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Documentary, The Lost Vikings
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00:00Greenland
00:09Greenland, the world's largest island,
00:12blanketed by ice two miles thick,
00:15where glaciers meet the sea and icebergs choke the fjords.
00:19For more than a thousand years settlers have called this marginal land home.
00:36Amidst the scattered dwellings of today's residence lies a mystery from the past.
00:42These stones are all that remain of a lost Viking civilization.
00:55About a thousand years ago, the Vikings, Norsemen from Norway,
01:00established a colony in Greenland.
01:06For almost five centuries they flourished here.
01:09Then they suddenly disappeared.
01:13They left behind a riddle that scientists, historians and archaeologists
01:17have all failed to solve.
01:20Until now.
01:22The colony in Greenland disappears from history in about the year 1500.
01:26Nobody knows exactly why or exactly when this happened.
01:29It's one of the great unsolved mysteries of the Middle Ages.
01:39The first settlement to disappear lay on the west coast of Greenland.
01:53Around 1340 a visitor from the Vikings home in Norway sailed into this fjord.
01:59What he found shocked and amazed him.
02:02The emissary's name was Ivor Barterson.
02:11When he arrived there the place was empty.
02:13There was no one there.
02:14And he says in his report.
02:15I saw nobody, neither Christians nor heathens.
02:19Only some wild cattle and sheep all running wild.
02:22This means that the settlement was empty.
02:28The Norse Greenlanders had left or died out.
02:31Probably fairly recently since the domestic animals were still there.
02:36Barterson was the first of many.
02:38Who over the centuries have wondered what could have caused
02:40a once prosperous civilization to suddenly disappear?
02:49Today, 650 years later, an international team of scientists has come to Greenland hoping to find the answer.
02:57The team includes archaeologists, physicists, chemists and botanists
03:02who are pooling ideas and resources.
03:04Among them is Dr. Bent Frenskild, a botanist who has been fascinated by the lost Vikings for more than 40 years.
03:14It's a long story.
03:16It started in 1955 with my first visit and since then I have spent 29 whole summers in different places in Greenland.
03:27Outside the few small towns, Greenland has no roads.
03:36Like the Vikings before them, the scientists rely on boats to get around.
03:50One of the first steps in their investigation is the excavation of a key Viking site.
03:55In a remote coastal valley, a sheep farmer has stumbled across the ruins of a farmstead.
04:04The team of scientists from Scandinavia, Britain and the United States is led by Dr. Jette Arnborg of the National Museum of Denmark.
04:16The disappearance of the North Green builders is a mystery.
04:19Every new generation has new answers and I think that's very exciting and in a way that reflects that history is very much alive in our society today.
04:34The team will camp here for a month, making the most of the few short weeks of the Arctic summer.
04:45They hope this dig will yield the answer to what really became of the Greenland Vikings.
04:50They turn to what may seem like a peculiar place to look for clues.
05:06Here they are working through a midden for a garbage dump.
05:18Every farmstead had one.
05:20And into it, generations of Viking families through their waste.
05:24Everything from leftover food to the outgrown treasures of childhood.
05:36Can you see? It's a horse man.
05:38We don't know really what those horses were for, but we guess that they were toys, children's toys.
05:44Perhaps they had something to do with horses here. I don't know.
05:53Every object will be dated, because the archaeologists can calculate exactly when each layer of the midden was laid down.
06:01The very top of the transect is a layer that just came on a few years ago.
06:10And then beneath this we have a recent peat layer.
06:14And then there's the first Norse layer, one could call it, which has a lot of charcoal and bone remains in it.
06:22The Viking period is actually documented from all the way from the bottom until 15 centimeters below the recent surface.
06:34The excavations have helped the team build up a remarkably detailed picture of life in Greenland at the height of the Viking civilization.
06:43They have gleaned further facts from an extraordinary collection of historical documents written by Icelandic scribes in the Middle Ages.
06:52These chronicle how the Norsemen first came to this unknown land, then on the outermost edge of the known world.
07:02Now preserved in this institute in Iceland, the sagas present a wider picture.
07:09They illustrate how the Vikings built an empire that extended from their homeland in Scandinavia, east across Russia and south to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
07:23The Icelanders in the Middle Ages were notorious for writing.
07:27They wrote much more than any of their Scandinavian neighbors.
07:31They were writing sagas about kings, legendary heroes of the Viking past, and themselves, as well as people in the Faroe Islands, the Orkneys, and in Greenland.
07:41And this is where we are told about the Vinland voyages, about the discovery of North America.
07:50America, called Vinland by the Vikings, was the westernmost outpost of their empire.
