Chapter 1 — The Sivullirmiut: "First People"

The Arctic is the coldest inhabited region on Earth. Winter temperatures in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago routinely drop below minus forty degrees Celsius -- a temperature at which exposed skin freezes in minutes and exhaled breath forms crystals that drift and fall like snow. The sea ice extends for hundreds of kilometers in every direction, a white plain broken only by pressure ridges where tectonic forces have buckled the frozen surface into jagged walls. The sun disappears below the horizon in November and does not return until February. During the darkest weeks, the only natural light comes from the moon, the stars, and the shimmering curtains of the aurora borealis.

In summer, the transformation is dramatic. The sun circles the sky for twenty-four hours without setting. Temperatures can reach fifteen degrees Celsius -- warm enough for mosquitoes to emerge in clouds so dense they can suffocate caribou calves. The sea ice breaks apart, opening channels and leads of dark water where seals surface to breathe and whales migrate through the passages. The tundra, frozen solid for nine months, erupts in a brief, intense bloom of wildflowers, grasses, and lichens. Millions of migratory birds arrive -- snow geese, eider ducks, Arctic terns -- to breed and raise their young in the few weeks of warmth. The Arctic summer is a season of frantic abundance, a brief window in which all life -- human, animal, and plant -- must accomplish in weeks what temperate environments allow months to do.

Arctic landscape showing summer tundra with distant sea ice

Roughly four thousand years ago -- around 2000 BCE -- the first human beings moved into this environment from the west. They came across the Bering Strait from Siberia, following a route that their distant ancestors had used to enter the Americas thousands of years earlier. But these newcomers were different from the peoples already living in the Americas. Genetic analysis -- particularly the groundbreaking Saqqaq (SAH-kahk) genome study of 2010 -- has revealed that the first Arctic peoples were genetically distinct from both modern Inuit and from the Native American populations who had entered the Americas via Beringia during the last Ice Age. They represented a separate migration from Siberia, a distinct wave of human movement into the New World.

The archaeologists call their toolkit the Arctic Small Tool tradition -- one of the least poetic names in archaeology, but one that captures the essential fact about these people. They made tiny, precisely crafted stone tools: microblades (thin slivers of stone used as cutting edges, sometimes set into bone or antler handles), small triangular projectile points, miniature scrapers, and delicate burins (pointed tools for engraving bone and antler). The tools are small enough to fit in the palm of a hand, and their craftsmanship is extraordinary -- the flaking is controlled, symmetrical, and consistent, the work of people who had mastered the art of shaping stone to a degree that impresses modern knappers.

The Inuit word for these earliest people is Sivullirmiut -- "the first inhabitants" or "the very first people." The term is used loosely; the Inuit recognize that their own ancestors were not the first to live in the Arctic, and the Sivullirmiut represent the oldest layer of human memory in the region. In archaeological terms, the Sivullirmiut correspond to the Paleo-Eskimo cultures -- a broad category that includes the Arctic Small Tool tradition (also called the Denbigh Flint Complex in Alaska, after a site near Cape Denbigh on Norton Sound), the Pre-Dorset culture, and the Saqqaq culture of Greenland.

The spread of the Arctic Small Tool tradition was remarkably rapid. Within a few centuries of appearing in Alaska, the toolkit had spread across the entire North American Arctic -- from the Bering Strait to the northern coast of Greenland, a distance of over six thousand kilometers. The speed of this expansion implies either a single migrating population moving quickly across a landscape with few or no prior inhabitants, or the rapid adoption of a superior toolkit by existing populations. Most scholars favor the first interpretation: a relatively small founding population moving east along the Arctic coast, exploiting the rich marine and terrestrial resources of the tundra environment, and encountering very little competition for the land.

The people who carried the Arctic Small Tool tradition lived in small, mobile groups -- perhaps fifteen to thirty individuals -- following the seasonal movements of caribou, muskox, seals, and fish. Their campsites are typically small scatters of stone tools and fire-cracked rock, the remains of tent rings (circles of stones used to weigh down skin tents), and occasional middens (refuse heaps) containing animal bones. The sites are modest in scale: these were people who traveled light, carrying their essential tools and possessions from camp to camp as the seasons dictated.

They hunted with bows and arrows. This is significant because, as will become clear later in this volume, the people who succeeded them -- the Dorset -- appear to have abandoned or lost bow technology. The Arctic Small Tool people also used toggling harpoons (harpoon heads designed to rotate and lock under the skin of a marine mammal after penetration, preventing the prey from pulling free), indicating that they hunted seals at their breathing holes in the winter ice. The combination of bow-and-arrow technology for terrestrial hunting (caribou, muskox) and harpoon technology for marine hunting (seals) gave them a versatile subsistence strategy that allowed exploitation of both the tundra and the sea ice.

