Posted on 09/02/2003 11:38:57 AM PDT by blam
DNA study to settle ancient mystery about mingling of Inuit, Vikings
By BOB WEBER
(CP) - A centuries-old Arctic mystery may be weeks away from resolution as an Icelandic anthropologist prepares to release his findings on the so-called "Blond Eskimos" of the Canadian North.
"It's an old story," says Gisli Palsson of the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. "We want to try to throw new light on the history of the Inuit." Stories about Inuit with distinct European features - blue eyes, fair hair, beards - living in the central Arctic have their roots in ancient tales of Norse settlements and explorations.
"The Icelandic sagas, at several points, mention the Norse in Greenland meeting people who belong to other cultures," Palsson said.
Although those settlements pushed ever westward from Greenland as early as the 9th and 10th century, they had mysteriously disappeared by the 15th. The fate of settlers - did they simply disappear into the local population? - is unknown.
The Inuit tell legends of long-ago meetings with people from a strange culture.
Tantalizing accounts of European-looking Inuit surface in the accounts of some of the earliest western Arctic explorers, including Sir John Franklin, who was later to lead the doomed Franklin Expedition.
In the first decade of the last century, the famed Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson heard a rumour from a whaling captain about fair-haired people living among the Copper Inuit near what is now Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.
Stefansson, hungry for renown, used the rumour to raise money for an expedition to the area. In 1910, he finally caught up with the Inuit he sought.
A documentary entitled Arctic Dreamer, which premieres Friday at the Montreal Film Festival, quotes Stefansson's journals on the meeting:
"There were three men here whose beard is almost the same colour as mine and who look like typical Scandinavians," he wrote. "One woman has the delicate features one sees on Scandinavian girls."
Stefansson speculated the people he met had descended from the inhabitants of the vanished Norse settlements. His theory thrust him onto the front pages of newspapers across the continents with headlines of a "lost white race."
Palsson, with the help of biological anthropologist Agnar Helgason, has turned the light of DNA testing on Stefansson's speculations. Last year, he and his team took saliva samples from 350 Inuit in Cambridge Bay and Greenland and they have been comparing them with genetic markers known to have been prevalent in medieval Scandinavia.
The present-day Inuit of the area don't look markedly different than other Inuit, Palsson says.
"There has been lots of mixing over the last decades."
As well, Palsson points out that Stefansson had backers to please and lecture halls to fill.
"I'm not convinced that he actually saw Inuit who looked different than other Inuit. He may have exaggerated."
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Still, that doesn't mean Stefansson was wrong. Modern archeologists have lately found Norse remains and textiles as far west as Baffin Island.
"Things like that testify to at least economic exchange," says Palsson. "None of this is actual proof, but I think Inuit and Norse must have met, at least in western Greenland."
The last of Palsson's samples, which arrived in Iceland last month, are now being analysed. He expects to release his findings in October.
Although Palsson's results won't be indisputable proof, they will offer a high degree of probability. And a finding that Inuit and Viking blood probably mixed a millennium ago will change our understanding of human mobility, says Palsson.
"We now know the Inuit were not stationary and passive, outside of history," he says. "On the contrary, they were experimenting with travel routes and subsistence resources. And the same with the Norse.
"There's a tendency to undermine the mobility of the species. Archeology and biological anthropology are increasingly demonstrating that regions that people thought were barriers were really migration routes.
"And it may well be that we see the same results in the Arctic."
"THE LEGEND OF THE CLOUD PEOPLE"
Gran Villaya, the city of "Cloud People", the largest pre-Columbian city of the Americas, was once inhabited by the Chachapoyas, legend says, a group of tall, blue-eyed blondes. Today the ancient city is shrouded by overgrowth in the high tropical rain forest of northern Peru, but just a millennium ago, it was still a grand metropolis of fortresses and farms that covered 100 square miles.
The Chachapoyas were conquered by the Incas in 1480. Spaniards reported it, the Incas reported it, and as you go deeper into the dense jungle, tall, blonde, blue-eyed people are still found. Up until very recently, some of these people still used mummy caves (like their Aryan-Egyptian relatives).
There are 10,000 stone structures, complex units of circular buildings. Stairways run up terraces for several hundred yards, and there are underground caverns and about 24,000 circular structures of cut limestone. Kirelap, a great elliptical fortress whose walls soar to 60 feet, and which is thought to have once reached 150 feet, defends Gran Villaya from the east.
From the west, the city and its agricultural terraces are guarded by a chain of fortifications. Local myths trace the Chachapoya culture to the 10th century BC.
The people there were architects, farmers, and engineers who built aqueducts, canals, bridges, and once were in contact with the seas. The archaeological discoveries of Gran Villaya have already located 43 lost cities high in the Andes.
Researchers have found roads built from huge stones leading down to the Amazon. There are few stones in the jungle, so they were likely transported there. Pizzaro, the Spanish conqueror of Peru, recording the persistence of white blood at that time, wrote that "The ruling class in the kingdom of Peru was fair-skinned with fair hair about the color of ripe wheat."
Anthropologists in 1971 discovered a tribe of white-skinned Indians in the depths of these jungles. English explorer Colonel P.H. Fawcett, wrote in 1924 of also finding remote South American tribes with blue eyes and auburn hair.
She had a decorative plate from Finland illustrating their canoes and typees.
I have known a number of Americans of Welsh ancestry and they all share this coloring, along with round faces and heads like Zeta-Jones.
Ping.
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The rather droll side-story, is that before he left the arctic, Vjalmar Stepnansson managed to leave a little of his own viking DNA in the Mackenzie Delta srea, so that to this day there are Stephanssons living in Inuvik [and they are neither blond, nor Nordic-looking]!
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In Jeffersonville IN, I met a man named Dana Olson who exhaustively researched and wrote a book about Prince Maloc in the late ‘70s. He couldn’t get it published, mainly because he refused to present it as a legend — rather, he insisted it was all true. He published via vanity press.
The book included a few photos: a sign erected by the DAR stating that On this spot in such-and-such a year Prince Maloc landed on the American continent.
The Rose Island bridge near Louisville constructed from large limestone blocks salvaged from a European-style fort found on the banks of the Ohio River by the “first” European explorers.
Also included was a list of Mandan words and their Welsh counterparts.
Olson was not a scholar. His book contained no footnotes or bibliography, nor did he mention any of his sources w/in the book. Still, there really was a lot there.
I have no idea how to get hold of Olson or his book. I met him in a bar, and he sold me a copy of his book out of the trunk of his car for $10.
According to Olson’s book, Maloc was a Welsh prince who somehow fell into great disfavor with the British crown. Fearing for his life, he gathered a troop of loyal cohorts, and set sail for parts unknown.
I read the book about 20 years ago, so I don’t remember a whole lot about it. A few years after I read it, I was attending a Mormon conference, and a Mormon leader had a copy of the book, and held it forth as proof that Columbus and the Vikings were not necessarily the first visitors to the American continent.
Since the book was very obscure, I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t imagine the Mormon leader purchasing a copy in the bar parking lot, as I had.
Still, there was a lot to the book. It’s a shame that Olson wasn’t more of a scholar, able to present his research in a a more responsible and acceptable fashion. And/or, that he refused to publish it as a legend, but insisted it was all true.
Maybe a history scholar will be interested and give this topic the treatment it warrants.
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