07:55In the 1960s, archaeologists discovered and reconstructed the only known Viking settlement on the North American continent.
08:07It's at L'Anse-aux-Midaux, on the northern tip of Newfoundland.
08:11Here, the Vikings built houses for around a hundred people.
08:18But the sagas suggest the experiment was short-lived.
08:22After perhaps as little as three years, constant skirmishes with the indigenous people and the difficulties obtaining supplies from Europe drove the settlers away.
08:31Of all the Viking colonies, the American was one of only two that failed.
08:40The other was in Greenland.
08:44The sagas record the facts of the Greenland colony's foundation, but mysteriously do not explain the settlers' disappearance.
08:52The earliest and most reliable source tells us of a man called Erik the Red from Norway, who had heard of a country to the west and sailed to find it and discovered it and called it Greenland, and then went back with 25 ships of settlers.
09:09Erik the Red settled in what's called the eastern settlement in Greenland.
09:15Once there was also a smaller settlement in the western settlement.
09:18Of the 25 ships that went to Greenland, only 14 arrived, but later colonists kept arriving after that.
09:27The scientists have established that the Viking colonists were farmers.
09:31They lived in houses like this Icelandic reconstruction, built from turf, stone and timber, in the style of their ancestors back in Scandinavia.
09:40The life of the Greenland Vikings was being pieced together.
09:51They lived in small isolated farmhouses, and you have to remember that it was dark for most of the year that far north.
09:55So they would sit indoors and amuse themselves by composing poetry, telling stories, carving toys out of wood and ivory.
10:12Playing chess perhaps.
10:13The Vikings built houses, stables and cowsheds, hidden in sheltered valleys among the coastal hills.
10:31Each summer they grew fodder and hay for their animals on the high pastures.
10:49One task for today's archaeologists is to map these settlements.
10:58Here are the remains of a compound one farmer constructed for the sheep, cattle and goats he'd imported from back home in Scandinavia.
11:05The ruins show that over the years the Viking population grew.
11:12Before their disappearance up to 6,000 people occupied Greenland.
11:16In winter the Vikings lived cheek by jowl with their animals, sheltered from the piercing arctic cold.
11:21Unable to exercise in these cramped conditions, the animals lost the use of their legs.
11:40And when spring finally came, they had to be carried out into the fields to graze.
11:44The Vikings lived by subsistence agriculture in Greenland and they had to import a lot of the things that was necessary to their lifestyle.
11:53So they had to import timber for their housing, they had to import iron for the nails to build their houses with.
11:59And in order to get these from abroad, for instance from Norway, they exported Greenland falcons, which were known as far away as Sicily.
12:08They exported Walrus ivory and in the early Middle Ages, this was the only source of ivory.
12:19It was exported throughout Europe and carved into beautiful objects found in churches, crucifixes, caskets and the like.
12:29For 500 years the settlers flourished.
12:38With the money from trading, they built magnificent churches.
12:42This one at Volsae is the only one still partly standing today.
12:48As their prosperity grew, they even sent a message to the Pope in far away Rome, telling him they needed a bishop.
12:53In exchange, they offered the gift of a polar bear.
12:58But this success did not last.
13:01In the 14th and 15th centuries, something unexpected made the Greenland Vikings disappear from their settlements.
13:12The last known communication from Norse Greenland was in the year 1410,
13:16when a party of Icelanders arrived in Norway, having come from Greenland.
13:23While they were there, two of them decided to get married.
13:26And we have very detailed records of the wedding that took place in the church at Valse on the 16th of September in 1408.
13:34And it said that there were many people there, both Greenlanders of Viking descent and foreigners.
13:39It was also done properly. The bands were read out in church for three weeks running before the wedding.
13:49The same Icelanders also witnessed some dramatic events while they were in Greenland.
13:54A man called Kolgrimur, who had apparently seduced a married woman using witchcraft and black arts,
14:01was sentenced to death by burning at the stake.
14:03The woman he seduced never really recovered from this experience and she died shortly afterwards.
14:20After this report, nothing more was heard from the Greenland Vikings.
14:28They vanished, seemingly into thin air.
14:30Today the finds from excavations are all that archaeologists have as they seek an explanation for the mysterious disappearance.
14:49But this hasn't stopped them from toying with some extraordinary theories.
14:53One possibility is the plague, that they died of illness and the colony was just wiped out.
15:04Another possibility is that they were kidnapped by pirates.
15:08It's also been suggested that they've intermarried with the Inuits, the native Greenlanders.
15:16Other investigators claim the Vikings perished in a war with the Inuit.
