4 ms·

I wonder if part of the Dorset disappearance was due to Viking pathogens.

• beloch 12y ago
  The Dorset were present across Canada's North, and only the Easternmost would have had contact with vikings. The entire Dorset culture was rapidly displaced shortly after the Thule (Inuit) came across the Bering sea. The Thule do have tales of contact with what is now thought to be the Dorset, and they do suggest the result was violent conflict that the Dorset were simply not ready for. There are also some theories that the Thule might be partly responsible for the abandonment of at least one viking settlement in Greenland. In short, the Thule were bad-ass, possibly to the point of turning the tables on the vikings. To be fair, the vikings of Greenland have very little in common with the vikings of popular culture. They were farmers and traders, not berserkers and pillagers.
  • duaneb 12y ago
    At that point, they were no longer vikings (as in, they never went viking), they were simply migrant norsemen.
• dghughes 12y ago
  It certainly did for the First Nations people called the Beothuk they are extinct in part due to European spread diseases. Vikings landed in L'anse aux Meadows Newfoundland over 1,000 years ago.
  • tjradcliffe 12y ago
    The Mi'kmaq were also very important to the extermination of the Beothuk. As was the common case across Canada, groups of indigenous people who were in earlier contact with European traders and colonists and who were better able to utilize iron tools and other European technology diligently set about exterminating any hereditary enemies in the vicinity. Read any early ethnographic account from Champlain on and you will find detailed reports of this. The tale of indigenous extermination is not at all simple, and while European diseases certainly played a role, many other factors were also very important. One result of this was that some groups were wiped out almost immediately when Europeans entered the area, while others persisted and even thrived for some centuries after contact. The most devastating effect of disease was likely in the West Coast groups, who left a large number of abandoned villages a few decades after first contact, where contact was very late (in the late 1700's) and colonization played a relatively small role in their destruction (the Interior groups were probably more strongly affected by colonization rather than disease, having had more contact with Eastern groups over the preceding centuries and therefore likely some immunity to disease.)
• Jongseong 12y ago
  The Norse found only abandoned Dorset settlements when they first came to Greenland. They had already disappeared from Greenland by A.D. 300, long before the Norse arrived. They did reoccupy northwestern Greenland around A.D. 700, but didn't go into the areas that would later be settled by the Norse. Because their settlements didn't overlap, they would have encountered each other only on hunting expeditions and such. Norse objects such as pieces of smelted metal have been found in Dorset sites, though this doesn't definitely establish face-to-face contact as these objects may have simply been scavenged from abandoned Norse sites. Anyway, the Dorset disappearance is usually blamed on the Inuit (whose oral traditions recount driving off the Dorset people), although they seem to have already been in decline when the Inuit arrived. It could be that Inuit pathogens may have partly been to blame, though we may never know.