The Geography of Medieval Greenland | Vikings at the Edge of the Ice
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- Опубліковано 30 вер 2024
- Most of us hear the story of how the Vikings, or Norse, sailed across the stormy Atlantic and settled Iceland. Many times we hear about the Vikings in Vinland. But too often, history discussions skip over the Norse in Greenland. These communities were long-lived outposts at the edge of an ice sheet 12,000 feet tall-they were not, however, alone. Today we dive briefly into the story of how the Norse and Thule people settled a vicious icy domain, and survived for centuries.
Image Sources:
Canadian Museum of History
Google Earth
Wikipedia Commons
Flickr
Elfshot Archaeology elfshotgallery....
Information Sources:
Canadian Museum of History
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Archaeology of Frontiers & Boundaries. By J ROBINSON
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Lepus arcticus (Arctic hare), Animal Diversity Web, University of Michigan Museum of Zoology.
Bennike, Ole; Andreasen, Claus (2005). "New dates of musk-ox (Ovibos moschatus) remains from northwest Greenland". Polar Record. 41 (2): 125-129.
Gunn, A. (2016). "Rangifer tarandus". IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 2016
Thomas, Henry; Dana Lee Thomas (1972). Living Adventures in Science. Ayer Publishing. pp. 196-201.
The Wave Energy Concentration at the Agulhas Current off South Africa
I. V. Lavrenov. Natural Hazards volume 17, pages 117-127 (1998)
Walrus ivory will make you do a heck of a lot of crazy stuff. Tribute records show that the revenue from Greenland was twice as valuable as the revenue from Iceland. Also, bone records show that as time went along and it got colder the Norse population had a greater and greater proportion of marine food in their diet. The real end of the Norse settlements was the introduction of mass elephant ivory to the European market by the Portuguese. It was cheaper, more abundant, and of higher quality. Economics!
How do we know that the Thule didn't relentlessly murder them?
@SimplyApollo you don't, but we know that some people moved back to Iceland, and others stopped migrating to Greenland. I'm sure a lot were killed by the Thule but also probably more intermarried.
@@capnstewy55 "Economics!"
Exactly so. Greenland was wiped out by cheaper ivory coming out of Africa. Greenland had no other reason for existing. With the extermination of the Greenland ivory i ndustry, the colony was extinct within two generations, if not less. We've seen this hundreds of times in North America and Europe. Huge numbers of communities that simply became ghost towns in much less than a couple of decades. This was particularly true in communities based on mining, such as the original town in France where bauxite (aluminium) was first found in significant quantites. When the bauxite disappeared, so did the town, leaving a ghost town.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Baux-de-Provence
There are many hundreds and thousands of towns across North America, long abandoned when the railroad went elsewhere or the mine ran out of ore. And it always happened quite quickly. As for Greenland, fictional hostile Thule for which there is no evidence was entirely unnecessary. Simple economics killed the place rapidly and swiftly. The Little Ice Age would not have helped matters much either, making Greenland ivory more expensive with more hazardous sailing conditions.
@@SimplyApollobecause we don't have evidence of their settlements being ransacked.
I'll drop here again a theory I heard from old men here in Iceland about a possible reason why the Vikings disappearned and that's slavery. Algerian/Arab/Ottoman slave ships sailed up and down the N-Atlantic and they'd kidnap people from farms, taking EVERYBODY with them. They took people from all of the Islands and coasts from Ireland to Greenland/Iceland, Norway and the Faroe, Shetland and Orkney islands.
Since a group of people typically don't disappear without a trace it is likely that they got taken or rescued by a ship which did not report that to sultan/Norwegian or Danish king.
There's actually a forest in Greenland. It's called Qinngua valley. It's on the southern tip of the island.
Medieval Greenland is such an interesting situation. Literally the only piece of land where Europeans got here first then where replaced by native Americans. Such an interesting society they built got a time. Great podcast called collapse of civilizations that had an episode on them
From what I've read multiple Native American cultures such as the Dorset got to Greenland first, it's just that the Norse got there before the Thule
Greenland has been populated by at least 5 or 6 peoples before the norse and the Thule people.
the podcast is _Fall of Civilizations:_ www.youtube.com/@FallofCivilizations
We didn't replace the Greenlanders though, the Vikings settled near Nassassuaq/Brattahlíð and lived both off of farming and hunting whereas the Inuits lived around the coast and did not farm. Sure they were pushed out of some areas but overall they traded with us. I remember my Icelandic countrymen having both great respect for the Inuit for their survival skills and disdain because of their alcoholism, familiar abuse and high s-rate.
