Scientists Investigate Arctic
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Canadian Press
Posted September 3, 2003

`Lost white race' in early accounts of explorers Icelandic team matches saliva data to test theory

BOB WEBER
CANADIAN PRESS

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."

Inuit tell legends of long-ago meetings with a strange people.

Stories of Inuit with European features — blue eyes, fair hair, beards — living in the central Arctic have their roots in ancient tales of Norse settlements and explorations, Palsson said. "The Icelandic sagas, at several points, mention the Norse in Greenland meeting people who belong to other cultures."

Although those settlements pushed ever westward from Greenland as early as the 9th and 10th century, they had disappeared mysteriously by the 15th. What befell settlers — did they simply disappear into the local population? — is unknown.

Tantalizing accounts of European-looking Inuit surface in the accounts of some of the earliest western Arctic explorers, including Sir John Franklin.

In the first decade of the last century, famed Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson heard a rumour from a whaling captain of fair-haired people living with 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 from Stefansson's journals: "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 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 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 to compare them with genetic markers prevalent in medieval Scandinavia.

Present-day Inuit of the area do not look markedly different from other Inuit, Palsson says, noting 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."

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 saliva samples arrived in Iceland last month and are being analyzed. He expects to release his findings in October.

A finding that Inuit and Viking blood mixed a millennium ago would change our understanding of human mobility, Palsson adds. "We now know the Inuit were not stationary and passive, outside of history ... they were experimenting with travel routes and subsistence resources. And the same with the Norse.

"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."

Canadian Press

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