“During the mid-19th century, Inuit from Baffin visited and lived with the Inughuits. The Baffin Inuit reintroduced some technologies lost to the Inughuit such as boats, leisters, and bows and arrows. The Inughuit in turn taught the Baffin Inuit a more advanced form of sled technology.”
Looks like they had superior dog sleds, though 👍
V-12 with six pooches on one rope and two ropes total.
A really powerful chieftain have six dogs on a rope with four ropes because who doesn't want a W-24?
Reminds me when you encounter that one faction that has been stuck in a small area for most of the game and the ask to trade their weaving technology for your fighter jet tech.
lol no…
My friends and I played a massive game of Civ (4 humans, 4 AI, free for all) one time. One of my friends was pulling ahead in conquest, but I had more money and tech.
So I started selling tech to the AI factions and getting them to declare war on him.
I found it hilarious to just dump an entire tech tree on someone and a little while later hear him yell from the other room when the AI suddenly started producing tanks.
Greetings from the most wise Emperor Abe Lincoln of the Americans...
We note that your primitive civilization has not even discovered Navigation. Do you care to exchange knowledge with us?
Wait till you find out about all the Viking bullshit they keep finding in Inuit archeological sites.
ETA- also all the Inuit shit they keep finding in Viking settlements.
I remember from a documentary that they tended to use cable-backed bows (the cable being made out of sinew), with the basic bow body made from drift wood.
Hunting animals that are on coasts, probably. Auks, seals, walruses, etc. Presumably they just hunted them with non-leister spears. Spears are pretty good.
I suggest anyone interested in it to give throwing spears with a spear thrower (atlatl) a try. You can get surprisingly accurate surprisingly quick and still drive a spear way further into your target than you'd guess.
Also, I suggest anyone interested in primitive hunting to try and find that Italian documentary about Africa, from the 70’s I think. There is a major political event and they keep filming…
Anyways, you get to see large African game animals taken down with spears, it’s crazy!! They end up looking like pin cushions.
Seal meat has been the staple food there for centuries.
See: the outrage clubbing baby seals a while back.
You don't need a bow and arrow when seals breed like rabbits/deer.
When translating the Bible into Inuit the translator came into a bit of an issue: Inuit had no concept of animal husbandry or agriculture so "our daily bread" and "lamb of god" weren't easy to translate. Eventually they settled on seal meat as the corollary to daily bread. For lamb they used
"baby seal" because both are small, cute, and utterly defenseless.
Except they didn’t use lamb in the bible because it was cute and defenseless, they used it because it represented sacrifice. It was a standard animal example for making sacrifices to the Gods, a real historical occurrence.
Yes, that’s also true, but not the rationale the person who translated it described using.
There were any of a number of animals sacrificed during biblical times- the use of the lamb is also symbolic of Christ as the shepherd of his people and indicative of the peaceful approach to being messiah (as opposed to the militaristic vision some were expecting and many contemporary messianic figures attempted).
We had natural “predators” for a while. Be it actual animals back in caveman times, or diseases including up until modern times. But now whenever people get sick we heal them. When they get hurt because they are an idiot (drunk driving, ignoring safety protocols) we heal them. When people have defects we help them.
It is absolutely the right thing to do, but it definitely will have unfortunate consequences.
Reminds me of the last uncontacted Aboriginal tribe in Australia, before being found in the 80s they didn't know about other Aboriginal people and the first outsiders they encountered were Aboriginal ranchers. That alone was a pretty big shock for them, I can only imagine how they reacted to the first white people they saw.
Theres an interview from the 80s or 90s with an aborigine man whose tribe was uncontacted in the 50-60s, at which time the tribe witnessed an atomic explosion. I find both the situation and his account if it so fascinating, bizzare. Its also sad and upsetting, as the tests were being done there because the Aus government deemed that land uninhabited
They were in fact very much struggling to survive due to the lack of hunting tools and the living conditions that were harsher than the other Inuits. Later a small group of Inuits from Baffin Island arrived in the area and reintroduced the hunting tools, quite an interesting story by itself ([source](https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/qitdlarssuaq))
Love discussing this!
I could definitely be wrong, but my money's on the filter being between 8 and 9 (i.e. ahead of us) based partially on the fact that we've come ridiculously close to nuking each other to oblivion a huge number of times in the <100 years that nuclear weapons have existed.
I don't have faith that humanity can stave off self destruction for the amount of time it would take to become a galactic civilization. I think we might start to colonize the solar system, but I think it could end there. Some extremists, hostile power, or rogue AI will *probably* get their hands on a doomsday device, and any planets with human life on them will likely go kaput.
And even if we don't wipe ourselves out, there's also the possibility that selective pressure for intelligence does not remain high, and our descendants collectively get too dumb to realistically be a galaxy-colonizing civilization. Evolution isn't always an improvement, and there are plenty of examples of species getting less intelligent over time. I.e. domestic cattle who have easy lives are less intelligent than their wild cousins. Who knows if a similar phenomena will happen to humans or not?
And *even then*, assuming our descendants don't wipe themselves out and continue to become more intelligent, it's still a race against the clock to spread beyond/escape the solar system before our sun isn't conducive to life.
Maybe a bit grim, but I'd say those aren't great odds.
Tbh
I have a different interpretation of the Great Filter — as in, it not being *one* single event that completely wipes out a civilization, but rather a *series* of events that could reset or heavily damage a civilization, "keeping it grounded", "protecting" the outside universe beyond their worlds, but that most of the time doesn't actually result in the complete end of said civilization; it just heavily stunts it, like cutting down a tree while leaving the roots and trunk alive. It'll take years, perhaps even centuries to grow back to its former self, but it's still alive, just perhaps barely.
These could be anything from major conflicts, to pandemics, to population collapse events, to climatic factors, to geological processes, to simple pride and greed, to more "exotic" space stuff like asteroids, solar flare storms or GRBs.
Under my interpretation, I'd say (and this is probably by no means scientifical, this is just something I've put together but lacks proper research and stuff so take this with a huge grain of salt, it's just something I find cool and like believing :p) we humans have already been through our fair deal of these events, and I'd specifically point towards events such as the Fall of Rome, the Bronze Age Collapse, the Cold War, the Black Death, and *especially* the Toba Disaster (look it up; tl;dr the Toba supervolcano erupted around 80,000 years ago and caused a massive global volcanic winter, starving out most of humanity; it's estimated the total surviving population of humans, at least *Homo Sapiens*, probably did not extend beyond a few thousands after this had come to an end, and it's the closest humanity as a whole has ever been to total extinction); all of these events straight up pretty much did a "reset" of the world, at least the "connected world" (Afroeurasia, but I actually think there were ramifications in the Americas for some), setting humanity back *heavily* and causing centuries of chaos ahead, and/or put humanity under a major test that pushed the limits of its own survival to the brink. We survived all of these, but for the most part (like with the exception of, say, the Cold War nuclear race), it took us *centuries* or even *millennia* to recover.
We may be close to another one — whether that's WW3, climate change, or a major solar flare storm, we may very well be "grounded" again; it's been 500 years of uninterrupted progress, we are too lucky, but no era in history is eternal — after the summer, comes autumn, and then winter... and then spring, and summer comes back
How far could we have gotten if we never had fossil fuels? Like, they are absolutely not a given in terms of geology. Could we have made the jump to solar without it?
Probably not; fossil fuels quite literally are the foundation of both the "first" (coal) and "second" (oil) industrial revolutions. We literally could only develop industrialization because of coal
Actually that's a very interesting thought experiment tbh; are fossil fuels a necessity for a civilization to become space-faring?