15:19The sagas, ancient records of Arctic history, tell of battles lost by the settlers.
15:30In one, 18 Vikings lost their lives.
15:34Pioneering excavations at the beginning of the 20th century provided further valuable leads.
15:39From graves in Greenland's Viking churchyards,
15:46from graves in Greenland's Viking churchyards, archaeologists recovered human bones,
15:52and farmhouse mittens yielded thousands of artifacts.
15:56They even found medieval clothing, perfectly preserved in the permafrost, with their colors still fast.
16:11Now, almost a century later, the bones are finally revealing clues that may explain why the Vikings disappeared.
16:27The University of Copenhagen is the new resting place for these samples.
16:42It is also where Dr. Niels Linnerup has been pursuing the mystery.
16:46A pathologist well-versed in the latest forensic methodology,
16:52he has been using modern techniques to analyze the ancient bones.
16:57And he has come away with a significant discovery.
17:01His research shows that the Vikings' life expectancy fell during the last years of the settlements.
17:09The cause? A dramatic decline in people's living conditions.
17:14And a corresponding deterioration in health.
17:17We have the remains of about 350 nors.
17:23The average lifespan was about 30 to 35 years.
17:28I would think maybe there was a decline throughout the settlement period.
17:33People would be living maybe to 35 years old,
17:36and then gradually the lifespan fell by a couple of years throughout the 500 years of settlement.
17:42Dr. Linnerup turned back to the bones for an explanation.
17:45Skull X-rays revealed that in the later years many of the Vikings suffered from middle ear disease,
17:52a sign of deteriorating health that indicated susceptibility to more serious diseases.
17:58We found that there was a higher frequency of middle ear disease in the later settlement period
18:04as compared to the early settlement period.
18:10Again indicating that living conditions were getting worse,
18:14more and more people were getting common diseases as pneumonia,
18:19and then again that would mean that more were also dying from that disease.
18:21We found that there was an over-representation of young adult female skeletons in the graveyards.
18:22We found that there was an over-representation of young adult female skeletons in the graveyards.
18:23We found that there was an over-representation of young adult female skeletons in the graveyards.
18:24We found that there was an over-representation of young adult female skeletons in the graveyards.
18:25We found that there was an over-representation in the graveyards.
18:26We found that there was an over-representation of young adult female skeletons in the graveyards.
18:30further analysis of the bones revealed another important clue.
18:37further analysis of the bones revealed another important clue.
18:40We found that there was an over-representation of young adult female skeletons in the graveyards.
18:46of young adult female skeletons in the graveyards,
18:51which could also indicate worsened living conditions.
18:56Because we know that young females, along with infants and the very old,
19:02are those most susceptible to diseases.
19:06Linnarup's discoveries pointed to a crisis.
19:10The people most vital to the future of the settlement,
19:13young women of childbearing age, were dying off.
19:17And in the silted up ruins of a farmhouse,
19:20the archaeologists found a chilling pointer to the fate of the other settlers.
19:27Lying in the kitchen were the bones of a newborn calf
19:31and a Norwegian Elkhound or Viking hunting dog.
19:37The bones were covered in knife marks.
19:39Both creatures had been butchered and eaten.
19:47The investigators knew that no Viking family would have slaughtered their hunting dog,
19:52unless faced with certain starvation.
19:56A study of fossilized flies provides confirmation that a famine raged in Greenland
20:03in the last years of the Viking colony.
20:05At Sheffield University, Peter Skidmore has pieced together the story,
20:10using flies recovered from rooms at the farmhouse, where the dog's bones were found.
20:16Fossilized flies can tell us a very great deal.
20:19Some of the material from Greenland that I've examined has been amazing condition.
20:27I have here a batch of specimens that Max has extracted from one particular room in a Norse dwelling.
20:34That species, Telomerina flavipes, only bred in situations that were warm.
20:39It's what they call a thermophilus fly, and it breeds in decaying animal matter.
20:44The sort of situation that this fly would require
20:49would be found in a dark, warm room in those days,
20:54with plenty of droppings, precisely a description of the Norse living room in those days.
21:01As he'd expected, Skidmore found warmth-loving flies
21:05on the floors of the bedroom and the living room at the farmhouse.
21:08While in the food larder, another type had flourished.
21:11This fly loved colder conditions and lived off meat.
21:15But on the top layer of silt, formed at the end of the Viking's occupation,
21:20he found something quite different.
21:24The warmth-loving flies had disappeared
21:27and the cold-loving flesh-eaters had moved into the bedroom.
21:31Skidmore knew what that meant.
