Pre Eskimos?

I wasn't aware that there was a pre Eskimo culture.

NatGeo article about them.

Inuit hunters in the Canadian Arctic have long told stories about a mysterious ancient people known as the Tunit, who once inhabited the far north. Tunit men, they recalled, possessed powerful magic and were strong enough to crush the neck of a walrus and singlehandedly haul the massive carcass home over the ice.

the stories described the Tunit as a reticent people who kept to themselves, avoiding contact with their neighbors.Many researchers dismissed the tales as pure fiction, but a major new genetic study suggests that parts of these stories were based on actual events.

In a paper to be published Friday in Science, evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev and molecular biologist Maanasa Raghavan, both of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and their colleagues reveal for the first time that the earliest inhabitants of the Canadian Arctic—a group that archaeologists call the Paleo-Eskimos—lived in isolation from their neighbors for nearly 4,000 years, refraining from any mixture with Native Americans to the south or with the ancestors of the modern Inuit.

The culture may have died off after meeting modern Inuit, or maybe from Viking diseases.

They had a rare variation of the D2 haplogroup, and although the Nat Geo article says there was no interbreeding or contact, modern studies in Alaska show that this rare haplogroup is indeed found among some of the modern Inuit.

Wikipedia on the Dorset culture.

Remains of a Dorset stone longhouse in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut Carving of a polar bear The Dorset was a Paleo-Eskimo culture, lasting from 500 BC to between 1000 and 1500 AD, that followed the Pre-Dorset and preceded the Inuit in the Arctic of North America.

uh, Pre Dorset culture? Wikipedia article on them:

The Pre-Dorset is a loosely defined term for a Paleo-Eskimo culture or group of cultures that existed in the Eastern Canadian Arctic from c. 3200 to 850 cal BC,[1] and preceded the Dorset culture.[2] Due to its vast geographical expanse and to history of research, the Pre-Dorset is difficult to define. The term was coined by Collins (1956, 1957) who recognised that there seemed to be people that lived in the Eastern Canadian Arctic prior to the Dorset, but for whose culture it was difficult to give the defining characteristics.

the Canadian Museum of history has this article on the Dorset culture:

1) Inuit
2) Northern Indian Lands
3) Dorset Culture
4) Norse Colonies

"The Tunit were a strong people, and yet they were driven from their villages by others who were more numerous, by many people of great ancestors; but so greatly did they love their country, that when they were leaving Uglit, there was a man who, out of desperate love for his village, harpooned the rocks and made the stones fly about like bits of ice." Ivaluardjuk, Igloolik, 1922

------------------------------

I never worked in Alaska so much of this is something I will have to explore later if I get around to it.

One thing that brought this up was that we had watched the film "Lost in the Barrens", based on the book by Canadian Naturalist Farley Mowatt.


The boys were warned not to go into the barrens which were haunted by a reclusive people who killed intruders,  and so that area was avoided by the local Indians even when they needed food.
But they ended up being rescued by these "Eskimos".


People magazine article on the author and his book Never Cry Wolf (ebook here) which was being made into a Disney movie.

Farley wrote a book about the People of the Deer about the Eskimo hunters who helped him, and the white man's incursions into their land, but it makes me wonder if the author wasn't using the legend of the strong but reclusive remnants of this group as part of his novel. ( ebook on internet archives with free registration)

I can't find a freebie version of Never Cry Wolf, but the movie Lost in the Barrens can be watched at Youtube, as can the follow up movie.