Another very interesting public archaeology talk is coming to Memorial University this Monday. Bjarne Grønnow, a Danish archaeologist working on Palaeoeskimo sites in Greenland, will be talking about some of the amazingly preserved Saqqaq sites in Disko Bay. One of the sites, Qeqertasussuk, is a site that I reference frequently in my work. I've made reproductions of some of the baleen wrapped knives found there and human hair from the site allowed scientists to sequence a Palaeoeskimo genome.
Bjarne excavating
That's all cool, but really I'm excited because Bjarne is a super nice guy. In 1994, he accompanied a University of Calgary archaeology project to Little Cornwallis Island that I worked on as a student. I recall one horrible windy day where work was called off because of the terrible weather. Four of us sat huddled in one tiny Logan tent that was snapping like a drum around us. It was too loud to hear or think and we were several kilometres away from the main camp. We were feeling pretty low, until we heard a rustling at the tent flap and Bjarne's beaming face, followed by a bottle of schnapps, poked inside. He drove a quad from the main camp in weather that wasn't fit to be in just to pop in for a chat and to share a nip of schnapps.
PROFESSOR BJARNE GRØNNOW
Danish National Museum, Copenhagen
will give a talk
At Close Quarters with the Arctic Pioneers: News from the Frozen
Saqqaq Sites in Disko Bay, West Greenland
Four thousand years ago, a man in Greenland got a haircut and because of that, the whole world knows more about him today than he knew about himself. Mats of his hair were preserved in permafrost for millenia. Eventually they were collected by archaeologists and studied by a team of geneticists. They published their results in Nature last week in an article called Ancient Human Genome Sequence of an Extinct Palaeo-Eskimo. Roughly 80% of this Saqqaq Palaeoeskimo man's genome was recovered from his hair. Interestingly, the site of this haircut was Qeqertasussuk in Greenland, which I've blogged about before, because its the source of the stunningly preserved wood and baleen handles that I had such fun reproducing a few weeks ago.
Archaeological research during the last half of the 20th Century backed up what the Inuit have been saying all along, that they were not the first people to live in the Arctic - that the Tunit were there before them. Archaeologists call the Tunit "Palaeoeskimos" and their sites and artifacts confirm that there were people living in the Arctic for several thousand years before the Inuit arrived. The Palaeoeskimo used a completely different toolkit and lived in a different way than the Inuit and their immediate ancestors, the Thule, who populated the Eastern Arctic sometime within the last 1000 years.
Genetic research is beginning to fill in even more of the story. Culturally, there is no continuity between the Palaeoeskimo and the Thule (Tunit and Inuit), but there doesn't appear to have been any genetic continuity either. The Palaeoeskimo people are as extinct as their culture. There was a fascinating paper published in 2005 that suggests that the Palaeoeskimo bloodline may have continued into the the 20th century with the enigmatic Sadlermuit people of Southhampton Island(*), but the new analysis of the Saqqaq hair gives us a glimpse at the very earliest times in this ancient and vanished branch of our family tree. The DNA in the Sadlermuit study came from skeletal remains, whereas the new research reported in Nature is based on hair samples and provides a much more detailed reconstruction of a Palaeoeskimo genome. Given the fact that the Palaeoeskimo are extinct, its an important accomplishment that the researchers have been able to recover any DNA at all.
The new research offers fascinating details of one Palaeoeskimo man. There are genes there that tell the researchers that he was dark skinned, with brown eyes, shovel shaped incisors, dry earwax, A+ blood, and a predisposition to heart disease and early hairloss. He was lactose and gluten intolerant, cold adapted with a high BMI and percentage of body fat and unable to taste "bitter". (source .pdf of the image on the right) He's not related to the Inuit living in Greenland today, but he does have ancestors amongst 3 living groups on the Siberian side of the Bering Straits. According to the genome, the split between the Saqqaq Palaeoeskimo people and their Siberian relatives took place sometime between 6400 and 4400 years ago, which corresponds nicely with the oldest dates for Palaeoeskimo sites in the Arctic. There are even some very personal details about the man's family, like the fact that his parents were probably first cousins, or similarily close relatives.