Their shelters were skin tents in summer and semi-subterranean houses in winter -- shallow pits dug into the ground and roofed with driftwood, whale bone, and skins, with a central hearth for warmth and cooking. The houses were small, typically three to four meters across, designed for a single family. Heat was provided by burning driftwood, animal fat (seal blubber, caribou fat), or, in treeless regions, moss and heather. The challenge of staying warm in the Arctic winter was the fundamental problem of Arctic life, and the solutions these early peoples developed -- insulated shelters, layered clothing, efficient hearths -- were the foundation of all subsequent Arctic adaptations.

The seasonal round -- the annual cycle of movement between resource locations -- structured every aspect of Paleo-Eskimo life. In spring, the people gathered at the floe edge (the boundary between fast ice and open water) where seals hauled out to bask in the strengthening sun. In summer, they moved inland to intercept caribou at river crossings, fishing in lakes and streams along the way. In autumn, they cached food for the winter -- dried caribou meat, rendered fat, dried fish -- in stone-lined pits dug into the permafrost, which served as natural freezers. In winter, they returned to the coast, where they hunted ringed seals at breathing holes in the sea ice. This seasonal rhythm, dictated by the movements of animals and the availability of resources, was the organizing principle of Arctic life for over four thousand years.

The Independence I culture -- a variant of the Arctic Small Tool tradition found in the extreme High Arctic of Greenland and Ellesmere Island -- provides a vivid picture of life at the absolute edge of human habitation. Named after Independence Fjord in northeastern Greenland, where it was first identified by the Danish archaeologist Eigil Knuth (AY-gill KNOOTH) in the 1940s, the Independence I culture represents human occupation at latitudes above 80 degrees north -- the northernmost point at which human beings have ever lived on a sustained basis. The sites are tiny: a handful of tent rings, a scatter of tools, the fire-cracked rocks of a hearth. The people who left these traces lived in one of the most extreme environments on Earth -- a place where winter temperatures routinely drop below minus 50 degrees Celsius, where the sun is absent for four months of the year, and where the nearest tree is over two thousand kilometers to the south. That they survived at all is remarkable. That they left behind finely crafted stone tools of elegant workmanship is extraordinary.

The Saqqaq culture of Greenland, a regional variant of the Arctic Small Tool tradition, produced the most famous single artifact in Arctic archaeology. In 2010, a team led by Maanasa Raghavan (mah-NAH-sah RAH-gah-vahn) at the University of Copenhagen published the complete genome of a Saqqaq individual -- a man who had lived in Greenland approximately four thousand years ago, whose hair had been preserved in the permafrost at a site called Qeqertasussuk (keh-KER-tah-soo-sook) on the west coast of Greenland.

The Saqqaq man's preserved hair tuft from Qeqertasussuk, Greenland

The Saqqaq genome was the first ancient human genome ever sequenced -- a milestone in the history of genetics. The results were startling. The Saqqaq man was genetically most closely related to modern populations in eastern Siberia -- the Chukchi (CHOOK-chee) and Koryak (KOR-yak) peoples of the Russian Far East. He was genetically distinct from modern Inuit, who are descendants of the later Thule migration. He was also genetically distinct from all known Native American populations. The implications were clear: the first people to colonize the Arctic represented a separate migration from Siberia, unrelated to the earlier Paleo-Indian migrations that had populated the rest of the Americas.

The Saqqaq man had dark skin, brown eyes, and thick, dark hair. He was genetically predisposed to dry earwax (a trait common in East Asian populations), male-pattern baldness, and a stocky build. He was blood type A-positive. The hair sample from which the genome was extracted was a small tuft, perhaps five centimeters long, found in a layer of well-preserved organic material at the site. From this single tuft of four-thousand-year-old hair, scientists reconstructed the genetic portrait of an entire population -- a people who had crossed from Siberia to the Americas in a migration distinct from the one that produced the First Peoples of the Americas.

A 2014 study by Raghavan and colleagues extended this genetic picture dramatically. By analyzing ancient DNA from dozens of Paleo-Eskimo remains across the Arctic -- from Alaska to Greenland, spanning over three thousand years -- the team demonstrated that all Paleo-Eskimo populations (including the Saqqaq and the later Dorset people) belonged to a single genetic lineage, distinct from both Inuit and Native Americans. The Paleo-Eskimo represented a single migration that persisted in the Arctic for over four thousand years -- from roughly 3000 BCE to as late as 1300 CE -- before being replaced by the ancestors of the modern Inuit.

The word "replaced" is significant. The 2014 study found almost no evidence of genetic mixing between the Paleo-Eskimo and the Inuit. When the Thule (the ancestors of modern Inuit) expanded across the Arctic starting around 1000 CE, the Paleo-Eskimo populations did not intermarry with them in any significant way. They simply disappeared. The nature of that disappearance -- displacement, absorption, conflict, or avoidance -- is one of the central mysteries of Arctic archaeology.