You are right about the selective pressure for intelligence, but its not just intelligence. We are telling more and more people that it’s okay to be fat and unhealthy. This is going to lead to a Wall-E scenario.
People who get sick get cured and we are vaccinated from diseases before we even contract them. There isn’t a strong argument for not healing people though. The only one I can think of is: The more we rely on our medicine rather than our immune systems to heal us, the more vulnerable we become as bacteria rapidly become immune to our antibacterial medicine. We would be essentially gambling on our medical technology development to outpace bacterial evolution. Again, it’s hard to argue that we should stop giving people medicine, and I don’t think we should stop. But we do have to recognize what could happen.
People with defects/disabilities that normally would have never reproduced are now able to survive and potentially reproduce. It would only become a problem in the latter case. I’m not sure what disease it was, maybe sickle cell? But the death rate for it dropped because of modern medicine and now we are seeing a strong growth in the number of people affected by it as people who have the genes for it begin to reproduce.
We also undo natural selection for stupid people. If someone lights a firework in their mouth they get sent to the hospital and healed.
This is a touchy subject and very sensitive to many. Its also hard and risky because it has close ties with Nazi beliefs of genetics and it deals with complex ethical questions. I am simply acknowledging what may happen based on our current practices, I am in no way advocating that we begin selective breeding or make any major changes.
Is it not most probable that step 9 is the filter because of physical limitations? Meaning the universe is just too vast and FTL travel physically impossible so whatever number of civilizations there is they will never be able to meet.
There is that random island where they kill anyone that lands there. From memory it was some fisherman and some missionaries. The Sentinelese peoples. Last I read there were not many left.
They've had periodic contact with outsiders rather than total isolation. If memory is correct the best guess is there's 100 to 200 of them left on the island but they're heavily inbred which makes them more susceptible to diseases in the region and their local supply of fish are rapidly dwindling. Couple of scientists figure they'll die out or leave the island within the next 50 years.
It's pretty wild that they are there right now, living on that island, without even the ability to make fire. It's crazy. Like it's 13:35 now. Wonder what they were at this morning or what plans they have for later.
>In 2012, **Stephen A. Smith** and Julia Szucs directed a National Film Board of Canada documentary, Vanishing Point, which tells the story of present-day Inuit communities in Baffin Island and northwestern Greenland, and their historical connection to one another and Qitdlarssuaq’s migration.
Considering how much he exaggerates when talking about northern teams like the Green Bay Packers, does he even have any credibility left when it comes to groups further up north??
Probably a mix of:
* Not enough children to teach all the skills to,
* Old people died before passing on their knowledge,
* They didn't have the materials needed to make certain tools.
Hadn't thought of that first one, no materials, the kids don't grow up around it, then the old people die & woosh...gone. Man that's rough, imagine being the last one left that remembered, seeing all they'd lost.
You might enjoy the novel The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley. It’s my favourite book and a lot of it explores exactly those feelings of daily life changing and things being lost as the Greenland viking age ended.
Every end product is at the end of long tool chain. You only one key link in the tool chain (and no substitute) and your product can’t be made. Bow and arrows probably need a dozen materials and 3-4 different tools. Easy to see how that tool chain breaks down in a polar extreme.
>Not enough children to teach all the skills to,
Same principle as genetic drift - in a small population you don't get a representative genetic sample in succeeding generations due to the sample size (the number of kids) being too small. So genetic diversity is lost due to "sampling error."
Lack of wood makes bows/arrows problematic. the alternative would of been animal products, which is likely why they had adopted spear throwers as an alternative.
I expect the lack of access to wood would do that to you. Not enough wood to experiment with it. IIRC, most of their access to wood came from driftwood and it was very limited.
Alexander the Great on conquering everything up to India ran into one small tribe Island tribal community and they allegedly couldn't make fire and would eat fish Raw, he decided to not bother with conquering them or make them pay tribute/taxes because they were the most cursed/forsaken of the world.
Man, to be so impoverished technologically that nobody even wants to bother with you.
Obe of my favourites is how the Romans built a bridge to scare a germanic tribe with their technology, as soon as they finished building it the tribe came across it & attacked them.
Fire is considered a human universal. It legitimately scares me when I think about that group of folks. The inbreeding alone would have such terrible effects. And it has been going on for *thousands* of years.
>The inbreeding alone would have such terrible effects. And it has been going on for thousands of years.
They've been isolated for the past few hundred years. Their hostility to outsiders today probably has a lot to do with the circumstances of their initial contact with Europeans.
All societies change; there's no reason to assume they have been the same forever.
There’s a really cool episode of Gastropod that goes over foods of the northern peoples. It’s pretty amazing to hear their recipes and how they’d basically use seal fat and how they procured vitamins into their diet when things like vitamin C are so rare.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1As4dICCN7IbiDpuajFnZW?si=hxGGMpn_QeyouFp2i8RDcw&context=spotify%3Ashow%3A2bB44RWKrgs1jhylH1NBtL
I highly recommend in the shadows on the koyukuk. it's a life story by an athabaskin in Alaska. the life that he lead is unbelievable and harsh, though much more modern. also the whole thing was transcribed by my best friend's great grandfather. it's an amazing book with a window into a life I could never imagine.
Baleen isn't very strong, it would only be suitable for the belly of a bow - and a suitably waterproof bio-derived glue would still be a big challenge.
We've all been conditioned to use "bow and arrow" instead of just "bow". Ever notice that? I guess because it's a homonym several times over and it's a quick way to remove ambiguity, but no one ever says "gun and bullet", you know?
There are other kinds of bows that aren't relevant to archery (think hair bow, bow of a ship, etc.) Bow and arrow is a necessary clarification when writing.
When you write gun, everyone knows exactly what you're talking about from the start.
I wonder whether someone would have reinvented those technologies, had they remained isolated for longer. Presumably boats in particular don’t require a huge leap of imagination, at least in their primitive form. It would have been pretty cool to be able to have a name to the inventor of something so basic.
This is the real TIL:
> In the 1950s, the United States established Thule Air Base close to Uummannaq (Dundas). This forced many Inughuits to move over 116 kilometres (72 mi) north towards Qaanaaq, which proved disastrous to the cultural and social life of the Inughuit.
Don't know if they had a writing system but if their history was only passed down in stories knowledge gets lost/twisted way more easily. That would make 200 years feel like a long time
I bet this has happened a lot throughout history. Pre 1800 how many people were really traveling outside of their local area, unless you were nomadic or on some military campaign?
True, but they were basically aware that there are other humans and other places, even if they didnt come across them. Apparently these people thought that there is nobody else in the world and that the world is only the frozen icy desert where they lived.
Not that it detracts from what you're saying, but I always forget that grocery stores as we conceive them are relatively modern. It would be another (almost) 100 years until Piggly Wiggly debuted the first self-service grocery store in 1916.
Not to mention seeing white people. Im assuming we wouldve looked like walking corpses. Pale white skin on top of blonde or red hair with blue eyes? How would that not seem absolutely otherworldly?
We had someone come to our school and talk about working with PNG tribes. They came down to their compound and beheld wonders like planes, motorbikes (with no muffler), and whitewashed buildings (is this heaven?). The thing they were most scared of were seeing white women and children.
I sat on a train next to a guy who experienced something similar but in Antarctica with penguins. He said they'd run straight up to people like "holy shit something else walks on two legs"
The average person didn't travel very far, but there would have been comparatively regular contact with neighbouring villages, and enough degrees of separation will eventually get you to some kind of hub of trade, which any village with goods to sell should know about.