Everything in the article and its supporting information fits with what we thought we knew about the Palaeoeskimo from decades of archaeological research. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't contain new information or make it any less remarkable. Take the timing and origin of the Palaeoeskimo migration into the Eastern Arctic from the Bering Straits, for example. Through the painstaking excavation of dozens, probably hundreds, of Palaeoeskimo sites from one end of the Arctic to the other and the careful analysis of tens of thousands of artifacts and hundreds of radiocarbon samples, archaeologists came to the same conclusion that was contained in a single exceptionally well-preserved haircut; that the Palaeoeskimos migrated eastward into the Arctic sometime before 4500 years ago from the Bering Straits. Archaeologists working in the North have known about this seperate migration into North America for decades, but if you follow the reporting of this story online, the evidence contained in the hair is far more convincing to most people than all those decades of previous research.
Photo Captions: 1: Cover of Nature, Feb 11, 2010 2: Elfshot reproductions of Saqqaq tools from the Qeqertasussuk site, Greenland 3: From Hair to DNA 4: From Genotype to Phenotype 5: Artist's reconstruction of the Saqqaq man, nicknamed "Inuk". by Nuka Godfredsen.
Baleen hangs from the roof of a whale's mouth and acts like a massive filter that holds food in and squirts water out when the whale gulps in a mouthful of fish and seawater and presses up with its tongue. Baleen is made from hard keratin, like horn, hair or fingernails. Its made up of long fibrous strands that are fused together into sheets with a surface that looks like a vinyl record. Historically, it was important in fashion to make the ribs of corsets, fans, and parasols. At other times in the past it was used to make everything from bows and bowls to traps and string. I'm using it as a lashing material on this project.
The baleen I'm using came from a beached humpback whale. It was a younger animal with relatively short plates - about 2 feet long. A Bowhead Whale can have baleen plates up to 13 feet long!
You can cut the baleen into strips running the length of the plate. When its thin enough you can cut it with a sharp knife, but as it gets thicker towards the middle I find it tough to control the knife and make even strips. So on the short humpback plates I use a scroll saw to cut the strips and then sand the edges to even them out.
To make the baleen flexible you need to boil it. That's when you know whales are mammals. In addition to the usual fishy smell of whale bone, boiling baleen gives off a greasy, hairy, musk smell that could only come from a hairy animal. The thin strips can be bent and twisted into shape and as they dry they return to their hard plastic-like rigidity, but hold their new form. The thicker strips can be split apart like spruce roots, to create two flexible halves. I didn't know that was possible until this weekend - I guess I've never had thick enough baleen to try it. You start the split at the base and carefully pry the two halves apart. The split runs neatly along the inner fibres of the baleen. You can tell split baleen because it will have one flat shiny side and one ridged stringy side. Un-split baleen will have a flat shiny surface on both the front and back.
Baleen starts to harden almost immediately when it hits the air. But it softens again just as quickly when its put back into the boiling water. The baleen spring in the above video was wrapped around a handle for about half an hour before I decided to retry the wrap. Watch it hit the water! It reminded me of a particularly gruesome wolf killer that was used in parts of the Arctic. A piece of baleen is sharpened to a point on both ends and fan folded into a small parcel. When its cooled it will hold its shape. You wrap it in fish skin or meat and place it somewhere that a wolf will eat it. In the warm wet wolf's stomach the baleen straightens out and punctures the wolf's organs. Pretty unpleasant way to go. If you want to go hug your dog now, I'd understand.
After the baleen set, I sanded it down and used hide glue to fill in the gaps between the bands. The sanding neatens the look of the baleen up, but it also smoothes down the sharp edges. I haven't used them yet, but I suspect that the baleen will be much less affected by moisture than sinew. I think they should be more useful for working wet materials.
The five tools I made are all based on Saqqaq tools from Greenland, although the endscraper handle is a more generic style. The Saqqaq scraper handle from Qeqertasussuk was bow shaped and mounted with a scraper on each end. The three knives are faithful reproductions of the originals, as is the side scraper.