Because slavers sailed up and down the N-Atlantic, kidnapping whole coastal farms it may just be that the reason the Viking settlers disappeared* was because they got kidnapped, it happened more than you'd expect.
*I'm talking about the Brattahlíð/Nassasuaq area farms, the inhabitants seem to have literally "disappeared" from their beds after even eating their dogs. What happened to them nobody knows but this is a likely theory for such a small community; that they simply were 'rescued' and never reported.
Yes actually the history is way more interesting than this video shows. There was paleo-eskimoes living in Greenland when the Vikings arrived and then the Thule arrived. so there was 3 different peoples and separate cultures living in Greenland at the same time, and they did not mix at all according to DNA study. The Paleo people went extinct due to unknown reasons, but the culture was not a ocean culture so the paleo did not use boats and did not hunt whales due to lack of weapons technology, another prof that the cultures did even not exchange know how. This is a great mystery and likely the Skrælling described by vikings was the Paleo people as they are smaller people than the Thule, and probably looked more wild due to lack of culture, clothing, dogs sleds and wepons. There are also no signs of war or conflict between the peoples - the Paleo always ran away, Thule and Vikings exchanged items but no DNA @@upsidedownbagofflour697
I didn't know about the driftwood around Greenland, but it makes sense with all those boreal forests surrounding the Arctic.Thanks for the video, I loved it.
This channel is criminally underrated, truly a great video, thanks for all your efforts, I cant imagine the amount of research this was. Dont stop making videos!
Keep watching and interacting
If he improves his audio (too high bass, too low treble) I can see his subs growing more.
Yes. Insert engagement here 😄
holy moly... those vikings that went to Greenland were insane! 50% mortality rate to get to the promised land of... Greenland!!!
I can't imagine trying to farm that god forsaken piece of real estate. Especially when the winters turned really crappy & cold in the 1400's ~
A white land, not green...
🏔️❄️🌬️🌊🌨️☃️
I think this is your best video yet - perfect in scope, pictures and coverage of history, geography and meteorology. And respectful of all the people and cultures involved.
I really enjoyed this. The combination of geography, history, and cultural studies is very effective here. The arc of the story about humans trying to civilize Greenland’s harsh habitat is interesting enough to hold our attention, even while you convey a great deal of information. Thank you so much.
Arctic is mostly surrounded by tundra aside Hudson bay
You should do a video about the Messinian Salinity Crisis and what the environment of the dried out Mediterranean basin would have been like. Apparently it was as hot as 170 degrees Fahrenheit! Seems like an interesting topic no one knows about.
Good suggestion! I've also wondered what a basin this deep would be like. Aside from the temperature, would the higher air pressure be noticable and/or problematic the way low air pressure on tall mountains can be, for example? Would rivers emptying into the basin create local oases, or was it just a salty hellhole at the bottom?
@@amaureaLua I wonder if water could even pool and remain at such high temperatures, you'd think it would evaporate quickly; if you had a large and fast river, then it's wild to imagine it ending in a lake that shrinks in size the hotter it gets.
Both the Inuit people and the Vikings were very tough people. Living in the extremely cold and harsh arctic climate of Greenland. Very impressive. Homo Sapiens are sure an adaptive species and our ancestors such as the Inuit and the Vikings are a big reason we are here today.
I can only assume something of great value made living in Greenland bearable. Much like today, oil, minerals, or something rare make me places like Alaska worth settling. Take away that precious commodity and the towns eventually dry up. Montana has numerous ghost towns from early mining days. As soon as the gold was gone, the town was gone. I bet this is one of the big reasons. It was simply no longer profitable for younger people to bear the harsh conditions. We see the same in our society’s.
