Paleo-Inuit cultures

Paleo-Inuit is the name archaeologists increasingly use for the first peoples to live across the North American Arctic, from Chukotka and Alaska to Greenland, long before the ancestors of today's Inuit arrived. Their cultures appeared around 4000 BCE and lasted for thousands of years, ending with the Dorset culture, which faded between about 1000 and 1500 CE. They are known only from archaeology, ancient DNA and, possibly, Inuit oral tradition.

The older term, Paleo-Eskimo, is now widely avoided. In 2010 the Inuit Circumpolar Council asked scientists to use Inuit and Paleo-Inuit instead, and archaeologists such as Max Friesen have supported the change. There is no full agreement: in Alaska, where Native peoples do not call themselves Inuit, scholars have tried other labels, and some prefer to name the specific cultures, such as Groswater or Dorset. Inuktitut words such as Tuniit and Sivullirmiut have also been suggested.

Ancient DNA shows that these people came from Siberia in their own migration, separate both from the much earlier ancestors of most Indigenous Americans and from the later ancestors of the Inuit. A study of hair about 4,000 years old from a man of the Saqqaq culture in Greenland, published in 2010, was the first ancient human genome ever sequenced. It suggested that the migration took place roughly 5,500 years ago and that its descendants had reached Greenland by about 4,500 years ago. A 2014 study likewise placed the move at around 4000 BCE and found that the population then stayed largely isolated for millennia.

Archaeologists group most of these cultures in the Arctic Small Tool tradition, named after its finely worked stone blades and points. In Alaska it includes the Denbigh, Choris, Norton and Ipiutak cultures. In the Canadian Arctic and Greenland it includes the Saqqaq culture (about 2500 to 800 BCE), Independence I (about 2400 to 1800 BCE) and Independence II (about 800 to 1 BCE), the Pre-Dorset, the Groswater of Labrador, Nunavik and Newfoundland, and finally the Dorset. Its roots have been traced to cultures of eastern Siberia.

The bow and arrow may have helped these hunters spread so quickly, and they are credited with bringing it to eastern Canada by about 2000 BCE. Among their art is First Face, a small walrus-ivory carving of a human face from Devon Island, made some 3,600 to 3,900 years ago and one of the oldest known depictions of a face in North America.

The later Dorset people were genetically distinct from the Thule migrants who replaced them, and by about 1300 CE Thule people had taken over almost the whole region. Yet Paleo-Inuit ancestry did not vanish from the genetic record. A 2017 study found traces of it in Athabaskan and other Na-Dene-speaking peoples, such as the Dene, and a 2019 study in Nature concluded that it also forms part of the ancestry of Inuit, Yupik and Aleut speakers, passed on through later mixing. Some geneticists, including David Reich, have suggested that the Paleo-Inuit may have carried the Na-Dene languages into the Americas, though this remains a hypothesis.

Our maps for 500 and 400 BCE and for 1 BCE through 400 CE draw an approximate Paleo-Inuit zone across the Arctic. In later years the same region is shown as the Dorset culture and then as Thule, the forerunners of the Inuit.