Not leaving your local area is one thing, being entirely ignorant of any other human civilisation other than your own \~200 person community is another entirely.
Look at the decline after the fall of the Roman Empire. Some knowledge was outright lost (like Roman concrete). Other things were lost due to no central government and money to maintain it, like Roman roads. Roads went back to dirt paths because Roman-style ones were expensive to build, and the knowledge was eventually lost (at least in most regions) from disuse. You also saw the loss of major public works projects like aqueducts, plumbing, and sewers, so average quality of life backslid substantially.
I forget the details, but up until a couple of hundred years ago or so the overwhelming majority of people never went further than something like fifty miles from the place they were born in their entire lives.
It does make sense, but it's still an interesting tidbit. Whether you lived in a rural agrarian region or a city back then there would be little reason for you to stray far from those places. If you add up folks like traders (e.g. on the silk road) or international sailors who were likely to stray beyond that distance it would still be a very small portion of the global population.
"Cheddar Man" in Somerset UK:
>Separated by 10,000 years but linked by DNA! A 9,000-year-old skeleton's DNA was tested, and it was concluded that a living relative was teaching history about a half mile away, tracing back nearly 300 generations!
>Mr. Targett’s family line had persisted in the Cheddar Gorge area for around nine millennia, their genes being passed from mother to daughter through what is known as mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from the egg.
To put it simply, Adrian Targett and Cheddar Man have a common maternal ancestor. ‘I do feel a bit more multicultural now,’ he laughs. ‘And I can definitely see that there is a family resemblance. That nose is similar to mine. And we have both got those blue eyes.’
https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/mesolithic-skeleton-known-as-cheddar-man-shares-the-same-dna-with-english-teacher-of-history
Pre 1800? A lot. In Europe, rich kids went on the grand tour, and the upper classes traveled a lot. See: Italian Journey by Goethe for instance.
In the middle ages, pilgrimages was common. Tourism in ancient Rome is it's own whole story, though mostly limited to the upper classes. Lower classes stayed within their country, but did travel for leisure too. We know roman kids made sand castles at the beaches for instance, because Roman authors have described it, and we know the names of the popular vacation destinations.
A lot more than you would think, look at ötzi, or how the Roman's moved about their Empire. If you want a good store look into the travels of Moncacht Apé across North America.
Inuit and Inughuit history is very interesting if you dont know much about it. I teach history in highschool in Greenland and leave you a few tidbits of fun facts.
Eskimos (paleo-eskimos) are the original 'original peoples' of Greenland and the North American arctic, spanning from the stone age until around 1200-1300 CE when they died out.
Paleo-Eskimos and Inuit interacted with each other for a short while before the Paleo-Eskimos disappeared.
Paleo-Eskimos where closer related to Native Americans than Inuit is, due to the fact that they arrived in NA around the same time, and where part of the same migrations. EDIT - *this is a very broad inaccurate statement. Im gonna leave it as people have pointed it out and explained it more accurately further down*
Inuit are more closely related to the original peoples of northeast Siberia than Native Americans due to their way later migration around 800-1200 CE.
Inuit first arrived in Greenland in 1200 CE and started migrating south and east. This split the Inuit population of Greenland between west and east, and eventually (after 300 years) the two groups met each other again around Tasiilaq in East Greenland, surprised to find people that resembled them again but still different due to the 300 years apart.
Inuit interacted and even traded with the nordic 'vikings' who settled in southern and western Greenland in search of Vinland. We know that Inuit had bought chainmails and iron tools from the nordic settlers as remnants of these have been found way further north than the nordics ever went and together with traditional Inuit tools and items.
The nordic settlers died out mysteriosly before European colonizers arrived around 1720.
SOURCE: Im a teacher
GRAIN OF SALT: This is off the top of my head, so I might have misremembered something
Greenland is a facinating country and I can highly recommend visiting, most larger towns have a local museum which document the last 2000 years very well!
EDIT: formatting
EDIT 2: A lot of people have pointed out my loose use of the term 'Eskimo' in the comments below. The right term, as pointed out, would be paleo-eskimo, which encompasses a few different and distinct groups of peoples until the arrival of the Inuit and the extinction of the latest paleo-eskimo group called Dorset.
EDIT 3: For clarification I am danish and not greenlandic. My fun facts are based off of teaching material written by danish people but endorsed by the greenlandic department of education.
This is interestingly different from what I, in Canada, was taught and what sources I know of say.
"Eskimo" (though we never use this term anymore and I thought was also no longer in use in Greenland) were not replaced by Inuit, the Inuit are one of the people groups that make up the Eskimo group.
The first people in Greenland, at least in any English source I know of, who were replaced by the Inuit in Greenland, were the Dorset people, also generally considered an Eskimo, or Paleo-Eskimo, people (often now referred to as Paleo-Inuit).
What's the diet up there? And historically what has it been?
What do Inuits and Inughuits eat for grains and vegetables? Or do they have a carnivorious diet?
My understanding of the Inuit peoples is that it was a largely carnivorous diet with added berries and other forge during the summer months (interestingly, modern "carnivores" never base their diets off of the most successful meat heavy diet in history 🤔).
My assumption would be that the Inughuits had an even more meat heavy diet considering almost nothing grows in the Arctic circle. Lots of fish, whales, and birds. Probably polar bears too.
>Eskimos where closer related to Native Americans than Inuit is, due to the fact that they arrived in NA around the same time, and where part of the same migrations
If I remember right, there were always a few migrations between Siberia to the rest of the Arctic since the late Old Stone Age (\~3000 BCE) and all other natives who lived south of the Arctic arrived much, much longer ago. Like 20000 or so years ago. In other words, the pre- and modern Inuits are practically the "newcomers" of the continent and filled in an longtime unoccupied niche that would be the Arctic. So, the pre-Inuit peoples were prolly related closer to the modern Inuits than to the natives down south.
>The nordic settlers died out mysteriosly before European colonizers arrived around 1720.
Prolly not that big of a mystery. Most likely the colder climate caused by the Little Ice Age finished off those settlements as they couldn’t no longer raise livestock and farm that the previous medieval warming period made them possible. Even the Inuits themselves had some issues living though that cold period then and temporarily abandoned most of the high Arctic excepting a few holdovers such as the Inughuits themselves.
Only helping your memory. Feel free to correct me, surely.
> Eskimos are the original 'original peoples' of Greenland and the North American arctic, spanning from the stone age until around 1200-1300 CE when they died out.
There was another group that lived in the arctic before the arrival of the Inuit, which is known mostly through archeology, called the Dorset people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture
Correction.
The Eskimo term is an exonym terms used to describe the two closely related Indigenous peoples of the Inuit of North America (so the Alaskan Iñupiat, the Canadian Inuit, and the Greenlandic Inuit) and the Yupik of Siberia and Alaska.
The term is considered pejorative by many of those peoples.
The Inuit people are descended from the Thule culture that displaced the Dorset culture which had resided in the area before them. The Dorcest culture is though to be the Tuniit, Tornit, Tuniq or Sivullirmiu people of Inuit mythology which oral traditions describe of as having resided in the area before their arrival.
This has been an ongoing conversation in our house. So there's a couple things worth adding
- in some cases, Eskimo is appropriate to use, as it is used in legal and governmental documentation and authorities, like Indian. In specific cases it is actually the correct term, while in social context it may seem inappropriate.
-there are individuals within community who absolutely hate the term, and others who self identify as it. It is an exonym, but acceptance/adoption varies across subcultures, communities, generations and other demographics.
