The Great Warming

by Brian Fagan

  Tuniit culture developed slowly over many centuries. These Dorset people, as archaeologists call them, were constantly on the move, pushing northward in warmer centuries, retreating in the face of colder conditions. The people were, above all, sealers, who also took caribou. During centuries of colder climate, they developed new ice hunting and fishing methods that allowed them to acquire food in midwinter, rather than semihibernate as their predecessors had done. They had but the most basic of spears and no bows and arrows, nor did they have the sophisticated boats or toggle harpoons of Bering Sea people. Their hunting relied on expert stalking and infinite patience that enabled them to approach their prey at close range, then kill it with a spear thrust. Such weapons were valuable for ice hunting through holes in the pack, especially after A.D. 1000 and during the warmer centuries, when the hunters started using weapons tipped with hammered, pure, and extremely rare meteoric iron from the Cape York region of northwestern Greenland, obtained from a meteor shower that fell to earth at least ten thousand years ago.16 Other groups exploited the native copper outcrops in the Coppermine River region of the central Arctic.

  Both meteoric iron and native copper had major advantages over bone and ivory—weapons tipped with metal were tougher and more lethal— and such metal was accordingly precious. Judging from measurements of the slots in abandoned bone tools, precious iron was recycled again and again. At least some of this iron was in the hands of whaleboat skippers. Over 46 percent of the slotted bones from a house with whaling gear at a Thule settlement at Qariaraqyuk on Somerset Island once held metal blades. In a smaller house nearby, 9.6 percent of the tools had held metal blades; all of these artifacts were used for hunting on land. Small quantities of iron slowly passed from hand to hand over enormous distances, in some cases as much as 372 miles (600 kilometers) from their source. In time, some of the ores, or artifacts made from them, may have traveled westward to iron-hungry groups around the Bering Strait.

  There must have always been some contacts between the Bering Strait and points east, but it was during the Medieval Warm Period that these connections increased significantly.

  LIKE THE NORSE, entrepreneurial canoe skippers in the Bering Strait were both insatiably curious and hungry for new trading opportunities. Warmer conditions after 1000 would have brought more weeks of ice-free conditions, also wider ice leads along which skin boats could pass safely to hunt sea mammals and migrating whales. With more plentiful food supplies, local populations may have increased, which in turn may have caused some whale captains to strike out for new hunting grounds. And with more favorable ice conditions, umiaks could follow bowhead whales in open water and through wide ice-free passages as they migrated eastward along the shores of the Canadian Arctic and into the archipelago. Bowheads, Balaena mysticetus, are Arctic right whales with large bow-shaped heads that form up to 40 percent of their body length. They live near the surface and move in small groups during spring and summer and in large groups during the fall.

  In 1921–24, a Greenlandic scholar, Knud Rasmussen, led an expedition by dogsled from Greenland to Alaska, studying Inuit groups and excavating archaeological sites along the way. To their surprise, the archaeologists, headed by Therkel Mathiassen, unearthed a quite different culture from that of the living Inuit. They identified the hitherto unknown society of a thousand years ago from abandoned houses near Thule in northwestern Greenland. Soon afterward, they found similar sites over an enormous strip of the Arctic from the Davis Strait to northern Alaska. These Thule people were the sea mammal and whale hunters who had moved across the High Arctic during the Medieval Warm Period, hunters so successful that they dwelled in permanent winter communities of stone and turf houses roofed with whale jawbone beams.17

  The Thule migration of A.D. 1000 soon passed into the scholarly literature as a movement of whale hunters who had rapidly traveled east along the Arctic coast from the Bering Strait in pursuit of bowheads, which thrived in the more open waters during the warmer centuries of the Medieval Warm Period. In reality, the events behind the migration may have been much more complex, involving not only whaling but a quest for iron.18

  To what extent warmer conditions played a role in the movement of Thule people eastward from Alaska is unknown. There are some indications that the two warmer centuries also brought strong north winds and many storms. But whatever the conditions, the Thule and their Bering Strait ancestors were more than capable of surviving comfortably, of adjusting effortlessly to greater warmth or cold. Whether it was iron or whales that took small numbers of these people thousands of miles, we cannot be sure. Certainly whales were a critical staple, and remained so. But the real lure may have been meteoric iron from Cape York, and also outsiders from over the ocean who apparently possessed the precious ore in abundance. In an Arctic world where people covered long distances and where intelligence about ice conditions, whale migrations, and sea mammal rookeries was all-important, we can be sure that the Thule, like the Tuniit, had heard stories of mysterious qadlunaat, blue-eyed strangers from over the sea, who used iron weapons and had plenty of metal, sometimes even willingly trading it.