21:33They'd gone there to feed on the dead bodies of the settlers.
21:37Purely looking at the flies,
21:40there was a build-up of carrion in the bedroom.
21:43And it looked all pretty sinister, really.
21:46that possibly the occupants had died in the beds.
21:55In the hope of discovering the cause of this tragedy,
21:59the scientists looked to Greenland's forbidding interior,
22:02almost entirely covered by its ice sheet,
22:05two miles deep and more than a quarter of a million years old.
22:09Here, an extraordinary scientific feat might provide critical evidence
22:14that could lead to solving the mystery of the Viking's disappearance.
22:26The Greenland Ice Sheet Project, or GISP-2,
22:30was a difficult drilling operation in the barren interior.
22:34A single core of ice was carefully extracted from the ice sheet.
22:44Some sections were brought to the University of New Hampshire
22:47for storage and study.
22:51The thickness of the ice in the area that we conducted our study
22:54is about 3,000 meters.
22:56In fact, it's exactly 3,056.4 meters,
22:59because we drilled right down to the bedrock.
23:01As snow falls on Greenland,
23:04it absorbs chemicals,
23:05gases and dust from the atmosphere.
23:07Over time,
23:09this snow compacts into ice.
23:11Scientists looking at a section of ice core
23:14from the past 250,000 years
23:17can get a good idea of what was happening to the climate
23:20at any given time.
23:21The ice core is a 5.2-inch diameter core.
23:25And what's particularly remarkable is that within any layer
23:29we can recover 50 different measures
23:31or descriptions of what the environment is like.
23:34So here we have the best preserved record,
23:38a frozen atmosphere for that one particular year.
23:42The ice cores reveal that when the Vikings first settled in Greenland
23:46around the year 1,000,
23:48the climate was exceptionally fine,
23:51but it wasn't to last.
23:53There's evidence when the Viking colony was first established
23:56that the weather was actually rather good.
23:58There's even a 13th century Norwegian text
24:01which says that the weather in Greenland in the summer at any rate
24:04is nicer than in either Iceland or Norway.
24:06But what seems to have happened is that the weather got gradually colder.
24:11To measure how cold it became,
24:15Dr. Lisa Barlow of the University of Colorado
24:18analyzed the atoms inside the ice cores.
24:21She was looking for deuterium.
24:23Most water molecules are made out of two hydrogens
24:26and one oxygen atom.
24:28A very small percentage of water molecules
24:31are made out of one hydrogen and one heavy hydrogen
24:34which is called deuterium and an oxygen molecule.
24:37These water molecules with the deuterium are slightly heavier
24:43and so they respond differently to processes
24:46like evaporation and precipitation.
24:48In cold weather,
24:51the heavy deuterium does not evaporate as easily.
24:55So, less falls back to the earth and snow.
24:58So, as you look through the snow,
25:02if you had a profile from the surface of the snow
25:05and looking down through time,
25:07you have this nice seasonal signal where
25:09in the summertime,
25:10there's a little bit more of the deuterium
25:12and the wintertime is a little less.
25:14Dr. Barlow found that the ice cores
25:17from the end of Viking times
25:19contain abnormally little deuterium.
25:21Her conclusion?
25:22The climate grew colder.
25:24In fact, Greenland was hit by a small ice age.
25:28When the Norse traveled to Greenland
25:30during a very mild period in earth history,
25:32the medieval warm period,
25:34the conditions were relatively mild.
25:36Having lived there for many generations,
25:39they would have been extremely surprised
25:40to suddenly find out in the late 1300s
25:42and early 1400s
25:44that things were changing around them.
25:46But the evidence of the series of cold summers
25:59came only from the ice in the center of Greenland.
26:06To make sure that the climate had also changed
26:08at the settlements on the coast,
26:10Dr. Henry Frick of the University of Michigan
26:13compared the ice core results
26:15with data from the bodies of the Vikings themselves.
26:18He knew that teeth, too,
26:20could provide an accurate record of...
26:22...making this one step further.
26:24And I'm using the oxygen isotope ratio of tooth enamel
26:29to act as sort of a record or a proxy
26:33for that of local rain or snow.
26:36And we can do that because in the case of the Norse,
26:39they were probably getting their drinking water
26:42from little ponds, streams,
26:44melt water from snow.
26:46So that water from the surface
26:49gets incorporated into their bodies,
26:51into their blood,
26:52and then eventually into the teeth
26:54so that the oxygen isotope...
26:56...and eventually into the teeth
26:58so that the oxygen isotope ratio
27:00of that tooth enamel
27:02can act as a record for what the temperature was
27:04at the time that that person was living.