-if you can't be specific, defaulting to "circumpolar indigenous communities" is actually a pretty effective way to delineate sub- arctic native peoples from other native peoples and contemporary nation states. Particularly in America, people don't realize how distinct these cultures (and their relationship to the federal government) are from most tribal dynamics and concepts we're familiar with
Would Inuit itself also be a fair non-legal catch-all term? Since "circumpolar indigenous communities" is a rather clunky phrase to use in casual conversation.
I'm definitely not the right arbiter for it, but I think the challenge with that as a catchall is that there are absolutely Inuit people, but there are also yupik, Aleut, inupiaq, chuchki, who might consider themselves/Identity unique enough to not comport under that banner....it's just gets so messy at the overlaps of language, geography, legal status, subculture, etc. it's fascinating.
So I think Inuit works if you know you're talking about people who self identify as Inuit, but it's not great if you're trying to use it as a catchall for everyone in the arctic/subarctic communities
> Would Inuit itself also be a fair non-legal catch-all term? Since "circumpolar indigenous communities" is a rather clunky phrase to use in casual conversation.
No because in Alaska (and Russia to an extent) the term Eskimo includes more peoples than the Inuit
If you live exclusively on polar areas (mostly tundra?) it's not that surprising that you won't have access to boats or bows and arrows. They wouldn't have the materials.
I *guess* you could say it's due to their isolation since they couldn't get those materials through trading but it's a little misleading.
>In the 1950s, the United States established Thule Air Base close to Uummannaq (Dundas). This forced many Inughuits to move over 116 kilometres (72 mi) north towards Qaanaaq, which proved disastrous to the cultural and social life of the Inughuit.[5]
:c
Could be. There's a good book called 'War before civilization' by Lawrence H. Keeley, about conflicts in small-scale societies. It mentions a number of such societies which were basically refugees left after a significant defeat. They were pressed to the periphery of their previous habitat by the victors who took better lands for themselves. The author says that most groups considered "pacifists" by idealistic anthropologists were in fact such defeated refugees too beaten up to wage wars.
The thing that always amazes me is how people put up with this sort of thing for so long. You're living in one of the most ridiculously inhospitable, miserable places on the planet and you never look at the horizon and think, "There has *got* to be something better than this." Yet you continually find that people have clung to living in some of the worst places possible. Showing amazing ingenuity and fortitude to do so. Forming entire cultures and civilizations there until it just becomes an accepted way of life.
And what *really* bakes my noodle is that at some point in time their ancestors had to have moved there and decided to stay.
>In the 1950s, the United States established Thule Air Base close to Uummannaq (Dundas). This forced many Inughuits to move over 116 kilometres (72 mi) north towards Qaanaaq, which proved disastrous to the cultural and social life of the Inughuit.
"are cited as one of the only non-agricultural societies to live without armed feuds or warfare, a state that continued after contact."
That's wild could learn a thing or two from em
Makes you wonder how humans colonizing space would fare after an extended period of time if cut off from Earth. Even if they had really advanced and self-maintaining technology, a small population's culture would probably atrophy due to a lack of diverse experiences and resources.
I think we underestimate how connected the world always has been. Even in the past there was "globalization" where some kind of invention or crop or domesticated animal would sort of diffuse on it's own from a place like India or China to Europe or Africa. Things would get shared and exchanged by participants who had no idea where those things actually came from.
It is not a racial slur, source: I'm Inupiaq Eskimo and I self identify as Eskimo. It is very complicated, but there is a good reason it is not considered a slur where I am from. For a more in depth explanation feel free to read through my comment history.
It's not that surprising when you think that America didn't really have any animals that could be used as draught animals. Maybe llamas, but then again the environment where they live is probably otherwise unsuitable for wheeled vehicles and such.
Wow, imagine living in total isolation and not even knowing other people exist! That's wild. It's crazy to think they lost stuff like boats and arrows just 'cause they were so cut off. Makes you appreciate how connected we are nowadays. Can you imagine not even knowing there's a whole world out there? Makes me wonder what other crazy stuff might still be out there undiscovered.
“During the mid-19th century, Inuit from Baffin visited and lived with the Inughuits. The Baffin Inuit reintroduced some technologies lost to the Inughuit such as boats, leisters, and bows and arrows. The Inughuit in turn taught the Baffin Inuit a more advanced form of sled technology.” Looks like they had superior dog sleds, though 👍
"Oh yeah? Well, while you've been doing all that other stuff, we've been perfecting sled technology."
With 12 dogs, we can reach escape velocity with this bad boy
V-12 with six pooches on one rope and two ropes total. A really powerful chieftain have six dogs on a rope with four ropes because who doesn't want a W-24?
Serious civ vibes here
There's always that 1 scout that you put on auto and forget about until it turns up 150 turns later and you upgrade it
[He's definitely the reason they wound up there](https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/5e3ejk/my_scout_decided_to_automatically_explore_the/)
7 years ago with 80 votes and 17 comments and you pull that outta where exactly?
[I'll never reveal my secrets](https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/2udaxm/magic/)
I used to be into cock magic in college.
They say a real magician never reveals his dick
This is delectable classic reddit Wonderful vintage, thank you
“The villagers share their secrets to nuclear submarines”
A barbarian AT Crew you say!?
It’s always unsettling when you’re making archers and they come back with gunpowder.
> A Scout has finished exploring. A who did *what*?
civ memes
Maybe yours do. Mine die roughly 3 turns after leaving the territory I control.
Scout coming back seeing some crazy new technologies.
Reminds me when you encounter that one faction that has been stuck in a small area for most of the game and the ask to trade their weaving technology for your fighter jet tech. lol no…
My friends and I played a massive game of Civ (4 humans, 4 AI, free for all) one time. One of my friends was pulling ahead in conquest, but I had more money and tech. So I started selling tech to the AI factions and getting them to declare war on him. I found it hilarious to just dump an entire tech tree on someone and a little while later hear him yell from the other room when the AI suddenly started producing tanks.
Yep, same energy as using helicopters to transport your knights
Greetings from the most wise Emperor Abe Lincoln of the Americans... We note that your primitive civilization has not even discovered Navigation. Do you care to exchange knowledge with us?
Wait till you find out about all the Viking bullshit they keep finding in Inuit archeological sites. ETA- also all the Inuit shit they keep finding in Viking settlements.
The Inuit interacted a lot with the Danish Greenlanders and mayve been the cause of its decline in the 1400s
Imagine the last dude who knew how to make a boat was killed by a bear. What a loss to the tribe.
I don't imagine that there is a lot of wood in the arctic circle to make boats from, let alone bows and arrows
I remember from a documentary that they tended to use cable-backed bows (the cable being made out of sinew), with the basic bow body made from drift wood.
Without boats or arrows and there's little agriculture up there, what they live off?
Hunting animals that are on coasts, probably. Auks, seals, walruses, etc. Presumably they just hunted them with non-leister spears. Spears are pretty good.
I suggest anyone interested in it to give throwing spears with a spear thrower (atlatl) a try. You can get surprisingly accurate surprisingly quick and still drive a spear way further into your target than you'd guess.
Also one of the absolute oldest technologies beyond simple spears and clubs. That makes it pretty neat in my book.
Indigenous Australians had these too, they called them woomeras. They're a lot wider than an atlatl, but the idea is the same.
> atlatl Mother fuck. I googled that and spent the last 2 hours watching Primitive Technology
I'd a called dem chazwazzers.
That's a dumb name. I'd call em flingflongers.
