He is an exuberant blowhard capable of extreme exaggerations. His book on wolves is farcical.
I’ve been in the Canadian arctic a number of times. And many of the Inuit are not dissimilar from their southern cousin.
The Norse did not ‘perish’, they moved back to warmer regions like Iceland and Scandinavia.
Oh people came from the UK and France to NL primarily to supply salt cod for Western Europe. The cod fishery was already in decline by 1900. Now the cod are mostly gone, and NLers are gradually leaving too. It’s a complicated process – the out-migration is slowed by switching to other species, notably shrimp, by Federal subsidies (I doubt the Greenlanders had those), and work in the oil industry. Nothing dramatic at all; and no die-off.
After we loaded the truck with our backpacks and essential supplies requested by the archaeologists—a case of beer, two bottles of Scotch, a carton of menthol cigarettes and some tins of snuff—Hansen drove us to our destination:
The study points to trade – walrus tusks for whatever was required – being the animating incentive for those Vikings who populated Greenland.
Farming would be necessary to grow crops, true, but what about grog ?
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/extreme-3500-year-old-nordic-grog-was-booze-choice-vikings-1432694
Very interesting article.
Gord, no doubt the cooling climate played a part in the abandonment of the settlements, as did the changes in the ivory markets.
My ancestors and my wife’s ancestors, all tradesmen and landless, left the Danzig/Gdansk region of Poland, then West Prussia after 1792, between 1789 and 1793 for the free land Tsarina Catherine II of Russia had opened for settlement in the Zaporozhia area of New (Little) Russia, now Ukraine. The industrial age of factory production had begun in Europe and everywhere there was reduced need for spinning wheel makes etc, so these people migrated to Little Russia and took up farming and practiced their former trade to supplement their incomes. It was interesting that no landowners also migrated, just unemployed trades people. In the case of my people climate had nothing to do with the migration, but in the case of the Greenland Vikings it was a combo.
They just got bored, Vikings were all about plunder and pillage.
My ancestors left the Frankfurt am Main region for the Volga region in 1766. By WWI they turned into half a million Germans on the cusp of Asia.. Lenin and Stalin, over the next 30 years, implemented a program of birth control. What better way to control births than by starving or butchering potential parents?
The narrative that … “white people are dumb” … plays really, really, well at our institutions of leaning higher bias. Add to that base narrative that … “white folk know nothing of the eco-world” … and voila … PhD’s are disbursed. The Vikings are seen as the original White Colonialists … so by all means … anything that can knock them down a peg (thank you Obama) … is fair game … right ?
However what is SHOCKING to me is the flimsy (original) scholarship. Seriously ? Such grand conclusions were developed about Viking Greenland settlements before a single midden had been excavated ? Seriously ? Talk about Archaeology 101. How did these PhD candidates ever make it through the Masters program ?
“How did these PhD candidates ever make it through the Masters program?”
I have a degree in Anthropology. How you get through is by doing what the prof says. If the prof says the Vikings were a bunch of layabouts who perished of the cold, that’s what you say too. Presto, you pass. No skeletons found? Never mind!
Two words: Margaret Mead.
After a BA in that, I took up house painting. For the intellectual stimulation and collegial honesty. I wish I was kidding.
The climate nonsense calls into question every scientific or academic article I read these days. And, I hate their guts for it.
I see the fumes have had no effect on your keen intellect. You must be using State-approved Low-VOC paints. I, like you, much prefer the company of folk who live in the real world … who feel the sun on their faces and can easily distinguish the difference between policy papers and studies about global warming … and a NORMAL sunny day.