Rewriting Greenland's immigration history

[Viggen]

Thirty-six-year-old Professor Eske Willerslev, University of Copenhagen, and his team of fossil DNA researchers have done it a couple of times before: rewritten world history. Most recently two months ago when he and his team discovered that the ancestors of the North American Indians were the first people to populate America, and that they came to the country more than 1,000 years earlier than originally assumed. And the evidence is, so to speak, quite tangible: DNA samples of fossilised human faeces found in deep caves in southern Oregon.

 

This time, focus is on Greenland, and the scientific evidence is DNA analyses of hair from the Disco Bay ice fjord area in north-west Greenland, which are well-preserved after 4,000 years in permafrost soil. The team�s discovery makes it necessary to review Greenland�s immigration history. Until now, science regarded it as a possibility that the earliest people in Greenland were direct ancestors of the present-day Greenlandic population.

 

full article at EurekAlert

[Faustus]

This time, focus is on Greenland, and the scientific evidence is DNA analyses of hair from the Disco Bay ice fjord area in north-west Greenland, which are well-preserved after 4,000 years in permafrost soil. The team's discovery makes it necessary to review Greenland's immigration history. Until now, science regarded it as a possibility that the earliest people in Greenland were direct ancestors of the present-day Greenlandic population.

The distance around the Arctic Circle (at the Arctic Circle) is 1075 miles versus 24,920 around the circle of earth at the equator. The northern shores of the North American continent lie within the Arctic Circle and therefore experience several months of continuous daylight. The highest temperatures recorded at the Arctic Circle is 83 deg F. at Deadhorse, Alaska in 1991. Following the northern shore across the North slopes of Canada and then across the Queen Elizabeth Islands and Ellesmere Island to Greenland's West shore is less than 2500 miles.

 

The Arctic Basin and the North Slopes of Canada and that part part of the Canadian Archipelago within the Arctic circle experience less than 10 inches of precipitation per year qualifying the region as a desert. This suggests that a human populaton's journey over this distance, either over a period of time, or short term would not be unduly difficult for a people whose survival skills were adapted to the climate. Taking note of this CHART of solar activity for the past 7,500 years and Legend we can see that solar activity and global temperatures 4000 B.P. were at much higher levels than now, and continued to be so for the second longest period which has occurred over the last 7,500 year period.

 

WIKI - 1975 location of the 10 deg C (50deg F) July Isotherm and minimum extent of sea ice in the Arctic

Edited June 7, 2008 by Faustus