Agree, The young people leave for better opportunities, leaving the aging community without support. I think that the habit of having their animals share their living quarters led to the spread of diseases such as hantaviruses. It is strange that the Greenlanders did not borrow the Inuit methods of dealing with the environment. Starvation might have reduced fertility leading to a lowered birth rate.
That would be the ivory they could export to Europe, until elephant tusks became more popular/cheaper
Wow, so profound
Well there was a lot of civil wars between the scandinavian countries and in norway, so a lot of norwegians fled Norway to go to Iceland/Greenland.
A chance to have own land. The temperatur in Greenland was higher than today. It was first during the middle age till mid 1800 the the temp fell
They grew grain in Greenland before the middle age
I would love to hear Greenlandic Norse and Norn in Shetland, to see how much of it I would be able to understand. I’m a native speaker of Faroese which is closely related to Old Norse and Icelandic.
I can’t imagine how it would sound if you consider our close but yet so different Icelandic and Faroese
@@Temp-hg3kq We share a large part of our vocabulary and grammar with Icelandic. It’s very apparent when reading the languages, but the spoken languages are very different. I only recognize a few words when I hear spoken Icelandic, but I can usually get the meaning of what is said when reading it. :)
Genetive
We don't have much information in about Greenlandic Norse. All we know is that likely got conserved (merged with æ in Icelandic) and that there was a merger of initial /θ/ and /t/.
the local names in Greenland are the craziest strings of repetitive letters I've seend written in latin alphabet.
I once heard a theory that the use of cattle may have been part of the problem. Cattle require a lot of food and maintenance than say sheep and goats. Meaning a lot of pasture land was needed in summer and a lot of hay in winter. Something that may have become difficult in greenland especially if deforestation of the few forests they had nearby and digging up of peat from bogs lead to more flooding of the little land available for farming
5:33 driftwood; 6:12 length of colony; 6:50 Thule hunting techniques , clothing; 8:50 hunting seals; 10:06 Thules meet Vikings; 11:28 raid
I could listen to you talk about Thule/Inuit technology and society all day and never get sick of it.
“South East Greenland is uninhabited by people and even most animals”
100 Days UA-camrs: “Challenge excepted!”
The water equivalent snowfall in Greenland's southeast coast exceeds 2500 mm per year and can reach to over 3000 mm. A really huge amount.
A non freezing climate is tolerable with huge amounts of rainfall, but in a freezing climate like this one, any amount above 1000 mm is way too much.
Whats amazing is that the Vikings actually deforested Greenland. Today there is one singular forest in Greenland, but before the Vikings there were a handful of forested valleys around that general region (the protected innermost fjords of southwest Greenland). The fact that Vikings were not only the first people to southern Greenland, but _also_ deforested it just sounds fantastical.
Damn europeans getting their greedy mitts on everything 😤
That's not too surprising considering the Norse deforested Iceland as well.
@@thefunklenbgamerextraordin6144Also, trees were so scare to begin with that it wouldn’t require a lot to completely defrost a fjord.
@innosam123 Iceland actually used to have pretty large forests, but if you are talking about Greenland, you're right. Although there were also far fewer people settling there. The vikings were just really bad at ecological sustainability.
Iceland is doing reforestation and still has some
amazing we have photos from thousands of years ago!
Their Norse ancestors need reparations from the Thuul
every time I eat food I be turning this stuff on
Man this is SO good. I'm legitimately getting emotional at just how good this content is. Thanks so much for sharing your passion
You seem to have glossed over the fact that at the beginning of the Norse settlement, there is evidence that they did cultivate grain (barley) and they had domesticated animals. Certainly by the end of the MWP, this sort of agricultural activity was no longer possible.
The evidence we have suggests barley was never very productive in Greenland, compared to Iceland--their shift toward hunting was likely an adjustment based on this lack of productivity. Evidence for a significantly warmer Greenland in the Middle Ages is controversial. The Little Ice Age did bring colder conditions, but their shift toward seal/caribou hunting preceded this (unlike in Iceland). The sources in the description go into more detail.
1) The wave height map at 0:44 is a surprise. The Southern Ocean has no obstacles to the fetch factor in creating huge waves. Yet this map suggests the biggest are in the northern hemisphere. Curiouser and curiouser.
