Could the Inuit have reached Iceland?
- Thread starter Mort the Reaper
- Start date
If you mean if they could travel there yes, if you mean if they settle there, not really.
I was thinking more along the lines of trade, but your response gave me another question. Could they have settled it if they somehow managed to get there before the Norse?
They could probably reach it and trade with anyone there, and could also settle there. But could they stay there long? No, the Norse would've probably driven them out sooner or later.
The Inuit didn’t come into existence before the Norse had settled Iceland. They developed around 1000 AD, spread to Greenland in the 13th century. As for the Dorset culture which was related to the Inuit (as in both originated from the same early proto-Inuit culture), they didn’t have the technology to travel to Iceland.
But even if we imagined some proto-Inuit culture developing the Inuit tool kit earlier, Iceland are simply a wasteland for their culture, lacking in big animals, lacking the ice which make seal hunting easier. I doubt they would have the population to form a viable population and any permanent settlement would likely lose the tool kit necessary for traveling back to Greenland.
In OTL southern Greenland was never settled by Dorset culture simply because it was too hot for their culture, it was only with the Inuit and the Little Ice Age we saw them spread down the coast, but when the Danes contacted them (around 1900) several of their settlement on Eastern Greenland was in terminal decline, and if not for the earlier contact on the west coast, we would likely have seen the same happening on the west coast at the same time. The Inuit And protocol-Inuit lifestyle dependent on a very cold climate, and we see a continue boom, crashes and complete population replacements among these groups. I suspect with the traditional Inuit lifestyle and today’s climate, Southern Greenland would have been abandoned again and instead we would have seen Inuits expand into North East Greenland instead. Of course from the moment the Danes set up shop the Inuit lifestyle was permanent changed both for better and worse.
"simply because it was too hot for their culture,"
Quoting that simply because I like the thought of Greenland being too hot for something
It was nothing new. At the end of last Ice Age reindeer hunters abandoned Central Europe, leaving empty land behind, when climate warmed and reindeers moved north.