Greenland DNA Could Unravel Migration Mystery

Dec. 18, 2007 -- Danish researchers are to sieve through human and skeletal remains on Greenland in a quest to explain an enduring enigma over the island's settlement over thousands of years, one of the scientists said Tuesday.

"We want to track down how the settlement actually happened," Niels Lynnerup, a researcher at Copenhagen University's forensic medicine department, said.

The island, today a semi-autonomous Danish territory, had been colonised at least 3,000 years ago by Arctic Inuit people, who were then forced to leave, apparently because plunging temperatures eventually made the place uninhabitable.

Then came the Norwegian Viking, Erik the Red, who is popularly but wrongly credited with founding the first settlement on Greenland around the 11th century.

The Viking settlement lasted until about the 15th century when it strangely petered out.

One possible explanation for this is that Greenland, like the rest of northern Europe, experienced a "Little Ice Age" that sent the beleaguered Norse settlers searching for a warmer climate.

The Inuits living in Greenland today can be traced back to ancestors of the so-called Thule culture, who first arrived around the 13th century and for a time shared the island with the Norsemen, but contacts between the two communities are believed to have been rare or even hostile.

The Thule had a way of life based on the kayak and seal hunting that enabled them to brave the bitter Little Ice Age and remain on the island to this day.