2) The Inuit people are among the most incredible humans ever. The environment they not only survived in but thrived in a way that allowed them to produce more than just food, clothing and shelter but art, a unique music and a spiritual life. The igloo, kayak and superior clothing design are as great an achievement under astounding conditions as any culture anywhere.
3) The Norse decline was likely aided by lack of immigration. Small isolated populations like these needed a constant influx of new people to overcome any of the issues cited by scholars on their eventual decline. The Inuit were connected to migrating populations as far west as Alaska. Imho.
Crazy that people of European descent lived in Northern America right up until the Spanish found Cuba 🤯
this is one of my new favorite channels!! I love how you incorporate geography, anthropology, and history all together, and in the most objective way possible!
How did the Norse know that they need to settle on the west side after only just discovering Greenland? Did they just sail around and spot the green, or did they have an in depth knowledge about that kind of environment that doesn't seem obvious to me? How would they have described it?
Then end of Viking Greenland coincided with the Portuguese fishermen fishing the Grand Banks Cod Fishery-I suspect many of colonists had ndecided to join the Portuguese and simply left Greenland. There is no real evidence that the Inuit people were hostile to the greenlanders at all..the Inuit lived on the coast and hunted seals and Walrus on the ice...the Greenlanders lived st the heads of the fjords-they simply didn't compete with eachother.
Bingo. Vikings became knights of christ, knights of colombus and knights templar.
Voices of the past has a story of a greenlander befriending a viking. Only for the viking to climb a mountain. Have an archery contest with him up there. And then throw himself of the mountain to die like that was a normal thing to do. Vikings were just built different.
Excellent video. So much information, presented clearly and following an arc that keeps our attention. Bravo, sir!
Interesting that the Vikings went as far as Vinland (today New England) but they did not last for long there, they managed to stay in harsh Greenland longer than on the North-American mainland.
Maybe the long trip wasn't worth the goods to be obtained in America -which had to make its way back also. It may have been too different an environment to tackle, i.e., learning what the land yields, where the good rivers are, how native forests can be used, what local fauna is edible game; and it may also have been too warm for what they were used to.
Vinland was the Newfoundland island not the New England region
Part of the difference was people - Vinland was already settled, and from what we know the Vikings didn't really try hard to make friends.
7:35 I wouldn't say so, but woven material simply doesn't have the windproof properties of fur pelt. As for Amundsen and Scott, the significant factor was the dogs and it's generally recognised that the wool worn by Scott worked better under heavy physical activity as wool wicks away moisture.
I have a question.
Why don't katabatic winds experience the Foehn effect?
Places like Calgary have Chinook winds that come down the Rockies and can bring very warm temperatures for a city that usually has cold winters, and I figure that the mountains those Chinook winds come from aren't really that much warmer than the southern parts of the Greenland ice sheet.
This is a good question, because the Greenland Ice sheet does create the foehn effect for southwest Greenland's coast regularly...while also being a major source of katabatic winds for the east.
1) Keep in mind that normally, air is only colder at higher altitudes due to the lower air pressure. This means if it is not cooled by some other means, it will not lead to colder temperatures if it moves down to a lower altitude--because the air temperature will simply increase as the pressure increases when it descends.
2) Keeping in mind (1), katabatic winds can ONLY occur when the air atop a plateau is so cold, that it is denser than surrounding air at a lower elevation. As such, there is nothing stopping it from rushing downhill with gravity. For the most part, this happens when an air mass spends a long time on top of an ice sheet. The icy surface and high albedo cause the air to become SO cold that it is denser than the air over warmer seas at a lower elevation. This also happens on the eastern side of the Adriatic in winter, when a pool of cold air builds up to a great height in the Carpathian basin, and the cold air "overflows" the Dinaric Alps, rushing downhill to the low pressure of the relatively warm Adriatic.These are called Bora winds, and they also capsize ships and generate rough seas just like the katabatic winds of Greenland or Antarctica.
