February
09
/ 2026
A cluster of 4,500-year-old sites on the remote Kitsissut islands in north-west Greenland is changing how archaeologists picture the first people lived in the High Arctic. Rather than hugging the land as primarily terrestrial hunters, the evidence points to communities that repeatedly ventured into dangerous open water to reach rich seabird and marine resources. One of the key details is the journey itself: reaching Kitsissut required at least a ~52.7km open-water crossing, a distance the researchers describe as potentially the longest sea voyage that can be reasonably inferred for the Early Paleo-Inuit period. If correct, that makes “Paleo-Inuit seafaring” a more central part of the story of Arctic settlement than many earlier models allowed. The study has been published in
