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Inuit

Traditional snowshoes. Source: debspoons / Adobe Stock.

Wisdom in Every Step: Tracing the History of Snowshoes (Video)

Bill Mackowski, a snowshoe craftsman and collector, has assembled an extraordinary collection of over 200 pairs. These snowshoes, each with a unique tale, hold cultural and practical significance...
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...
Walrus ivory snow goggles, created by the proto-Inuit Thule culture of Alaska, dating back to about 800 to 1200 AD. Source: Public domain

Snow Goggles Are Masterpiece of Inuit Indigenous Innovation

While most readers would never expect to see the terms “snow goggles” and “ancient history” in the same sentence, snow goggles are actually nothing new. Despite being a modern-day necessity in snow-...
Loch Ness Monster by Hugo Heikenwaelder (1999) (CC BY-SA 2.5)

Unmerciful Diets of Ancient Sea Monsters Of The Northern Abyss

Unless having been to sea, far enough out to lose sight of land on an open wooden craft, no-one would quite understand the terror endured by ancient seafarers braving the unknown oceans. Mariners...
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...
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...
Example of a “hand-shaped” knife during sharpening with a metal file after freezing. Source: Eren / Journal of Archaeological Science.

Scientists Recreate Inuit Knife Out of Their Own Frozen Poop

Recent hands-on experiments determined human feces cannot be made into frozen knives to dismember dogs. A new scientific paper opens with a story from the 1998 book Shadows in the Sun: Travels to...
Two men found at the Yana Rhinoceros Horn Site in northern Siberia in Russia date to about 32,000 years ago, providing the earliest direct evidence of humans in the region.           Source: Elena Pavlova

Ancient Origins Of North Americans Settled - And Hard Evidence Of “Russian” Collusion Unearthed

For at least the last century archaeologists and anthropologists have generally agreed that the first humans arrived in North America having struggled across the icy wastes of Beringia, a vast land...
Life-size Dorset masks. (500-1000 AD) The masks were carved from driftwood and painted. They also once had fur moustaches and eyebrows attached with pegs. Scholars believe that the masks were probably used by shamans in rituals to cure illness, control the weather, or to aid in hunts.

Preserved in Legends and Ice: What Led to the Extinction of the Dorset Culture?

Before the Inuit’s ancestors conquered the Arctic region of what we now call Canada and Greenland, there is evidence of another remarkable Paleo-Eskimo culture– the Dorset. Soon after the arrival of...
An inuksuk at Igloolik, Nunavut, Canada.

How Global Warming Is Destroying Our Best-Preserved Archaeological Sites

The Arctic is like a time capsule. What dies there can be preserved, like a snapshot of our past, literally frozen in time. Some of the greatest insights we’ve gotten into life, thousands of years...
Legends of The Sun: From Solar Gods to Flying Chariots

Legends of The Sun: From Solar Gods to Flying Chariots

Thanks to scientific discoveries, we know for certain that life on Earth depends upon the sun. But long before scientists even discovered that our planet revolves around it, ancient cultures...
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...
Enormous Skull Found in Alaska May Belong to the Legendary King Bear of Inuit Mythology

Enormous Skull Found in Alaska May Belong to the Legendary King Bear of Inuit Mythology

An enormous, elongated polar bear skull emerged in 2014 from an eroding archaeological site southwest of Utqiaġvik in Alaska. Experts claim that it is quite different from most modern polar bear...
'Leif Eriksson Discovers America’ by Christian Krohg (1893).

A Lucky Viking Who Found Vinland then Fought Over the Canadian Coastline

Contrary to popular belief, Christopher Columbus was not the first European to establish an outpost in the Americas – some 500 years earlier, a Viking named Leif (“the lucky”) Erikson established a...
Eurasian Metals Discovered in Alaska from Centuries Before the Arrival of Europeans to the New World

Eurasian Metals Discovered in Alaska from Centuries Before the Arrival of Europeans to the New World

A new study of two bronze objects discovered in northwest Alaska shows that they provide the first known evidence of the presence of metals from Eurasia in prehistoric North America. The artifacts...
Unravelling the Spellbinding Story of the Inuksuit – Mysterious Structures from the Prehistoric Arctic

Unravelling the Spellbinding Story of the Inuksuit – Mysterious Structures from the Prehistoric Arctic

While the first pyramids were being built on the sands of the desert in Egypt, people in the cold north were creating a very different civilization. They produced a mysterious system of communication...
Archaeologists working in the 1,000-year-old house at the Rising Whale site at Cape Espenberg, Alaska.

Ancient Bronze Artifacts in Alaska Reveals Trade with Asia Before Columbus Arrival

An incredible archaeological discovery in Alaska provided evidence that trade was occurring between Asia and the New World centuries before Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas in 1492...
HMS Terror - John Franklin

Inuit folklore kept alive story of missing Franklin expedition to north-west passage

William Barr / The Conversation On September 6, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, announced that one of the fabled lost ships of Sir John Franklin’s expedition had been found off Hat Island,...
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...