3) Don't think of foehn winds as coming "from" mountains and plateaus. They occur when an air mass is traveling from point A to point B, and there is a mountain range or plateau in the way. If cold air from Siberia tries to reach India, the Himalayas will block most of the cold air mass, which is shallow. Potentially warmer air will be drawn down on the Indian side--think of a car running into a 6 foot wall and all the luggage on the roof rack going over the wall. "Potentially warmer" means that if it's brought down to a lower altitude, it will be much warmer than the cold air that it was overlying. This is called isentropic drawdown. There are other causes behing the Foehn effect, but that is the most important one. The Chinook winds are an interesting case because in winter, even if the Rockies were gone, those westerly winds would still bring milder weather, because they'd be coming off the Pacific.
@@casualearth-dandavis Thanks for the thorough answer.
1)I would be interested in a video or article about the Adriatic region.
It is puzzling to me that the wettest place in Europe is actually in Montenegro and not a place like Bergen in Norway on the Atlantic seaboard and that the Mediterranean basin is known for its dryness in comparison to the rest of Europe while other west coast locations in temperate latitudes experience much more rain than places like Norway or northern Spain.
2)Is it true that south eastern Greenland is colder than its western counterpart because of those katabatic winds and the Foehn effect?
I would expect katabatic winds to occur on the western side as well but I assume that the Icelandic low acts like a vacuum cleaner sucking out the cold dense air on the eastern side.
3)If that isn't the case, how come high precipitation leads to higher levels of glaciation?
I wouldn't necessarily expect the snow line to drop as significantly as it does in SE Greenland as I would think that summer rain would melt large amounts of winter snow at lower elevations and make its extremely low snowline unfeasible. But that clearly is not the case as places like Glacier bay in Alaska also have a very low snowline that is only matched when one travels to the high Arctic.
(SE Greenland even has an isolated and genetically distinct population of polar bears that rely on that glacial ice for hunting during the sea ice free summer months
www.washington.edu/news/2022/06/16/se-greenland-polar-bears/ )
@@stefanpfeiffermerino7633 (1) The Adriatic is a fascinating region. It is important to compare like to like, though--Bergen has 98 inches of rainfall per year, while Bar (coastal Montenegro) has 54 inches per year. Coastal Norway is similar to the Pacific Northwest in that sense.
(2) Yes, Southwest Greenland is warmer due to frequent Foehns, and Southeast Greenland gets much more frequent katabatic winds. When the Icelandic low is close to Greenland, it causes strong easterly winds to flow onshore and produces heavy snow. When it moves farther to the east away from Greenland, the Icelandic low draws cold air off of the ice sheet, which flows down the eastern side.
(3) Precipitation is key for glaciation. Glaciers form where accumulation of snow exceeds summer melting, and the snow compacts into ice over time. But the situation is quite different for the Pacific coast of Alaska vs. southeast Greenland. You're indeed correct that summer rain is bad for glaciers. At sea level, the Pacific coast of Alaska is much warmer--there are thriving, large conifer trees near those valley glaciers. Glaciers reach sea level there because they grow prolifically in the mountains, and they quite literally slip down slowly to lower elevations in the valleys (this is what people mean when they say "at a glacial pace"). Alpine glaciers are always losing ice at the foot, but they are always growing at higher elevations to compensate. You'll see a similar phenomenon in southern Chile. Southeast Greenland is far colder at sea level than these areas, and cannot support the spruce or nothofagus trees that Pacific Alaska or Chile do.
alt history where the nords go south right around 1492 instead of going back to iceland
Look at the micmac flag.
Actually, the iniuits didn't arrive until late before the northerners left the country.
So we actually were the first on this island/continent.
So why are we being kicked out? 🤔
Actually, it seems like that the norse arrived around100-150 years before inuit did.
It just took several hundred years before they met each other.
Greek tales of the northern winds and crossing beyond a point of nasty storms to reach a land of beauty match this tale.
The story of perceus and the apples of discord. Crosses hyperborea a sea of violent storms.
The days when the ships were made of wood and the men from steel.
I've heard that a problem for the norse settlers was, that they invested a lot into their native farming techniques such as cattle, which didn't work very well because of the harsh conditions. The northern tribes however, had generations of experience on how to survive in the ice and how ro live off of what nature provided, while the norse settlers tried to, in a way, control the land. If communication had been better, maybe they could have learned from each other, how to survive there...
