The Tunits | These mysterious inhabitants of the Arctic, before the Inuit

The Inuit arrived in eastern Canada 700 to 800 years ago. A people had lived there for thousands of years: the Tunits. According to a new study, they may have encountered Vikings. Story of a great Arctic enigma.

Ivoire

The Middle Ages awakened among the Vikings a vocation as merchants of walrus ivory. When this marine mammal became rarer in Scandinavia, the Vikings began to hunt further west, establishing colonies in Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland.

But they also traded with the Tunits (sometimes spelled Tuniits), the people who inhabited the eastern Arctic before the arrival of the Inuit in the 13th century.^e century. They could even have hunted walrus in Nunavik.

This is the conclusion of a study published in September in Science Advances. “This would be the first evidence of contact between Tunits and Europeans,” explains the study’s lead author, Emily Johana Ruiz Puerta, of the University of Copenhagen.

“One thing is certain, ivory created the first trans-Arctic trade network. »

M^me Ruiz Puerta draws a comparison with the Silk Road, which linked China to Europe.

Genetic analyzes

These results were obtained by comparing ivory from Viking objects from the Middle Ages with DNA from different populations of walruses from Greenland and the Canadian Arctic.

Some objects came from northwest Greenland, where there were Tunits, and others from eastern Canada, Labrador and Nunavik. According to M^me Ruiz Puerta and study co-author Sean Desjardins of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands said the Tunits had no ships sturdy enough to travel from north to south Greenland, where the Viking colony was established.

It was therefore the Vikings who traveled to the northwest of Greenland, either to hunt or to trade.

As for eastern Canada, the Vikings may never have set foot there. “The Tunits could go in winter, traveling on the ice, from Canada to Greenland,” says Mr. Desjardins.

In Canada, there are three Tunit sites which contain potentially Viking objects: types of rope. Mr. Desjardins also indicates that we find, in Viking sagas, mentions that refer to Ungava Bay and Baffin Land.

Two other archaeologists specializing in the Tunits, Patrick Jolicoeur and Max Friesen from the University of Toronto, confirm the validity of the analyzes published in Science Advances. Mr. Jolicoeur hopes that other genetic analyzes will use the genome of walrus populations in central Canada, present-day Nunavut, to see if the Vikings would not have gone further. Underwater archeology could also reveal a possible Viking wreck.

Tunits and Dorsetians

The Tunits, an Inuit term, were until recently called Dorset, after a site in Nunavut where the first traces of these first inhabitants of the Canadian Arctic were found, in 1925.

The Tunits arrived in Canada 4500 years ago. They colonized Greenland twice: 2500 years ago, then, after disappearing from the Danish island during the first century AD, in the 7th^e century.

Their disappearance is mysterious. “There are no traces of violence, of war between Inuit and Tunits,” underlines Mr. Jolicoeur. The Inuit often reoccupied the houses built underground by the Tunits. In their oral history, they speak of the Tunits as giants. It appears that the Inuit had better naval technology than the Tunits, larger ships that allowed them to hunt whales. »

A migration of whales during a warming wave 1000 years ago would explain the arrival of the Inuit in central and eastern Canada. Viking settlements also existed thanks to this “medieval warm period”, which ended with the “Little Ice Age” at the beginning of the 14th century.^e century.

Could the Tunits have succumbed to diseases brought by the Vikings, like many indigenous American peoples after the arrival of Europeans? “The possibility of illness cannot be excluded,” says Mr. Friesen. But I believe that the Tunits lived in communities that were too isolated from each other. »

This isolation was reproduced in the only known Inuit community to have adopted Tunit customs: the Sadlermiut of three Hudson Bay islands. They were the last Inuit to come into contact with Europeans, in 1824, and completely disappeared 80 years later, victims of epidemics. Their customs suggested that they were Tunits, but genetic analyzes 20 years ago showed that they were Inuit.

Arc you do

Tunite archaeology, which is practiced by around ten specialists, according to Mr. Friesen, still has many gray areas. “The Tunits, for example, knew how to hunt with a bow in the beginning, but 2,000 years ago they lost this technology for unknown reasons,” says Friesen.

The Tunits – and also the Inuit – are also the only people to have manufactured iron objects without having a mining industry. They used an outcropping deposit of pure iron created by a meteorite that struck Greenland.