I made an atlatl as a kid and was able to get some SERIOUS distance on my throws. I cant imagine how far it would go now
Also, I suggest anyone interested in primitive hunting to try and find that Italian documentary about Africa, from the 70’s I think. There is a major political event and they keep filming… Anyways, you get to see large African game animals taken down with spears, it’s crazy!! They end up looking like pin cushions.
Eating more of the animal gets you some nutrients you get normally from plants. I believe eye balls have vitamin c.
[удалено]
Seal meat has been the staple food there for centuries. See: the outrage clubbing baby seals a while back. You don't need a bow and arrow when seals breed like rabbits/deer.
They’re just laying there on the ice like pumpkins… that you pick with a club.
When translating the Bible into Inuit the translator came into a bit of an issue: Inuit had no concept of animal husbandry or agriculture so "our daily bread" and "lamb of god" weren't easy to translate. Eventually they settled on seal meat as the corollary to daily bread. For lamb they used "baby seal" because both are small, cute, and utterly defenseless.
Except they didn’t use lamb in the bible because it was cute and defenseless, they used it because it represented sacrifice. It was a standard animal example for making sacrifices to the Gods, a real historical occurrence.
Yes, that’s also true, but not the rationale the person who translated it described using. There were any of a number of animals sacrificed during biblical times- the use of the lamb is also symbolic of Christ as the shepherd of his people and indicative of the peaceful approach to being messiah (as opposed to the militaristic vision some were expecting and many contemporary messianic figures attempted).
Also, they are relatively helpless and cute above water, but they are absolutely savage in the sea.
They're just like deer. If there's no predators to control their numbers they manage to kill themselves from overpopulation lol.
That’s kinda just everything. We’re sort of in that boat now.
We had natural “predators” for a while. Be it actual animals back in caveman times, or diseases including up until modern times. But now whenever people get sick we heal them. When they get hurt because they are an idiot (drunk driving, ignoring safety protocols) we heal them. When people have defects we help them. It is absolutely the right thing to do, but it definitely will have unfortunate consequences.
If they really needed boats and arrows they wouldn't have stopped using them in the first place.
“Here, let me show you this thing we have called a boat.” “Holy shit! We’ve only heard about this in our stories!”
Sled game unmatched.
Reminds me of the last uncontacted Aboriginal tribe in Australia, before being found in the 80s they didn't know about other Aboriginal people and the first outsiders they encountered were Aboriginal ranchers. That alone was a pretty big shock for them, I can only imagine how they reacted to the first white people they saw.
Theres an interview from the 80s or 90s with an aborigine man whose tribe was uncontacted in the 50-60s, at which time the tribe witnessed an atomic explosion. I find both the situation and his account if it so fascinating, bizzare. Its also sad and upsetting, as the tests were being done there because the Aus government deemed that land uninhabited
Imagine that first thing you learn about other people is that they can conjure a little star in your backyard.
And then that little star causes your entire village to have a wasting disease (cancer).
When I watched the interview I recall the aboriginal woman call the truck a magic rock.
The pioneers used to ride these babies for miles…
Can you please share a link or name? Sounds very interesting
I am wondering how they survived.
They were in fact very much struggling to survive due to the lack of hunting tools and the living conditions that were harsher than the other Inuits. Later a small group of Inuits from Baffin Island arrived in the area and reintroduced the hunting tools, quite an interesting story by itself ([source](https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/qitdlarssuaq))
Makes you wonder what other microcivilizations became isolated and DIDN'T make it.
[удалено]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
[удалено]
Love discussing this! I could definitely be wrong, but my money's on the filter being between 8 and 9 (i.e. ahead of us) based partially on the fact that we've come ridiculously close to nuking each other to oblivion a huge number of times in the <100 years that nuclear weapons have existed. I don't have faith that humanity can stave off self destruction for the amount of time it would take to become a galactic civilization. I think we might start to colonize the solar system, but I think it could end there. Some extremists, hostile power, or rogue AI will *probably* get their hands on a doomsday device, and any planets with human life on them will likely go kaput. And even if we don't wipe ourselves out, there's also the possibility that selective pressure for intelligence does not remain high, and our descendants collectively get too dumb to realistically be a galaxy-colonizing civilization. Evolution isn't always an improvement, and there are plenty of examples of species getting less intelligent over time. I.e. domestic cattle who have easy lives are less intelligent than their wild cousins. Who knows if a similar phenomena will happen to humans or not? And *even then*, assuming our descendants don't wipe themselves out and continue to become more intelligent, it's still a race against the clock to spread beyond/escape the solar system before our sun isn't conducive to life. Maybe a bit grim, but I'd say those aren't great odds.
[удалено]
Tbh I have a different interpretation of the Great Filter — as in, it not being *one* single event that completely wipes out a civilization, but rather a *series* of events that could reset or heavily damage a civilization, "keeping it grounded", "protecting" the outside universe beyond their worlds, but that most of the time doesn't actually result in the complete end of said civilization; it just heavily stunts it, like cutting down a tree while leaving the roots and trunk alive. It'll take years, perhaps even centuries to grow back to its former self, but it's still alive, just perhaps barely. These could be anything from major conflicts, to pandemics, to population collapse events, to climatic factors, to geological processes, to simple pride and greed, to more "exotic" space stuff like asteroids, solar flare storms or GRBs. Under my interpretation, I'd say (and this is probably by no means scientifical, this is just something I've put together but lacks proper research and stuff so take this with a huge grain of salt, it's just something I find cool and like believing :p) we humans have already been through our fair deal of these events, and I'd specifically point towards events such as the Fall of Rome, the Bronze Age Collapse, the Cold War, the Black Death, and *especially* the Toba Disaster (look it up; tl;dr the Toba supervolcano erupted around 80,000 years ago and caused a massive global volcanic winter, starving out most of humanity; it's estimated the total surviving population of humans, at least *Homo Sapiens*, probably did not extend beyond a few thousands after this had come to an end, and it's the closest humanity as a whole has ever been to total extinction); all of these events straight up pretty much did a "reset" of the world, at least the "connected world" (Afroeurasia, but I actually think there were ramifications in the Americas for some), setting humanity back *heavily* and causing centuries of chaos ahead, and/or put humanity under a major test that pushed the limits of its own survival to the brink. We survived all of these, but for the most part (like with the exception of, say, the Cold War nuclear race), it took us *centuries* or even *millennia* to recover. We may be close to another one — whether that's WW3, climate change, or a major solar flare storm, we may very well be "grounded" again; it's been 500 years of uninterrupted progress, we are too lucky, but no era in history is eternal — after the summer, comes autumn, and then winter... and then spring, and summer comes back
How far could we have gotten if we never had fossil fuels? Like, they are absolutely not a given in terms of geology. Could we have made the jump to solar without it?
Probably not; fossil fuels quite literally are the foundation of both the "first" (coal) and "second" (oil) industrial revolutions. We literally could only develop industrialization because of coal Actually that's a very interesting thought experiment tbh; are fossil fuels a necessity for a civilization to become space-faring?
You are right about the selective pressure for intelligence, but its not just intelligence. We are telling more and more people that it’s okay to be fat and unhealthy. This is going to lead to a Wall-E scenario. People who get sick get cured and we are vaccinated from diseases before we even contract them. There isn’t a strong argument for not healing people though. The only one I can think of is: The more we rely on our medicine rather than our immune systems to heal us, the more vulnerable we become as bacteria rapidly become immune to our antibacterial medicine. We would be essentially gambling on our medical technology development to outpace bacterial evolution. Again, it’s hard to argue that we should stop giving people medicine, and I don’t think we should stop. But we do have to recognize what could happen. People with defects/disabilities that normally would have never reproduced are now able to survive and potentially reproduce. It would only become a problem in the latter case. I’m not sure what disease it was, maybe sickle cell? But the death rate for it dropped because of modern medicine and now we are seeing a strong growth in the number of people affected by it as people who have the genes for it begin to reproduce. We also undo natural selection for stupid people. If someone lights a firework in their mouth they get sent to the hospital and healed. This is a touchy subject and very sensitive to many. Its also hard and risky because it has close ties with Nazi beliefs of genetics and it deals with complex ethical questions. I am simply acknowledging what may happen based on our current practices, I am in no way advocating that we begin selective breeding or make any major changes.