27:14This tooth comes from a Viking graveyard in Greenland.
27:17Dr. Frick only needs a few grains of its enamel for his tests.
27:21The 650-year-old tooth enamel is mixed with chemicals
27:31and heated to 1400 degrees centigrade.
27:34The resulting gas is then put through a mass spectrometer
27:40that measures the oxygen isotope ratio.
27:43Frick runs tests on a series of teeth
27:49from carbon dated skeletons of different ages.
27:58His results confirm a drop in surface temperature
28:01at around the middle of the 14th century.
28:04He notes that this date coincides with the very time
28:12that the emissary, Ivor Barterson,
28:15had found the deserted western settlement.
28:18This isotopic evidence confirms the results
28:22that the people working on ice cores are getting.
28:25The cooling that they observe in those ice cores
28:27was in fact lived through
28:29by the people right there on the coast of Greenland.
28:33A mini ice age could have delivered the death blow
28:38to the Vikings' farming system.
28:44Lisa Barlow believes it caused their hay crops to fail,
28:47leaving the cattle and sheep without food
28:49for the bitter winter months ahead.
28:53If you have lower summer temperatures,
28:55then that affects the amount of grass that can be grown.
28:57Now, the important thing about that
28:59is not necessarily that summer,
29:00but the fact that these people are trying to feed their cattle
29:03for the next nine months of winter
29:05on whatever they can grow in the summertime.
29:07The proof that the harvest failed came from an unlikely source.
29:14The fossils of the beetles that lived in the fields
29:18and haylofts of Viking Greenland.
29:20When the scientists counted these fossilized insects,
29:24they found that their numbers fell dramatically
29:26in the last years of the settlement.
29:28An irrefutable sign that hay production slumped to crisis levels.
29:34In some of the later samples,
29:37there is a suggestion in changes in the fauna
29:40that the hayfield is being denuded.
29:42That either they are so short of hay,
29:46they are over-exploiting it,
29:48or they are over-grazing it.
29:50And the reason they're taking too much hay
29:52is that they haven't enough to keep their animals alive through the winter.
29:56Eventually, you reach a critical point
29:58where you can't maintain your breeding population of animals.
30:01And if your stock dies, then you die.
30:04So there was more to the Vikings' disappearance
30:08than the climate change alone.
30:10Dr. Ben Frenskild is a Danish botanist
30:17who worked on the mystery for more than 40 years.
30:23He believes that the Vikings were finding it difficult
30:26to feed their livestock long before temperatures
30:29plunged Greenland into a mini ice age.
30:34On his research trips to Greenland,
30:36Dr. Fredskild took hundreds of mud cores
30:39from lake beds.
30:42He found that the samples contained soil
30:45blown off the meadows in Viking times,
30:48indicating that the settlers had over-grazed the land,
30:52causing widespread erosion.
30:56The large erosion area we are going to see
31:01is just behind this ridge
31:02and in front of the two dark bedrocks.
31:05In modern times, over-grazing has again depleted the thin soil
31:11and Fredskild believes the situation was the same
31:14in the Middle Ages.
31:15Then, as now, the sheep and cattle ate away the ground cover,
31:19once blooming with plants like the Greenland willow.
31:22Here is a large root of a northern willow,
31:28the same species as grown there,
31:31and it has been exposed as a result of severe erosion.
31:38This erosion started because of over-grazing.
31:44The sheep broke the thin vegetation cover.
31:53With the vegetation cover broken,
31:55the harsh wind coming off the inland ice tears into the soil
31:59and blows it away.
32:03Dr. Fredskild believes that by over-grazing,
32:06the Vikings turned their once fertile pasture into wasteland.
32:12Frozen, starving, with their animals dying around them,
32:16isolated in the northern wastes behind an ever-growing wall of sea ice.
32:20Did the Vikings hang on to their old ways?
32:24Trying to raise cattle and sheep as they had always done?
32:28Courting disaster?
32:31Did these Greenland Vikings succumb to a crisis so overwhelming
32:35that those who could not escape simply took to their beds
32:39to wait for the inevitable?
32:44Professor Thomas McGovern has pursued the answers to these questions
32:48for three decades.
32:49He has excavated sites here in Iceland as well as in Greenland.
32:53He is the coordinator of an international multidisciplinary organization
32:57that has been actively investigating the Greenland Vikings' disappearance.
33:07Evidence from both Greenland and Iceland is critical for solving the mystery.
33:19In Greenland's eastern settlement, every fragment discarded while the farm was occupied
33:22was painstakingly gathered up.
33:23Every fragment discarded while the farm was occupied was painstakingly gathered up.