  The plot thickens when we realize that the earliest eastern Thule sites lie along the extreme High Arctic and icebound coasts adjacent to Cape York’s meteoric iron deposits. These early settlements yield not only meteoric iron but also fragments of iron and other Norse artifacts that can only have come from Greenland. Furthermore, the artifacts from these Thule settlements are identical to tools from communities around the Bering Strait. The Canadian archaeologist Robert McGhee and others believe this may be a sign that people from the Bering Strait region moved rapidly across the north to the Cape York region in an effort to gain control of the sources of iron at a time of warmer climate and perhaps more favorable ice conditions. Radiocarbon dates from the early Thule sites in the east hint that settlement began sometime during the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, at a time when Norse settlements in Greenland were enjoying considerable prosperity, when the summer pack frontier lay far north of Iceland and voyaging conditions in the North Atlantic were relatively easy during the summer.

  Once settled in the east, Thule groups spread gradually through the entire eastern Arctic. Their oral traditions recount how they killed or drove away the Tuniit as they gained control of iron sources. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the remaining Tuniit settlements were abandoned. At some point, too, some Thule bands moved southward from the northwest, came into contact with Norse communities, and coexisted with them. Neither side made an effort to displace the other, for they had commodities to offer one another that could not be obtained any other way.

  WE CAN IMAGINE the cautious approach to land as the crew row the knarr into the ice-free bay. They keep their bows and swords close to hand as three kayaks approach the slow-moving ship. The paddlers gesture toward shallower water close inshore where the Norse can anchor safely. As soon as the anchor is down, the three Inuit secure alongside and clamber aboard. They are without fear, for they have traded with this ship before. Presents are exchanged—some lengths of brightly colored wool and a fine walrus tusk. The youngest Inuit fingers the iron nails that secure the planks and gazes in amazement at the iron swords in their sheaths. He has never seen so much of the precious metal before.

  The bartering moves slowly when the skipper and a few watchful rowmen come ashore in their small boat. The Inuit lay out rows of walrus tusks in front of their winter houses. For their part, the Norse untie bundles of wool and iron bits. Not new weapons or spears, but old boat rivets, fragments of chain mail, handfuls of nails, and fragments of metal barrel straps, all discarded at home or recycled while shipbuilding the previous summer in forested Labrador, but of immense value on this side of the Davis Strait. Once the Norse have departed, the people convert some of the iron into spear and harpoon points, but much of it is simply cherished as a valuable, exotic material.

  After several days, the Norse depart with a load of ivory, leaving behind them some i
ron objects, an old steel helmet, and bolts of fine wool woven during the winter in Greenland. For as long as anyone can remember, the qadlunaat have arrived in summer, not every year, but when ice conditions permit, and without warning. Over many generations, the Inuit have come to depend on the trade for supplies of the most precious of all commodities: iron. Presumably, they have stockpiled walrus ivory against these rare visits.

  A few Norse artifacts have come from native settlements on Ellesmere Island in the High Arctic.19 The Ellesmere artifacts include non-native copper and iron, fragments of chain mail and carpenter’s tools, also boat nail rivets, fragments of woolen cloth, and a few carvings that give impressions of Norsemen. There are even some reworked bottom sections of wooden casks.

  Excavations in Inuit dwellings at Nunguvik on Baffin Island tell us even more. They include strands of yarn identical to some wool fragments found in the Western Settlement, the northernmost Norse community in Greenland. There are fragments of pine wood dating to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries. Pine does not come ashore as driftwood here. Two pieces bear holes with what appear to be rust stains from iron nails. The finds from this site are thought to be evidence of direct contact between Norse and native peoples, rather than objects passed from hand to hand over long distances. Nearly 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) farther south, two sites on southern Baffin Island have yielded Norse cordage and short lengths of yarn.

  The dispersion of artifacts found over an enormous area of the sparsely inhabited Canadian Arctic testify to at least sporadic contacts between the Norse and the Inuit. The earliest reference to such contacts comes from a twelfth-century text, the Historia Norvegiae: “Beyond Greenland, still farther to the north, hunters have come across people of small stature who are called Skraelings. . . . They do not know the use of iron, but employ walrus tusks as missiles and sharpened stones in place of knives.”20 How far west some of these Norse artifacts eventually traveled, we do not know. But there is absolutely no reason why a handful of them could not have reached the Bering Strait during the warm centuries.

  At the time, the Inuit, who were expert walrus hunters, occupied the coasts and islands of Arctic Canada, as far as the northwestern corner of Greenland north of Melville Bay. This region, named Helluland by none other than Leif Eirikson, abounded in walruses, whose ivory was a precious trade commodity for the colonists. Greenland was too cold, even in the warm centuries, for cereal cultivation. So the settlers relied on a dairy economy, growing hay for winter fodder, also on fishing and sea mammal hunting, especially when cooler temperatures descended on the north during the thirteenth century. In 1262, Greenland, like Iceland, became a tributary of Norway, but the real link between the Greenlanders and their home country was the church.21 The first bishop to live in Greenland arrived in about 1210 and established his residence at Gondar in the south. For generations, the Greenlanders paid tithes to the Norwegian church in valuable commodities—local cloth woven from sheep wool, Arctic furs, live falcons for the royal sport of European and Islamic kings, walrus-hide ropes for ships, and, above all, narwhal and walrus ivory. In 1327 alone, church officials reported a special Crusade tax of about 1,400 pounds (650 kilograms) of ivory, which would have required the killing of some two hundred walruses.