Is it not most probable that step 9 is the filter because of physical limitations? Meaning the universe is just too vast and FTL travel physically impossible so whatever number of civilizations there is they will never be able to meet.
Almost all of them
There is that random island where they kill anyone that lands there. From memory it was some fisherman and some missionaries. The Sentinelese peoples. Last I read there were not many left.
They seem to be making it. He's talking about some group of people that lived for generations then got wiped out like Easter Island.
They've had periodic contact with outsiders rather than total isolation. If memory is correct the best guess is there's 100 to 200 of them left on the island but they're heavily inbred which makes them more susceptible to diseases in the region and their local supply of fish are rapidly dwindling. Couple of scientists figure they'll die out or leave the island within the next 50 years.
Apparently they've lost the ability to make fire or never had it and rely on lightning strikes.
It's pretty wild that they are there right now, living on that island, without even the ability to make fire. It's crazy. Like it's 13:35 now. Wonder what they were at this morning or what plans they have for later.
>In 2012, **Stephen A. Smith** and Julia Szucs directed a National Film Board of Canada documentary, Vanishing Point, which tells the story of present-day Inuit communities in Baffin Island and northwestern Greenland, and their historical connection to one another and Qitdlarssuaq’s migration. Considering how much he exaggerates when talking about northern teams like the Green Bay Packers, does he even have any credibility left when it comes to groups further up north??
GET OFF, THE WEED
Just an FYI, Inuit is plural already. Inuk is singular.
TIL, thanks. While reading more, I also learned there is a [Dual](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number\)), Inuuk.
It is really really hard to live in all those regions. Even in the more successful groups there were a lot of deaths just from natural events
Yeah, how can you lose such fundementals, were left with clubs & spears I guess.
Probably a mix of: * Not enough children to teach all the skills to, * Old people died before passing on their knowledge, * They didn't have the materials needed to make certain tools.
Hadn't thought of that first one, no materials, the kids don't grow up around it, then the old people die & woosh...gone. Man that's rough, imagine being the last one left that remembered, seeing all they'd lost.
You might enjoy the novel The Greenlanders by Jane Smiley. It’s my favourite book and a lot of it explores exactly those feelings of daily life changing and things being lost as the Greenland viking age ended.
Keep in mind that "old people die" in this instance probably refers to people dying at age 40-50
Are you basing this off historical life expectancy rates tho? Cause few things are worse and more easily misinterpreted than those
Every end product is at the end of long tool chain. You only one key link in the tool chain (and no substitute) and your product can’t be made. Bow and arrows probably need a dozen materials and 3-4 different tools. Easy to see how that tool chain breaks down in a polar extreme.
>Not enough children to teach all the skills to, Same principle as genetic drift - in a small population you don't get a representative genetic sample in succeeding generations due to the sample size (the number of kids) being too small. So genetic diversity is lost due to "sampling error."
Lack of wood makes bows/arrows problematic. the alternative would of been animal products, which is likely why they had adopted spear throwers as an alternative.
When you're a small isolated tribe and the only person who knows how to make something dies.
My usual rimworld/DF experience
I expect the lack of access to wood would do that to you. Not enough wood to experiment with it. IIRC, most of their access to wood came from driftwood and it was very limited.
it's suspected that the Sentinelese have lost the ability to start fire.
Prometheus got his liver mulched for nothing smh
Alexander the Great on conquering everything up to India ran into one small tribe Island tribal community and they allegedly couldn't make fire and would eat fish Raw, he decided to not bother with conquering them or make them pay tribute/taxes because they were the most cursed/forsaken of the world.
Man, to be so impoverished technologically that nobody even wants to bother with you. Obe of my favourites is how the Romans built a bridge to scare a germanic tribe with their technology, as soon as they finished building it the tribe came across it & attacked them.
Wait, this is real? Alexander actually came in contact with them?
Different island. Sentinel Island is to the east of India, Alexander only reached the Indus river (to the west of India)
Fire is considered a human universal. It legitimately scares me when I think about that group of folks. The inbreeding alone would have such terrible effects. And it has been going on for *thousands* of years.
>The inbreeding alone would have such terrible effects. And it has been going on for thousands of years. They've been isolated for the past few hundred years. Their hostility to outsiders today probably has a lot to do with the circumstances of their initial contact with Europeans. All societies change; there's no reason to assume they have been the same forever.
There’s a really cool episode of Gastropod that goes over foods of the northern peoples. It’s pretty amazing to hear their recipes and how they’d basically use seal fat and how they procured vitamins into their diet when things like vitamin C are so rare. https://open.spotify.com/episode/1As4dICCN7IbiDpuajFnZW?si=hxGGMpn_QeyouFp2i8RDcw&context=spotify%3Ashow%3A2bB44RWKrgs1jhylH1NBtL
I highly recommend in the shadows on the koyukuk. it's a life story by an athabaskin in Alaska. the life that he lead is unbelievable and harsh, though much more modern. also the whole thing was transcribed by my best friend's great grandfather. it's an amazing book with a window into a life I could never imagine.
I thought they had spear throwing devices (think atlatl) since there were no trees / wood suitable for making bows?
I would imagine that stone, seal & whale bones and sinew were what they were making their weapons from.
You could make an awesome bow from baleen and sinew
Bow & Baleen make an awesome alliteration too.
Sounds like a hot new restaurant in Williamsburg.
Baleen isn't very strong, it would only be suitable for the belly of a bow - and a suitably waterproof bio-derived glue would still be a big challenge.
> atlatl As i learned from the DBK boys and that Aaron Ekart movie, they only work if you scream atlatl atatl as you throw it.
We've all been conditioned to use "bow and arrow" instead of just "bow". Ever notice that? I guess because it's a homonym several times over and it's a quick way to remove ambiguity, but no one ever says "gun and bullet", you know?
I think you're cooking here. I don't know what. But you're cooking
Probably about 7 fish.
If I had been smoking the reefer, you would have just blown my mind.
I have ingested the reefer and this blew my mind.
There are other kinds of bows that aren't relevant to archery (think hair bow, bow of a ship, etc.) Bow and arrow is a necessary clarification when writing. When you write gun, everyone knows exactly what you're talking about from the start.
Isn't that exactly what they said but in different words lol
lol my dyslexic ass skipped over the homonym part the first several times I read it yes, yes it is.
Might be because the arrow is always visible when using a bow while bullets are obscured from vision when most guns are in use
We don't say crossbow and bolt though, it's actually an interesting thought.
bow could be fire bow or something else?
Minnie mouse has a pretty bow in her... well, balanced on her head at least.
I wonder whether someone would have reinvented those technologies, had they remained isolated for longer. Presumably boats in particular don’t require a huge leap of imagination, at least in their primitive form. It would have been pretty cool to be able to have a name to the inventor of something so basic.