33:27By the time the excavation closed, 50,000 samples were ready to be sent around the world for analysis and identification.
33:31Some of the bones from previous expeditions made their way to City University in the busy heart of New York.
33:36where Professor McGovern studied them in detail, where Professor McGovern studied them in detail.
33:40In fact, Professor McGovern studied them in the busy heart of New York and Professor McGovern studied them in the busy heart of New York.
33:49Some of the bones from previous expeditions made their way to City University in the busy
33:57heart of New York, where Professor McGovern studied them in detail.
34:11By looking at the bones and at the layers in which they were formed, McGovern can deduce
34:16what the people ate and how their diets changed over time.
34:20We've got a tray of bones right here where you can see some of these animal bones laid
34:26out here.
34:27This is a pretty typical set of remains that you get from an archaeological excavation.
34:31Some of these things are cattle bones brought in from Europe.
34:34Here's a little piece of the sheep jaw, goats, pigs, dogs, horses.
34:41Some of them however are animals that are wild or local, animals like caribou, animals like
34:45seals.
34:47But McGovern concludes the Greenland Vikings only turned to fishing and hunting when the
34:52mini ice age threatened their standard food supplies.
34:57And even then they ate very little food from the sea compared to their Viking neighbors
35:01in Iceland.
35:03In Iceland by late 1200s, early 1300s, the same period as we were just looking at this
35:08tray here from Greenland, if we look at a tray, a very comparable site from Iceland, a very small
35:13one.
35:14You can see there's, again, a bunch of bones here, but they're different.
35:19Fish bones, we have some birds present here, we have little fragments of whale bones.
35:25But most of this tray is fish, including one great big ling, got in there somehow, a lot
35:31of cod.
35:33In Iceland, the Vikings turned to the ocean to provide what they needed to survive the global
35:39coolie.
35:42But in remote Greenland, their relatives seem not to understand the need for change.
35:49Maryu Olsen is a native of Greenland and an Inuit historian.
35:53This land is big, it's beautiful, but it's also very harsh.
35:59It's a harsh nature.
36:00So you have to have some certain skills to survive, especially in the old days.
36:06The Vikings didn't really catch the meaning of life here.
36:23Of the two peoples, the Thule Inuit had been in Greenland for less time than the Vikings.
36:30Yet they used their survival skills and quickly adapted to their new land.
36:36Modern day descendants of the original Thule Inuit now live in remote coastal villages.
36:44Their ancestors arrived in Greenland from the northern Arctic in the 12th and 13th centuries.
36:54They were hunter-gatherers and today in the remote areas of Greenland, the men still live
36:59by hunting.
37:05Boys make their first kill before reaching their teens.
37:12Their quarry can be seal, walrus, polar bear or whale.
37:26But these men from the isolated settlement of Capricilit are in pursuit of caribou.
37:36Over the centuries, the diet of the Inuit has hardly changed.
37:40It still depends on what the hunters bring home.
37:47During the mini ice age, the Inuit, like the Iceland Vikings, didn't go hungry.
37:57There was always game to be caught.
38:04But there was more to the story.
38:11Investigators had made an unusual discovery.
38:14Fully clothed Inuit bodies, desiccated over the centuries by the Arctic cold.
38:20Archaeologists have also found the mummified bodies of some Inuit people who were all dressed appropriately
38:27in furs and hides and were clearly much better adapted to survive this mini ice age.
38:35This extraordinary discovery sheds new light on old mysteries.
38:42These mummified bodies of what appears to be a single Inuit family were preserved by permafrost and date from around the time of the Vikings' disappearance.
38:54It is thought they were on board an Inuit ship that suffered a tragic accident.
39:01The family drowned at sea.
39:05When their bodies reached shore, they were mummified by the cold, dry Arctic winds and preserved for history.
39:12Their extraordinary state of preservation has allowed archaeologists to study their clothes.
39:18Each wore an outfit meticulously tailored from skins.
39:22Caribou and seal hides thick enough to withstand the onslaught of the harshest weather.
39:28Even in death, it is evident that they were well protected from the elements.
39:33Their clothing is quite a contrast from that worn by the Vikings.
39:38We can see that as conditions grew colder in Greenland, the Vikings didn't actually adapt very well to the changing conditions.
39:45At Herjolfsnes in the south of Greenland, archaeologists have found clothing from the 15th century.
39:51This is typical woolen clothing of the latest fashion.
39:57They wore hooded capes with long tails, which was the height of fashion at that time.
40:05But fashion is not always functional, and in this case may even have contributed to the Vikings' demise.