Are there any chance of finding old sunken ships around Greenland? Thinking temperatures might help with preservation and there's a lot of unknowns about the areas older history.
In fjords, possibly, but otherwise not easily. The continental drop seems to arrive very close to the coast, and is very steep. At least the few places I've visited. Not an expert though, so....
Might be able to find something, but the ocean there can be incredibly deep at some parts, the biggest “waterfall” is found between Iceland and Greenland, cold water from Greenland flows under the warmer Gulf stream down a massive underwater ridge
@@Temp-hg3kq Archeology there is a huge challenge, even on land. Doubt that there is anywhere near the level of excavations and surveying that there is in continental Europe. But that is obviously also why it's an interesting place archeologically. A few finds could potentially change a lot.
I'm Norwegian and had no idea about this. I knew vikings settled Greenland but I had no idea what happened to them. Great video!
I thought "Thule" was pronounced "TOO-lee." No?
Depends on language and dialect, laguages change over time.
In modern Danish we say it as more like TOO-luh (when I try to render it as phonetic English). Most English pronunciation guides does seem to recommend TOO-lee. Modern greek is apparently closer to THOOL (with the 'th' quick English-like. I didn't really find any reliable source on what it would have been in old greek where it comes from.
Then read : The last Greenland Viking .
It is worth .
I wonder if Eric the Red was the original salesman.
Well, he's reported to have told his son, Leif, that calling it Greenland would make people want to settle there.
The vikings are a shining example of the Faustian European spirit
You are such a fantastic storyteller. I watch your videos before going to sleep, and it feels like a good bedtime history/geography story. And it is well remembered the next day.
Thule is pronounced “too-lee” btw
The best I have seen.....I have learned immensely from your hard and outstanding work.
would you consider doing a video about the Mystery Spot, and similar phenomenon?
Pardon me but this info contradicts all other info I have read about the mediaeval warm period in Greenland. I see no reason to believe you over others.
As always, the sources are in the description--it's not about "believing me", as an individual. The Medieval Warm Period did not affect every part of the planet--it's still heavily debated where it did and did not have significant influence. Ice extent is a fairly sturdy measure of past climate, and that line of evidence points to a Greenland which missed out on extra warmth.
Fantastic video! Your best so far. You gove a great picture of the multi-faceted struggle and the imagination goes wild thinking of these people making hard decision after hard decision for hundreds of years.
PREMISE: Prior to human interference, North Atlantic seacoasts developed climax ecologies for those habitats. Rugged under normal adversity, fruitful under ideal conditions.
Trans-Arctic natives may have weakened climax ecologies, but not sterilized whole coastlines. They may have strengthened them from selective predation and fishing.
Nordic natives imported grazing sheep and goats into those fragile seacoasts for centuries. With weather optima, abundant grazing. After centuries, denuded coastal regions.
Subject for study: the effect of maximal coastal climax ecosystems on trans-Atlantic weather and North Continental climate in general. Minimum such = generally worse weather?
PROOF OF CONCEPT: In the event of catastrophic European climate change: Human urban occupation of those coasts reduced. Fisheries suppressed. Coastal parklands as constantly reinforced and multiplied as possible.
The same with Scandinavian coasts with climax ecologies re-established. I hear Scotland is working on as much. Economies of scale.
As much happened along the shores of the Med: green and lush prior to human empires, reduced to ash by their urban rapine, subject to final desertification.
Same goes for Baltic Coasts. For Javanese Coasts. Re-establish climax ecologies or starve in the World Desert. Your choice.
QUESTION: What was the effect of massive fallen forest trunk islands against kayak and longship logistics?
Great video! Thank you for putting so many things in perspective!
I would love to know if there are any hypotheses of why the Vikings didn’t establish any settlements in North America
Iceland, Greenland and North America offered a subsistence existence to Vikings. Raiding Europe or working as a mercenary would provide a more lucrative living.
this channel is fucking amazing! Totally binge watching today. Been needing a good channel - well produced, good content, etc.
And no annoying music.