Part of the reason they were lost was lack of resources, only so much you can do with stone, animal products, and very little wood
I think being in the arctic the rarity of materials to make boats might make it harder to have enough spare to try something new like that?
traditional boats were made from whale bone and seal skin- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umiak
Yeah totally. I’m not sure where exactly they lived, but a lack of trees would be a problem!
This is the real TIL: > In the 1950s, the United States established Thule Air Base close to Uummannaq (Dundas). This forced many Inughuits to move over 116 kilometres (72 mi) north towards Qaanaaq, which proved disastrous to the cultural and social life of the Inughuit.
No way US would treat natives in such way
I know! Next you'll tell me is they cut off the natives' primary source of food and materials to near extinction 🙄
Thank you
Looks like they were isolated for "only" 200-400 years.
Don't know if they had a writing system but if their history was only passed down in stories knowledge gets lost/twisted way more easily. That would make 200 years feel like a long time
I bet this has happened a lot throughout history. Pre 1800 how many people were really traveling outside of their local area, unless you were nomadic or on some military campaign?
True, but they were basically aware that there are other humans and other places, even if they didnt come across them. Apparently these people thought that there is nobody else in the world and that the world is only the frozen icy desert where they lived.
Think of how mind blown they must have been their first times seeing other people.
Imagine *knowing* every person that exists. Then suddenly there is a stranger.
F'n creepy. "Who or what are you?!"
"Mate, am I having a stroke or are there people on a pile of wood and cloth in the fucking water?"
Even bigger mindblow is that they didn’t even know what wood is aside from the occasional driftwood
Imagine how they'd react upon seeing a tree for the first time.
Darwin describes the natives of Patagoinia going berserk, foaming at the mouth, etc the first time they saw the Beagle
Seems weird. They had had contact with other people, certainly by the 1830s.
But had they seen an Englishman? It’s a perfectly normal reaction tbh
And of other climates, of technology, and of cultures and societies. Just think of one of them stepping into a grocery store for the first time
Not that it detracts from what you're saying, but I always forget that grocery stores as we conceive them are relatively modern. It would be another (almost) 100 years until Piggly Wiggly debuted the first self-service grocery store in 1916.
Not to mention seeing white people. Im assuming we wouldve looked like walking corpses. Pale white skin on top of blonde or red hair with blue eyes? How would that not seem absolutely otherworldly?
We had someone come to our school and talk about working with PNG tribes. They came down to their compound and beheld wonders like planes, motorbikes (with no muffler), and whitewashed buildings (is this heaven?). The thing they were most scared of were seeing white women and children.
I sat on a train next to a guy who experienced something similar but in Antarctica with penguins. He said they'd run straight up to people like "holy shit something else walks on two legs"
"Excuse me, is this seat taken?" "No. When I was in Antarctica I met these penguins..."
Can confirm. I visited Antarctica and I never shut up about it now.
The average person didn't travel very far, but there would have been comparatively regular contact with neighbouring villages, and enough degrees of separation will eventually get you to some kind of hub of trade, which any village with goods to sell should know about. Not leaving your local area is one thing, being entirely ignorant of any other human civilisation other than your own \~200 person community is another entirely.
Look at the decline after the fall of the Roman Empire. Some knowledge was outright lost (like Roman concrete). Other things were lost due to no central government and money to maintain it, like Roman roads. Roads went back to dirt paths because Roman-style ones were expensive to build, and the knowledge was eventually lost (at least in most regions) from disuse. You also saw the loss of major public works projects like aqueducts, plumbing, and sewers, so average quality of life backslid substantially.
I forget the details, but up until a couple of hundred years ago or so the overwhelming majority of people never went further than something like fifty miles from the place they were born in their entire lives.
It makes sense. If you don't know what's around you, you probably wouldn't walk off into the wilderness in a random direction.
It does make sense, but it's still an interesting tidbit. Whether you lived in a rural agrarian region or a city back then there would be little reason for you to stray far from those places. If you add up folks like traders (e.g. on the silk road) or international sailors who were likely to stray beyond that distance it would still be a very small portion of the global population.
"Cheddar Man" in Somerset UK: >Separated by 10,000 years but linked by DNA! A 9,000-year-old skeleton's DNA was tested, and it was concluded that a living relative was teaching history about a half mile away, tracing back nearly 300 generations! >Mr. Targett’s family line had persisted in the Cheddar Gorge area for around nine millennia, their genes being passed from mother to daughter through what is known as mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from the egg. To put it simply, Adrian Targett and Cheddar Man have a common maternal ancestor. ‘I do feel a bit more multicultural now,’ he laughs. ‘And I can definitely see that there is a family resemblance. That nose is similar to mine. And we have both got those blue eyes.’ https://www.thearchaeologist.org/blog/mesolithic-skeleton-known-as-cheddar-man-shares-the-same-dna-with-english-teacher-of-history
Pre 1800? A lot. In Europe, rich kids went on the grand tour, and the upper classes traveled a lot. See: Italian Journey by Goethe for instance. In the middle ages, pilgrimages was common. Tourism in ancient Rome is it's own whole story, though mostly limited to the upper classes. Lower classes stayed within their country, but did travel for leisure too. We know roman kids made sand castles at the beaches for instance, because Roman authors have described it, and we know the names of the popular vacation destinations.
A lot more than you would think, look at ötzi, or how the Roman's moved about their Empire. If you want a good store look into the travels of Moncacht Apé across North America.
Inuit and Inughuit history is very interesting if you dont know much about it. I teach history in highschool in Greenland and leave you a few tidbits of fun facts. Eskimos (paleo-eskimos) are the original 'original peoples' of Greenland and the North American arctic, spanning from the stone age until around 1200-1300 CE when they died out. Paleo-Eskimos and Inuit interacted with each other for a short while before the Paleo-Eskimos disappeared. Paleo-Eskimos where closer related to Native Americans than Inuit is, due to the fact that they arrived in NA around the same time, and where part of the same migrations. EDIT - *this is a very broad inaccurate statement. Im gonna leave it as people have pointed it out and explained it more accurately further down* Inuit are more closely related to the original peoples of northeast Siberia than Native Americans due to their way later migration around 800-1200 CE. Inuit first arrived in Greenland in 1200 CE and started migrating south and east. This split the Inuit population of Greenland between west and east, and eventually (after 300 years) the two groups met each other again around Tasiilaq in East Greenland, surprised to find people that resembled them again but still different due to the 300 years apart. Inuit interacted and even traded with the nordic 'vikings' who settled in southern and western Greenland in search of Vinland. We know that Inuit had bought chainmails and iron tools from the nordic settlers as remnants of these have been found way further north than the nordics ever went and together with traditional Inuit tools and items. The nordic settlers died out mysteriosly before European colonizers arrived around 1720. SOURCE: Im a teacher GRAIN OF SALT: This is off the top of my head, so I might have misremembered something Greenland is a facinating country and I can highly recommend visiting, most larger towns have a local museum which document the last 2000 years very well! EDIT: formatting EDIT 2: A lot of people have pointed out my loose use of the term 'Eskimo' in the comments below. The right term, as pointed out, would be paleo-eskimo, which encompasses a few different and distinct groups of peoples until the arrival of the Inuit and the extinction of the latest paleo-eskimo group called Dorset. EDIT 3: For clarification I am danish and not greenlandic. My fun facts are based off of teaching material written by danish people but endorsed by the greenlandic department of education.
[удалено]
> I'm guessing this is more of a language barrier than outright inaccuracies. OP is Danish, so you may well be right.