40:14With the onset of severe cold, these clothes could not protect the settlers from the elements.
40:22Investigators concluded that as the mini ice age enveloped the northern latitudes, the Vikings of Greenland brought disaster on themselves,
40:31by failing to adapt to the tried and true ways of their Inuit neighbors.
40:37The Norths in Greenland certainly perished in a time of climatic change, a time where the climate changes were mostly unfavorable to them.
40:45But it's good to recognize that not everybody in Greenland perished at the same time.
40:49The Inuit, who by this point were living in most parts of Greenland, survived quite nicely, as far as we know, through the same period.
40:56And they were the ancestors of the modern Greenland population, which exists today.
41:03Apparently, there was some fundamental barrier that prevented the Vikings from adapting to the deteriorating but still survivable Arctic climate.
41:12So Greenland did not become uninhabitable for all humans.
41:15What it did become, though, was extremely hostile to the kind of society the Norse Greenlanders had constructed.
41:22A society that had all these trappings in medieval Europe, the society that had its bishops, its monasteries, its nunneries, its rich men, its poor men.
41:32All the bits and pieces of medieval Europe which had come into Greenland at this point were expensive.
41:37They were expensive socially and they were expensive environmentally as well.
41:42Isolated in Greenland, the Vikings seem to have held on to their old ways too long.
41:51Even though scientists found some evidence of wild animals in the archaeological record towards the end of the Vikings' presence in Greenland,
41:59they believed that the Vikings' belated effort to change their diet failed to meet their nutritional needs.
42:08Fossils of blowflies from Viking and Eskimo middens provide evidence for etymologist Peter Skidmore to conclude
42:16that the Vikings went hungry while the Inuit had more food than they could eat.
42:22The species that indicate carrion on the midden are the blowflies.
42:28It appears from the fly remains present that there was no carrion or even marrow on the Norse middens.
42:39We know that there was a lot of bone material but there was no marrow.
42:45In contrast, these Eskimo middens, enormous amount of carrion and masses of marrow, they had plenty of it.
42:54They were availing themselves of the seals and the fish in the fjords.
42:59The Norse economy seemed to have been based entirely on the sheep and cattle.
43:04So, they were taking all the marrow out of the bones and they were scraping clean and probably boiling all the meat off the bones as well.
43:16The conclusion that one would be forced to draw from that would be that the Eskimos could be profligate with their meat products.
43:26Not so the Vikings. When they needed to most, the Norse failed to adapt and take advantage of the life-giving resources around them.
43:39Why, in the end, didn't the Vikings learn how to hunt from the Inuit?
43:45Thomas McGovern thinks the church may have played a critical role.
43:50The church may have played a role in this strange barrier between these two cultures.
43:56We might think that the Norse and the Inuit actually did not coexist in Greenland at all,
44:00because there are so few finds of Inuit objects on Norse farms.
44:05There are so few examples of Norse imitation of Inuit adaptation.
44:12McGovern is convinced that the church preached avoidance of the Inuit because they were not Christians.
44:19If contact was forbidden, the Vikings would never have been able to learn from their hardy Inuit neighbors,
44:25even in this time of crisis.
44:28Why would a Norse seal hunter not pick up some of this Inuit technology?
44:32And I think part of the answer is, of course, if you went and talked to an old, experienced Inuit hunter
44:37and persuaded him to teach you a few secrets.
44:40He would have talked to you about how to give water to the seal when it's brought up from the ice.
44:45He would have talked to you about the proper prayers to say as you were doing it.
44:48Or from the church's standpoint, what he would have done was fill your head full of heathen magic.
44:53So we can easily see scenarios where the church's interest in limiting contact between these two cultures
44:59and regulating it strongly could have had a really chilling effect
45:02in terms of effective interaction and effective learning between these two different cultures.
45:07There certainly was a barrier maintained between them.
45:10It wasn't accidental.
45:11It had to have been maintained at some considerable trouble and expense on somebody's part for a long period.
45:20Evidence to support McGovern's argument comes from the number of churches built in Greenland.
45:27Testimony to the church's importance in the lives of the Viking settlers.
45:33These buildings formed the center not just of the people's spiritual faith, but of their entire society.
45:42The church's power was clear.
45:46The adulterous seducer was burnt to death in the precincts of the church at Valsi.
45:52And from a grave in the shadow of the Viking Cathedral at Gardiner comes another striking indication of the church's power.
46:06The grave contained the bones of a bishop who was buried with his badges of office, his holy ring and his crozier.
46:15There is some evidence that the church in Greenland held a very firm grip on the people there.
