? The Church of England joke | Main | Faroe Islands ?
November 03, 2003
Blond Inuit
The disappearance of Norse settlements in Greenland (their last communication was a letter dated 1408) has resulted in romantic speculation that the Vikings had gone west and intermarried with the Thule Inuit.
A well-known Canadian Arctic explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, hinted in his diaries he came across European-featured Inuit in the early 1900s in Western Nunavut. So Helgason and Palsson tested the theory by comparing DNA from 100 Cambridge Bay Inuit with Norse descendants from Iceland.
It turns out there is no DNA match between the two groups and consequently no lost tribes of blond-haired, blue-eyed esqimaux.
Posted by Ghost of a flea at November 3, 2003 06:08 AM