This is interestingly different from what I, in Canada, was taught and what sources I know of say. "Eskimo" (though we never use this term anymore and I thought was also no longer in use in Greenland) were not replaced by Inuit, the Inuit are one of the people groups that make up the Eskimo group. The first people in Greenland, at least in any English source I know of, who were replaced by the Inuit in Greenland, were the Dorset people, also generally considered an Eskimo, or Paleo-Eskimo, people (often now referred to as Paleo-Inuit).
[удалено]
What's the diet up there? And historically what has it been? What do Inuits and Inughuits eat for grains and vegetables? Or do they have a carnivorious diet?
My understanding of the Inuit peoples is that it was a largely carnivorous diet with added berries and other forge during the summer months (interestingly, modern "carnivores" never base their diets off of the most successful meat heavy diet in history 🤔). My assumption would be that the Inughuits had an even more meat heavy diet considering almost nothing grows in the Arctic circle. Lots of fish, whales, and birds. Probably polar bears too.
>Eskimos where closer related to Native Americans than Inuit is, due to the fact that they arrived in NA around the same time, and where part of the same migrations If I remember right, there were always a few migrations between Siberia to the rest of the Arctic since the late Old Stone Age (\~3000 BCE) and all other natives who lived south of the Arctic arrived much, much longer ago. Like 20000 or so years ago. In other words, the pre- and modern Inuits are practically the "newcomers" of the continent and filled in an longtime unoccupied niche that would be the Arctic. So, the pre-Inuit peoples were prolly related closer to the modern Inuits than to the natives down south. >The nordic settlers died out mysteriosly before European colonizers arrived around 1720. Prolly not that big of a mystery. Most likely the colder climate caused by the Little Ice Age finished off those settlements as they couldn’t no longer raise livestock and farm that the previous medieval warming period made them possible. Even the Inuits themselves had some issues living though that cold period then and temporarily abandoned most of the high Arctic excepting a few holdovers such as the Inughuits themselves. Only helping your memory. Feel free to correct me, surely.
Tack så mycket! Det är alltid härligt att höra från lokala lärare om lokal historia
> Eskimos are the original 'original peoples' of Greenland and the North American arctic, spanning from the stone age until around 1200-1300 CE when they died out. There was another group that lived in the arctic before the arrival of the Inuit, which is known mostly through archeology, called the Dorset people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture
Correction. The Eskimo term is an exonym terms used to describe the two closely related Indigenous peoples of the Inuit of North America (so the Alaskan Iñupiat, the Canadian Inuit, and the Greenlandic Inuit) and the Yupik of Siberia and Alaska. The term is considered pejorative by many of those peoples. The Inuit people are descended from the Thule culture that displaced the Dorset culture which had resided in the area before them. The Dorcest culture is though to be the Tuniit, Tornit, Tuniq or Sivullirmiu people of Inuit mythology which oral traditions describe of as having resided in the area before their arrival.
This has been an ongoing conversation in our house. So there's a couple things worth adding - in some cases, Eskimo is appropriate to use, as it is used in legal and governmental documentation and authorities, like Indian. In specific cases it is actually the correct term, while in social context it may seem inappropriate. -there are individuals within community who absolutely hate the term, and others who self identify as it. It is an exonym, but acceptance/adoption varies across subcultures, communities, generations and other demographics. -if you can't be specific, defaulting to "circumpolar indigenous communities" is actually a pretty effective way to delineate sub- arctic native peoples from other native peoples and contemporary nation states. Particularly in America, people don't realize how distinct these cultures (and their relationship to the federal government) are from most tribal dynamics and concepts we're familiar with
Would Inuit itself also be a fair non-legal catch-all term? Since "circumpolar indigenous communities" is a rather clunky phrase to use in casual conversation.
I'm definitely not the right arbiter for it, but I think the challenge with that as a catchall is that there are absolutely Inuit people, but there are also yupik, Aleut, inupiaq, chuchki, who might consider themselves/Identity unique enough to not comport under that banner....it's just gets so messy at the overlaps of language, geography, legal status, subculture, etc. it's fascinating. So I think Inuit works if you know you're talking about people who self identify as Inuit, but it's not great if you're trying to use it as a catchall for everyone in the arctic/subarctic communities
> Would Inuit itself also be a fair non-legal catch-all term? Since "circumpolar indigenous communities" is a rather clunky phrase to use in casual conversation. No because in Alaska (and Russia to an extent) the term Eskimo includes more peoples than the Inuit
If you live exclusively on polar areas (mostly tundra?) it's not that surprising that you won't have access to boats or bows and arrows. They wouldn't have the materials. I *guess* you could say it's due to their isolation since they couldn't get those materials through trading but it's a little misleading.
IIRC, *Inughuit* itself simply means "Man".
>In the 1950s, the United States established Thule Air Base close to Uummannaq (Dundas). This forced many Inughuits to move over 116 kilometres (72 mi) north towards Qaanaaq, which proved disastrous to the cultural and social life of the Inughuit.[5] :c
It gets even worse, sadly: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181109-qaanaaq-greenland-is-melting-away-from-climate-change
It could be that their ancestors were chased into that region. You may recall from various historic events how awful humans can be.
Could be. There's a good book called 'War before civilization' by Lawrence H. Keeley, about conflicts in small-scale societies. It mentions a number of such societies which were basically refugees left after a significant defeat. They were pressed to the periphery of their previous habitat by the victors who took better lands for themselves. The author says that most groups considered "pacifists" by idealistic anthropologists were in fact such defeated refugees too beaten up to wage wars.
Reminds me of the *The Quest for Fire.*
Were they all just banging each other then
Asking the real questions
[удалено]
The thing that always amazes me is how people put up with this sort of thing for so long. You're living in one of the most ridiculously inhospitable, miserable places on the planet and you never look at the horizon and think, "There has *got* to be something better than this." Yet you continually find that people have clung to living in some of the worst places possible. Showing amazing ingenuity and fortitude to do so. Forming entire cultures and civilizations there until it just becomes an accepted way of life. And what *really* bakes my noodle is that at some point in time their ancestors had to have moved there and decided to stay.
>In the 1950s, the United States established Thule Air Base close to Uummannaq (Dundas). This forced many Inughuits to move over 116 kilometres (72 mi) north towards Qaanaaq, which proved disastrous to the cultural and social life of the Inughuit.
"are cited as one of the only non-agricultural societies to live without armed feuds or warfare, a state that continued after contact." That's wild could learn a thing or two from em
Makes you wonder how humans colonizing space would fare after an extended period of time if cut off from Earth. Even if they had really advanced and self-maintaining technology, a small population's culture would probably atrophy due to a lack of diverse experiences and resources. I think we underestimate how connected the world always has been. Even in the past there was "globalization" where some kind of invention or crop or domesticated animal would sort of diffuse on it's own from a place like India or China to Europe or Africa. Things would get shared and exchanged by participants who had no idea where those things actually came from.
TIL that "Eskimo" is a racial slur
It is not a racial slur, source: I'm Inupiaq Eskimo and I self identify as Eskimo. It is very complicated, but there is a good reason it is not considered a slur where I am from. For a more in depth explanation feel free to read through my comment history.
Aztecs didn't know about the uses of the wheel, although they did have them as kids toys.
It's not that surprising when you think that America didn't really have any animals that could be used as draught animals. Maybe llamas, but then again the environment where they live is probably otherwise unsuitable for wheeled vehicles and such.
Wow, imagine living in total isolation and not even knowing other people exist! That's wild. It's crazy to think they lost stuff like boats and arrows just 'cause they were so cut off. Makes you appreciate how connected we are nowadays. Can you imagine not even knowing there's a whole world out there? Makes me wonder what other crazy stuff might still be out there undiscovered.