46:21In the 14th century, as well as collecting tithes from the farms, the church also imposed an export tax,
46:28which may have led to deterioration in income from trade.
46:33We also hear that many of the hunting rights in Greenland belonged to the church.
46:38So although there was abundant whale, reindeer and polar bears,
46:42people could only hunt these creatures with the permission of the bishop.
46:46One of the things which is quite clear is the Norse Greenlanders had created vulnerabilities in their society
46:52to any kind of climatic or environmental change.
46:55When you have these cathedrals in the Arctic, when you have a society based on imported goods
47:01in a circumstance where connection with the homeland is difficult,
47:05you're setting yourself up for long-term trouble.
47:07The conservatism of the society, its rigidity in many respects that we can see in many different aspects,
47:14seem to have led them, instead of innovating, instead of responding to climate change
47:19by going fishing or doing something different, instead they go down the same path and perhaps try harder.
47:25They build bigger churches rather than trying a different adaptation.
47:30From the stones, ice and meadows of Greenland, the tragic story of the lost Vikings has finally come to light.
47:38Scientists have pieced together an amazing tale of failure.
47:42It seems the trigger for the Vikings' downfall was a deterioration of the climate.
47:47Ice core samples show that the mini ice age enveloped them, ultimately causing their crops to fail and their cattle to starve.
47:56In the cold, the people's health began to falter.
48:02Malnourished and weakened by ear and upper respiratory infections, young women and children began to die.
48:13The bleak history investigators have constructed tells that in desperation, Viking elders finally did try to follow the hunting and fishing techniques of the Inuit.
48:23But through ignorance of the dictates of an all-powerful church, they learned too little, too late.
48:30The archaeological find of the slaughtered hunting dog revealed their state of desperation.
48:42Combined efforts by scientists on both sides of the Atlantic have pieced together a tale of doom.
48:49It seems to me very clear that they were living at the limit of possible sustained existence.
48:58Had they gone over to the Inuit lifestyle of adapting more to their environment, they probably may have survived.
49:09But I think that they just came to a situation where it was just not possible to continue their lifestyle.
49:16But there are still some loose ends, some crucial questions that the scientists cannot fully explain.
49:22Although they found many skeletons in the graveyards, there were none in the Viking houses.
49:28One thing that's missing from this whole grim story of the end of Norse Greenland is, where's the human bones?
49:35And that's the real question. We have virtually no human bones from inside Norse houses that are contemporary with the end of the settlement.
49:43They're just not there. We have plenty of people buried at the churchyard.
49:48But that's the sort of thing that happens in an orderly fashion as the society is still functioning.
49:53What happened to the last ones? And the clear answer to this question is we don't know.
49:57There's been speculation that the Greenlanders, or at least some of them, returned to Iceland.
50:02It's a nice thought, but we have no real proof of this.
50:05There's been speculation that the last Greenlanders were carried off as slaves by Barbary pirates or by other people
50:11and wound up, as Icelanders were to do in later centuries, taken off to Morocco or elsewhere.
50:18We again have no evidence for this.
50:20So we really don't know what happened to those last group of people.
50:27What happened to them?
50:32Personally, I think the most likely explanation is that the colony dwindled until there were very small numbers
50:38and then probably they sailed away and either never arrived or went somewhere and we don't know about where they might have gone.
50:44Scientists suspect that in the face of fierce adversity, the last of the Viking colonists in Greenland opted to take refuge on warmer, more comfortable and friendlier shores.
50:57They may have tried to return to Norway, their ancestors' original homeland.
51:12They may even have struck out for America.
51:16But whatever their intended destination, they first had treacherous seas to cross.
51:23My own speculation to throw into the pot is that, well, if you were failing in your farm and your whole settlement was going down,
51:31a last resort might be to get into your boat and try to go to the eastern settlement, go somewhere else.
51:36And Greenland, as everyone who's sailed there can attest, is a dangerous place.
51:41And just because you're sat on a journey doesn't mean you make it.
51:44So one location for the last of the Norse Greenlanders may be simply at the bottom of the sea.
51:51Whether the last of the Greenland Vikings drowned at sea, ventured all the way to the American continent,
51:57or successfully returned home to Norway, it is clear that their legacy here is one of failed adaptation.
52:06These Vikings depended on a social system that lacked flexibility.
52:11One that worked in a certain place at a certain time, but could not change.
52:16Instead of adapting and surviving in the face of a deteriorating climate,
52:21in an environment that no longer supported the population,
52:24it appears the Greenland Vikings succumbed to their own rigidity and disappeared from history.
52:31With online experiments and new forensic evidence...
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