Photo Captions: First: Finished Palaeoeskimo reproductions using baleen as a hafting material Second: A humpback whale baleen plate with lashing strips cut from it Third: Splitting a baleen strip Fourth: Outside of the baleen strip (left), inside of the baleen strip (right) Fifth: Baleen lashings set out to dry Video: A baleen lashing unravels in the boiling pot Sixth: Baleen Wolf Killer Seventh: Finished side knife with baleen lashing Eighth: Saqqaq style knife with baleen lashing Ninth: Finished Palaeoeskimo tools
"In Japan, flint and obsidian arrow-heads are regarded as the weapons still in use by spirits. The popular belief there is, that every year an army of spirits fly through the air with rain and storm; when the sky clears, the people go out and hunt in the sand for the stone arrow-heads the spirits have dropped."
I found that quote the other day in a book digitized by google books. It has several pages dedicated to Elfshot and Thunderstones.
This is the second time in two weeks I've seen something fantastic on google books. A few days ago, John sent me a set of illustrations of 19th century Greenland Inuit clothing, toys, and tools from Meddelelser Om Grønland.
"If flint arrow-heads were regarded as "elf-darts," stone hatchets were equally believed to be thunderbolts. In Greece they are known as astropelekia, or axes that fall from the stars. So early as the time of Pliny they were known as thunderbolts."
From Flint Chips, 1870.
Photo Credits: Top; Tim Rast Bottom; Erick Walsh
Photo Captions: Top; Surveying a sand blowout in Labrador Bottom; Elfshot reproduction of a flint hand-axe or "thunderbolt"
Four thousand years ago, a man in Greenland got a haircut and because of that, the whole world knows more about him today than he knew about himself. Mats of his hair were preserved in permafrost for millenia. Eventually they were collected by archaeologists and studied by a team of geneticists. They published their results in Nature last week in an article called Ancient Human Genome Sequence of an Extinct Palaeo-Eskimo. Roughly 80% of this Saqqaq Palaeoeskimo man's genome was recovered from his hair. Interestingly, the site of this haircut was Qeqertasussuk in Greenland, which I've blogged about before, because its the source of the stunningly preserved wood and baleen handles that I had such fun reproducing a few weeks ago.
Archaeological research during the last half of the 20th Century backed up what the Inuit have been saying all along, that they were not the first people to live in the Arctic - that the Tunit were there before them. Archaeologists call the Tunit "Palaeoeskimos" and their sites and artifacts confirm that there were people living in the Arctic for several thousand years before the Inuit arrived. The Palaeoeskimo used a completely different toolkit and lived in a different way than the Inuit and their immediate ancestors, the Thule, who populated the Eastern Arctic sometime within the last 1000 years.
Genetic research is beginning to fill in even more of the story. Culturally, there is no continuity between the Palaeoeskimo and the Thule (Tunit and Inuit), but there doesn't appear to have been any genetic continuity either. The Palaeoeskimo people are as extinct as their culture. There was a fascinating paper published in 2005 that suggests that the Palaeoeskimo bloodline may have continued into the the 20th century with the enigmatic Sadlermuit people of Southhampton Island(*), but the new analysis of the Saqqaq hair gives us a glimpse at the very earliest times in this ancient and vanished branch of our family tree. The DNA in the Sadlermuit study came from skeletal remains, whereas the new research reported in Nature is based on hair samples and provides a much more detailed reconstruction of a Palaeoeskimo genome. Given the fact that the Palaeoeskimo are extinct, its an important accomplishment that the researchers have been able to recover any DNA at all.
The new research offers fascinating details of one Palaeoeskimo man. There are genes there that tell the researchers that he was dark skinned, with brown eyes, shovel shaped incisors, dry earwax, A+ blood, and a predisposition to heart disease and early hairloss. He was lactose and gluten intolerant, cold adapted with a high BMI and percentage of body fat and unable to taste "bitter". (source .pdf of the image on the right) He's not related to the Inuit living in Greenland today, but he does have ancestors amongst 3 living groups on the Siberian side of the Bering Straits. According to the genome, the split between the Saqqaq Palaeoeskimo people and their Siberian relatives took place sometime between 6400 and 4400 years ago, which corresponds nicely with the oldest dates for Palaeoeskimo sites in the Arctic. There are even some very personal details about the man's family, like the fact that his parents were probably first cousins, or similarily close relatives.
