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Greenland

Inuit women with tattoos. Source: YouTube Screenshot / Great Big Story.

Ancient Ink Reborn: Revitalizing Traditional Inuit Tattooing (Video)

In a harmonious blend of identity and strength, Marjorie Taub breathes life back into the ancient art of Inuit tattooing. With practiced skill, she employs two techniques that date back thousands of...
Mercator world map Public Domain and Gerardus Mercator of Rupelmonde at the age of 62 by Frans Hogenburg (1574) (Public Domain)

16th-Century Maps Reveal 1800 BC Ice Free Greenland And Antarctica

There is a large body of maps of the Americas which cannot be explained by known explorations. Mercator’s 1569 World Map shows all of Greenland without ice at its coasts. Finaeus’ 1531 World Map...

Vikings vs. Native Americans: A Clash of Cultures in the New World (Video)

The Vikings have always been known for their bold and adventurous spirit, but for a long time historians didn’t realize that the Vikings actually beat Columbus to the Americas by over 400 years. So...
AI generated image of Greenland Vikings during extreme conditions of the Little Ice Age. Source: Jenar/Adobe Stock

How the Little Ice Age Caused Greenland Vikings to Jump Ship

A new study challenges previous ideas as to why Vikings abandoned their Greenland settlements. It found this northern exodus wasn’t sparked by political wrangling or social unrest, but by the Little...
Norse settlement with wood houses. Source: Hauber_Photography / Adobe Stock.

Norse Greenlanders Traveled to North America and Europe for Timber for Five Centuries

When Norse colonists arrived on Greenland in the 10th century, they needed a lot of wood to build houses, storage buildings and ships. While most households relied on wood from trees that grew...
The Octavius ghost ship remains an unsolved mystery. Source: psychoshadow / Adobe Stock

The Chilling Mystery of the Octavius Ghost Ship

There are many strange mysteries that reside in history, but one of the most unsettling is that of the Octavius ghost ship . Discovered along the coast of Greenland in 1775, the Octavius had no...
Reconstruction of Kap København formation two-million years ago in a time where the temperature was significantly warmer than northernmost Greenland today.          Source: Beth Zaiken / Nature

Ancient Environmental DNA Reveals Thriving 2-Million-Year-Old Life on Greenland

A “breakthrough” has been made in understanding the history of our planet. Studying ancient environmental DNA a team of researchers has now tracked and mapped the evolution of biological communities...
Vikings shipped walrus ivory from Greenland all the way to Kyiv. Source: Nejron Photo /Adobe Stock

Vikings Shipped Walrus Ivory to Medieval Islamic Merchants 4000km Away!

With the accelerated pace of climate change and global warming wreaking havoc on the ice sheets of the world, particularly Greenland, new evidence emerges from the ice-capped country. Greenland was a...
Greenland’s Lake 578 site was one of the sites where core samples and other data were taken that showed evidence of a prolonged drought. “Nobody has actually studied this location before,” said study lead author Boyang Zhao, a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. 						Source: UMass

A Prolonged Drought Drove Out the Greenland Vikings, Says New Study

European Nordic seafaring pirates and raiders, known as the Vikings, would come to Greenland to settle around 950 AD, but mysteriously the Greenland Vikings vanished with the onset of the Little Ice...
The Thule Culture: Medieval Mariners Migrating In Search Of Meteoritic Iron

The Thule Culture: Medieval Mariners Migrating In Search Of Meteoritic Iron

The modern English word, ‘Thule’, first appeared in ancient Greek and Roman cartographic documents as the Latin word Thūlē, describing farthest north location in the known world. Over the centuries...
The Vinland Map: A Most Non-European Artifact

The Vinland Map: A Most Non-European Artifact

The Vinland Map carries with it the air of mystery and, some would say, the stench of deception. In the vaults of Yale University, and insured for $25 Million, it is either a colossal fraud or an...
A Beothuk woman named Demasduit

The Beothuck Key: Finding a Lost Chinese-Norse Civilization in Canada

Two mysteries - one Oriental, one Western - have attracted considerable attention recently both in academic and popular spheres: the disappearance of the Seventh Chinese Treasure Fleet and the...
The harsh conditions did not deter Viking Hrafna-Flóki from settling Iceland   Source: Sergio / Adobe Stock

Settlement of Iceland: Viking Hrafna-Flóki’s Real Journey

Iceland is a large Nordic island country, and one of the most sparsely populated nations in Europe. This remote island is known for its iconic North Atlantic climate and somewhat inhospitable nature...
Walrus carving from medieval Trondheim. Viking colonies in Greenland relied on walrus ivory for trade. Source: Credit: Åge Hojem NTNU University Museum

Viking Colonies Collapsed Through Over Hunting Walruses

The mysterious disappearance of Greenland's Norse colonies sometime in the 15th century may have been down to the overexploitation of walrus populations for their tusks, according to a study of...
Adult Inuit Mummy Who Was Scanned With Computed Tomography. Source: Courtesy of the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM 29-10-10/61570.0.

Inuit Mummies Had Clogged Arteries Despite High Omega-3s

Despite feasting on omega-3 rich diets of fish, which is thought to protect against plaque build-up in the arteries, 500-year-old Inuit mummies discovered in Greenland tell scientists of their...
Left: Upper jaw bones of a walrus, with tusks removed. Right: an elaborately-carved ecclesiastical walrus ivory plaque.

Lost Norse of Greenland Fueled the Medieval Ivory Trade, Ancient Walrus DNA Suggests

The Icelandic Sagas tell of Erik the Red: exiled for murder in the late 10th century he fled to southwest Greenland, establishing its first Norse settlement. The colony took root, and by the mid-12th...
Arctic Meteorites

People of the Arctic worked meteorite iron 1,200 years ago

About 10,000 years ago a big meteorite fell to the Earth on northern Greenland and broke apart. About 1,300 years ago, Dorset Culture people in the Innaanganeq or Cape York Peninsula area of...
Slaves working in a mine. Corinthian terracotta plaque painting, 5th century BC.

Ice-Core Study Finds Evidence of Ancient European Plagues, Wars, and Imperial Expansion

To learn about the rise and fall of ancient European civilizations, researchers sometimes find clues in unlikely places: deep inside of the Greenland ice sheet, for example. Thousands of years ago,...
‘Leif Eriksson Discovers America’ by Christian Krohg (1893).

Years Before Columbus: Leif Erikson, His Life and His Voyage of Adventure to the New World

Many people still believe that the person who “discovered” America was Christopher Columbus, forgetting the fact that there were already indigenous people living there. An additional fact that is...
Viking boat

Was it treasured Walrus Ivory that drove Vikings to sail thousands of kilometers to Greenland?

One of the puzzling mysteries of the Viking settlement during the Nordic Middle Ages may be solved by archaeologists armed with a pioneering scientific method and some ancient walrus tusks. The...
Ancient Inuits

Ancient routes of the Inuit mapped for the first time

A new digital resource brings together centuries of cultural knowledge for the first time, showing that networks of trails over snow and sea ice, seemingly unconnected to the untrained eye, in fact...
The mummies of Qilakitsoq

The mummies of Qilakitsoq and the Inuit baby that captured hearts around the world

His little face still stares upwards, as if eternally waiting for his mother. From the moment he was discovered, the little Inuit baby captured hearts with his photograph plastered on magazines and...
Halley Comet

Halley's Comet Linked to Planet Cooling 1,500 Years Ago

A new study has suggested that a large fragment of the famous Halley’s comet crashed into Earth in 536 AD causing a ripple effect of damage including dramatic changes in the planet’s climate, leading...