History of Greenland

Common card · No. 202022

The history of Greenland is a history of life under extreme Arctic conditions: currently, an ice sheet covers about eighty percent of the island, restricting human activity largely to the coasts. The first humans are thought to have arrived in Greenland around 2500 BC. Their descendants most likely died out and were replaced and succeeded by several other human groups migrating from continental North America since then. There has been no evidence discovered that Greenland was known to Norsemen until the 9th century AD, when Norse Icelandic explorers settled on its southwestern coast. The ancestors of the Greenlandic Inuit who live there today appear to have migrated there later, around the year 1200, across the Nares Strait from northern Canada. While Inuit survived in the icy world of the Little Ice Age, the early Norse settlements, known as the Eastern Settlement, along the southwestern coast disappeared, leaving Inuit as the only inhabitants of the island for several centuries. During...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Public domain