Emily Chan
“We had no idea the walrus ivory was coming from such remote parts of the Arctic. This is big news. The exciting implication is that ivory shipped back to Europe was coming from remote High Arctic areas inhabited by Arctic Indigenous peoples,” Jordan continued.
In these places, the Norse likely came into contact with other cultures, such as the Thule Inuit, who are the ancestors of the modern Inuit in Greenland and Canada.
According to Jordan, it represents one of the earliest human interactions across the globe after humanity expanded out of Africa tens of thousands of years before.
Since ivory was coming from remote areas where both the Norse people and Indigenous Americans operated, it is likely they were in the same place at the same time, searching for the same natural resource. The Tuniit, another older North American Arctic Indigenous group, may also have been present.
The researchers reached this conclusion after extracting ancient DNA from walrus samples recovered from various locations across the North Atlantic Arctic.
Then, they matched the genetic profiles of the walrus artifacts back to specific Arctic hunting grounds.
The study was published in Science Advances.