One Thule advantage mentioned in Jared Diamond's "Collapse" is that the kayak is more than just a canoe, it's a garment that the Inuit is >sewn< into by his wife. Vikings could not replicate this.
Yeah no I’m good in Iceland no need for more snow and less sun in winter I’m already white enough that I kinda turn blue in winter.
Amazing piece! Lover of human geography here, I think there is a future on UA-cam for more this content.
Cool video👍(pun intended)
I have always wondered why unlike its North American and European neighbors, the Greenland ice sheet survived the end of the last ice age.
Do we have an answer for why Scandinavia and the massive Laurentide ice sheets perished while Greenland's southern half remained heavily glaciated?
Making Scandinavians the only Caucasian Native Americans? 😆
Nice video, it gives a general idea of the topic. However, I missed any information about the Dorset indigenous culture that lived along the Norse in West Greenland and was replaced, maybe violently, by the Thule. I also think some more detail in the geography of the settlements would be great, following the title of the video. The statement about the similar conditions during the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age is not rigorous, Norse people were relying on wheat and livestock during the Medieval Warm Period and turned to seafood and seal meat during the later colder times, until they finally left, before climate got really cold.
I focused on the Thule and Norse to keep the scope narrow and discuss several centuries. My sources do address your point about climate. The evidence we have suggests barley was never very productive in Greenland, compared to Iceland--their shift toward hunting was likely an adjustment based on this lack of productivity. Evidence for a significantly warmer Greenland in the Middle Ages is controversial. The Little Ice Age did bring colder conditions, however, but their shift toward seal/caribou hunting preceded this (unlike in Iceland). Sources are in the description.
@@casualearth-dandavis The evidence for a much warmer climate is found in the graves of the Norse. The are presently in permafrost and old tree roots had grown through them. No sane person would hack through ice to bury someone and tree roots do not penetrate permafrost. The communities suffered predation from the Arab slavers. In the end no tax was being paid to the King of Denmark for a number of years so he sent men to find out what was afoot. They found abandoned villages, no bodies, no sign of struggle, animals grazing untended. So maybe they left to join Inuit, were captured by them, or captured by the Ottomans.
@@jimfairgray4607 maybe that part where the man was buried was warm but frosted over after the little ice age.
Genetic studies of the Thule would be interesting to see if any Norse ancestry is present.
THIS CHANNEL IS MY KIND OF THING!!!!
The harpoon type described was used in the baltic sea to hunt seals in medieval period, not unknown to Nordic people.
The advantage of wool over fur is that you don't kill the animal so you can grow more of it more quickly. Wool made it possible to have population density in cold climates.
That’s a weird comparison I think, i don’t know if sheep pelts would do much to improve wool. I’m pretty sure most furs come from animals that aren’t easy to farm. In theory a culture could have both, and I’m sure they did but each culture specialized in using or even exploiting animals to survive and thrive in their own ways.
I don’t think there’s any question the Thule were far more specialized
“Thule” is pronounced
“tool-ee” or “tool-ay”
Yep, pronunciation is never my strong suit
@@casualearth-dandavis you probably heard this a million times already. I didn’t check all the comments to find out lol
Cool vid!
Wow!
0:50: I notice a difference in the wave heights of the Great Lakes of North America. Interesting.
Different depths. If I remember correctly a few are only a hundred feet deep, and superior gets to 1100.
Don't quote me on that though
Youre right. I grew up on lake Ontario. Erie is fairly shallow and used to freeze solid every winter. My uncles would drive out on it to ice fish. lake superior can have massive waves on par with the ocean. @canadianmmaguy7511
Why does Denmark still thinks it owns Greenland? Indigenous people have no say? how "democratic"!
The norse are the indigenous of Greenland. Inuit didn't colonize greenland until 1300s. 300 years after the norse.
Wait the dude in 1540 he just was left there?
wait wait ... so your telling me that the peaceful natives attacked people... whhhattt
If you’re interested in this subject and would like further media concerning this, William T. Vollmann’s novel The Ice Shirt covers the Norse Greenland and Vinland settlements and their interactions with the native Thule and Skraelings, as well as giving an intense overview of both of their myths, histories, and cultures that are both written beautifully, with complex depth, and accuracy.
