Thule migration across the Arctic

Starting around 1200 CE, the Thule people, ancestors of today's Inuit, spread from the Bering Strait and northern Alaska eastward across Arctic Canada to Greenland in about a century. They traveled in large skin boats (umiaks) and kayaks, used dog sleds to cross sea ice, and hunted seals, walrus and the huge bowhead whale with toggling harpoons whose heads turned sideways inside the animal. They lived in semi-subterranean houses built with whale bones, stone and sod.¹³

Why they moved so fast is debated: some researchers point to warmer climate and whale hunting, others to the search for iron from the Cape York meteorite in northwest Greenland and trade with the Norse, who had settled southern Greenland around 985. As they spread, the Thule replaced the earlier Dorset people of the eastern Arctic, who disappeared within a few centuries. Thule people met Norse Greenlanders, and Norse objects turn up at Thule sites. When the Little Ice Age cooled the Arctic, they adapted with snow houses and new hunting strategies, and their descendants survive across the region today.¹²³