Everything in the article and its supporting information fits with what we thought we knew about the Palaeoeskimo from decades of archaeological research. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't contain new information or make it any less remarkable. Take the timing and origin of the Palaeoeskimo migration into the Eastern Arctic from the Bering Straits, for example. Through the painstaking excavation of dozens, probably hundreds, of Palaeoeskimo sites from one end of the Arctic to the other and the careful analysis of tens of thousands of artifacts and hundreds of radiocarbon samples, archaeologists came to the same conclusion that was contained in a single exceptionally well-preserved haircut; that the Palaeoeskimos migrated eastward into the Arctic sometime before 4500 years ago from the Bering Straits. Archaeologists working in the North have known about this seperate migration into North America for decades, but if you follow the reporting of this story online, the evidence contained in the hair is far more convincing to most people than all those decades of previous research.
Baleen hangs from the roof of a whale's mouth and acts like a massive filter that holds food in and squirts water out when the whale gulps in a mouthful of fish and seawater and presses up with its tongue. Baleen is made from hard keratin, like horn, hair or fingernails. Its made up of long fibrous strands that are fused together into sheets with a surface that looks like a vinyl record. Historically, it was important in fashion to make the ribs of corsets, fans, and parasols. At other times in the past it was used to make everything from bows and bowls to traps and string. I'm using it as a lashing material on this project.
The baleen I'm using came from a beached humpback whale. It was a younger animal with relatively short plates - about 2 feet long. A Bowhead Whale can have baleen plates up to 13 feet long!
To make the baleen flexible you need to boil it. That's when you know whales are mammals. In addition to the usual fishy smell of whale bone, boiling baleen gives off a greasy, hairy, musk smell that could only come from a hairy animal. 
The thin strips can be bent and twisted into shape and as they dry they return to their hard plastic-like rigidity, but hold their new form. The thicker strips can be split apart like spruce roots, to create two flexible halves. I didn't know that was possible until this weekend - I guess I've never had thick enough baleen to try it. You start the split at the base and carefully pry the two halves apart. The split runs neatly along the inner fibres of the baleen. You can tell split baleen because it will have one flat shiny side and one ridged stringy side. Un-split baleen will have a flat shiny surface on both the front and back.
Baleen starts to harden almost immediately when it hits the air. But it softens again just as quickly when its put back into the boiling water. The baleen spring in the above video was wrapped around a handle for about half an hour before I decided to retry the wrap. Watch it hit the water! It reminded me of a particularly gruesome wolf killer that was used in parts of the Arctic. A piece of baleen is sharpened to a point on both ends and fan folded into a small parcel. 
When its cooled it will hold its shape. You wrap it in fish skin or meat and place it somewhere that a wolf will eat it. In the warm wet wolf's stomach the baleen straightens out and punctures the wolf's organs. Pretty unpleasant way to go. If you want to go hug your dog now, I'd understand.
After the baleen set, I sanded it down and used hide glue to fill in the gaps between the bands. The sanding neatens the look of the baleen up, but it also smoothes down the sharp edges. I haven't used them yet, but I suspect that the baleen will be much less affected by moisture than sinew. I think they should be more useful for working wet materials.
The five tools I made are all based on Saqqaq tools from Greenland, although the endscraper handle is a more generic style. The Saqqaq scraper handle from Qeqertasussuk was bow shaped and mounted with a scraper on each end. The three knives are faithful reproductions of the originals, as is the side scraper.
"If flint arrow-heads were regarded as "elf-darts," stone hatchets were equally believed to be thunderbolts. In Greece they are known as astropelekia, or axes that fall from the stars. So early as the time of Pliny they were known as thunderbolts."
PDF
