Sailors visited remote arctic islands more than 4,000 years ago

A site on the island of Isbjørne where the Paleo-Inuit people set up a circular tent

Matthew Walls, Mari Kleist, Pauline Knudsen

People traveled to remote islands off the northwest coast of Greenland 4,500 years ago. This required them to cross more than 50 kilometers of open water – one of the longest sea journeys undertaken by Aboriginal people in the Arctic.

These intrepid seafarers were the first people to ever reach these islands, the archaeologist says John Darwent at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the study.

in 2019 Matthew Walls at the University of Calgary in Canada and his colleagues investigated the Kitsissut Islands, also known as the Carey Islands, northwest of Greenland. The islands lie in the Pikialasorsuaq polynya, an area of open water surrounded by sea ice. Studies of marine sediments indicate that the polynya only formed about 4,500 years ago.

The researchers focused on three central islands: Isbjørne, Mellem and Nordvest. They found five sites with a total of 297 archaeological objects. The largest clusters were on Isbjørn, along the beach terraces. There, the team found traces of 15 circular tents, each divided into two halves by stones, with a central hearth. These “bilobate” tents are characteristic of the Paleo-Inuit, the first peoples to reach northern Canada and Greenland.

Walls and his colleagues radiocarbon dated a single wing bone of a seabird called a thick-billed murre found in one of the tent rings. They estimate the bone to be between 4,400 and 3,938 years old. This suggests that humans were on the Kitsissut Islands at this time, very soon after the polynya had formed.

“There’s a nesting colony of thick-billed murres,” Walls says. People would collect their eggs and hunt them for meat. He suspects they were also hunting seals.

Paleo-Inuit were already in Greenland at the time and likely traveled west to Kitsissut from there, Walls says. “The shortest distance is about 52.7 kilometers.” However, given the prevailing currents and winds, they likely set out from a more northerly point, resulting in a longer but safer journey. To the west of Kitsissut is Ellesmere Island, which is now part of Canada, but it is further and the currents in between are difficult.

The only comparable sea route known from the prehistoric Arctic is the crossing of the 82 km long Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska, which was probably first made at least 20,000 years ago. However, the Diomede Islands serve as a halfway stop.

“They must have had some sophisticated craft to cross that stretch of water,” says Darwent. Given the size of the community on Kitsissut, kayaks would not be enough for one person. “It’s families, and you’re not going to be able to take kids and maybe older people on kayaks in areas like that,” he says. Instead, the Paleo-Inuit had to use a larger vessel that could carry nine or ten people.

No shipwrecks have been found on Kitsissut, and such remains are few and far between in the Arctic. “They would have been skin-on-frame vessels,” says Walls, like those used by later Inuit communities.

These early Paleo-Inuit settlers would help shape the Kitsissutu ecosystem, Walls says. By bringing in nutrients from the sea and leaving waste on land, they fertilized the barren soil and allowed vegetation to grow on the islands. “You have a rich vegetation there, at least in the beginning, that is somewhat dependent on people being part of the nutrient cycling between these systems.”