Whilst also hopscotching between the Norse and Skraeling views of their interactions.
Wow that ending... great stuff thank you
My anthropology professional pronounced Thule as “two-lee”.
I enjoyed this video.
Such a wistful, bittersweet denouement for the Norse, a brave people. Although when empathy over these tribulations fills my imagination for the Norse, I soon remember that they regularly marauded the Irish coasts, kidnapping and enslaving local villagers. Like many Irish, I live with an ancestral ligament problem traced to those ugly times and the genetic legacy bequeathed us by the "romantic" vikings a thousand years ago.
My bad, sorry. Norsemen on top. Richest countries ever today
@@meisrerbootThey will be African Muslim countries soon, lmao
@@chadthundercock3440 No we won't
@@meisrerbootYes we will, we have ended our own people, demographics is the destiny of all nations
I like and comment double, 'cause you didn't say i should 😄
fur also has a limit.. the animals needed to make it lol
Why are there warm Foehn winds in western Greenland whilst there are cold katabatic winds in eastern Greenland.?
Mountains
There are mountains on both sides of Greenland ringing the bodies of water.
say “nimble canoe” one more damn time
4:50 there was no global ice age following the medieval warming period.
A "little ice age" followed, which yes did indeed have variable effects across the earth.
4:40 - 5:11 If Greenland at the time of its discovery wasn't greener than it is today, perhaps not counting the warming / "greening" of the past 20 - 30 years, then how did it come by its name??
Thanks for this video! I've never really thought about these strong climatic differences between East and West Greenland!
I didn't see it mentioned anywhere else in the comments but "Thule" is pronounced: Tu-Lee. Otherwise great video
Keep making these, please!
This might not make any sense but you sound exactly like David Foster Wallace…
The bit about the foehne gap seems an awful lot like a snowy equivalent of a rain-shadow. =P I love in when nature produces analogs like that. Wave physics has it in spades.
Are piteraq’s a similar phenomenon to the “williwaws” Joshua Slocum wrote about?
I'm always interested in human exploration, settlement and survival, especially in severe environments.
Ivory was pretty minor bit of export from those ports in west africa.... the exports were more for fixing the labor shortage.
Jarred Diamond in his book "Collapse" devotes much attention to Greenland and the demise of Norse settlements - that's for anyone wanting "to know more". I'm not going to quote here all possible causes and archaeological findings, but I'll add to the video's narrative that apart from wood another extremely valuable commodity was iron/ steel (that's why "a knife worn to the spine" - also, many iron items, like nails, found at those settlements, wore signs of repeated use / reuse). Then there was this apparent "no fish diet" quirk of Norse settlers - there were no fish bones found anywhere in any of excavated settlements' dumps. Walrus, seals, caribou bones, and what not - but no fish bones - and then they probably haven't use fish even as a dog fodder. Strange, hard to explain in any rational way, but if that was indeed the case then they simply excluded a significant (and abundant) food source from their inventory - cuz herring, salmon or mackerel are quite fatty and nutritious fish, and halibut is pretty much a barrel of (fish) lard - but even a modest codfish is quite good at preventing death by starvation. Moreover, the author witnessed himself, while there, a woman (tourist) who just picked up a cod or some other fish from a low-tide pool next to the sea, without any tools or much effort whatsoever - so "if she could do that 'just like that' why Norsemen haven't done so too?"
And then there was a rather disturbing find - the analysis of faeces of last settlers turned out a protein that is present only in human flesh - meaning, cannibalism. Still, no fish bones...
I learned about this in school, we discussed the norses reliance on inefficient livestock, and more than just technique issues, they didn’t eat fish at all.
So nice to see an Irish wolfhound pictured on the title page.
Great video and very insightful!
Lots of detail here. Much appreciated.
Intresting
This is my new favorite channel!
We need to bring back ivory hunting.
'foen' is pronounced as 1 syllable
If the winds blow from west to east it was impossible for vikings sailing to America. Even today for sailing to America, one has to sail south to the Azores and there turn west
In the video, I discuss easterly winds north of the Icelandic low. It's also important to remember that "prevailing" winds are not 24/7 winds.
Greeeeat