  The compelling demands of church tithes took the Norse far north and brought them in contact with the native peoples of Arctic Canada. Over many generations, complex trading relationships developed between the Norse and their indigenous neighbors, fueled by two commodities—walrus ivory and iron. With a tithe that required more than four hundred walrus tusks a year, the Norse needed far more ivory than they could ever obtain around their settlements. Their Inuit contacts were at best sporadic, but they were of mutual benefit. The hunters were coastal people, who tended to stay on the outer shores, far more interested in trade than in displacing the colonists from their farms. It was not until a series of intensely cold winters and unusually cool summers between 1340 and 1360, well documented in Greenland ice cores, that the more northern settlers abandoned their farms and moved southward to join relatives in the more hospitable environment of the Eastern Settlement. With the abandonment of the northern settlements in the face of increasing cold, the ivory trade collapsed. Since ivory was the Greenlanders’ main source of wealth, they must have found it increasingly hard to maintain any economic relationship with Europe. The payment of church tithes ceased as ice conditions worsened and ties with Norway ended. By 1370, the practice of sending an annual trading ship from Norway to Greenland had ended. The last bishop died at Gondar in that year and was not replaced.

  The Inuit had also become increasingly dependent on trade with their neighbors for iron. As Greenland became more isolated from Europe, demand for ivory virtually ceased, forcing the Inuit to be more aggressive in their dealings with the Norse. They moved southward in the absence of the settlers, looting abandoned farms for metal. Reluctant as the Norse were to adopt native hunting practices or technology, the presence of indigenous hunters deprived the colonists of access to critical seal hunting and fishing grounds at a time when such resources were increasingly important for their survival.22 By 1450, the Norse colonies in Greenland were deserted and the fleeting contacts between two very different worlds fostered by warmer temperatures ceased. Only the Norse epics and treasured oral traditions preserved memories of an era when native Americans and Europeans met for the first time.

  The Norse and Inuit, like the inhabitants of northern Europe, found their lives made easier (if never easy) by the warming of the climate. Food was more abundant, and new technologies made the age-old labors of the farmer and the hunter more productive. From the Arctic to North Africa, with greater ease of transport, cross-cultural contacts allowed some of these technologies to be shared across great distances. Elsewhere on the planet, however, the rise in temperatures was not so benign. The great warming brought bounty to some areas, but to others, prolonged droughts that shook established societies to their foundations.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Megadrought Epoch

  In the beginning there was no sun, no moon, no stars. All was dark, and everywhere there was only water.

  —Maidu creation legend, California1

  YOU SWEAT EVEN WHEN SITTING under the deep shade of the rock shelter. A vast panorama of desert landscape lies before you—arid, heat-blasted mountain peaks, a pale, dusty blue sky overhead. The heat shimmers above the desert floor, over dunes and dry streambeds, the sparse shrubby vegetation grows near the ground. The sun is moving to the west, but the air is still, the silence complete. No wind sloughs through the scrub or causes sandy williwaws to traverse the searing plains. Day after day, one rises with the dawn and takes refuge from unrelenting sunlight well before midday. And it is only early June, with weeks of even greater heat still ahead.

  As soon often happens, your mind goes back deep into the past, in this case to the generations of foragers who once visited this place and looked out over the same arid vista. Only a handful of visitors would arrive each time, perhaps a dozen men, women, and children, the adults thin, agile, and wrinkled, as if parched by the desert sun. The women would light a fire as the sun approached the western hori- zon, while the men would scout for jackrabbits feeding on the banks of a sluggish-moving nearby wash. Back in the shelter, the women would grind some piñons from a precious store carried in a deer skin. The soft scraping of the milling stones was a familiar evening sound, part of the unending quest for food that kept the band on the move nearly all the year. The meal is sparing at best. No one is hungry, but edible plants are scarce. Even rabbits are hard to find after a very arid year.

  The American West is landscape on a grand scale, the stuff of legends, of John Wayne and classic Western movies. From 40,000 feet (12,000 meters), you gaze down at the dry terrain seemingly hour after hour, at a semiarid world that’s larger than life. Tough wilderness country breeds legends and stereotypes of hard-bitten men and resourceful women, the characters beloved by Holl
ywood. Reality was, of course, much more complex, but the sheer scale of the western landscape dwarfs humanity and leaves one in awe of the hunters and plant gatherers who thrived in this inhospitable world for thousands of years before the first cowboy tended cattle here. Europe may have enjoyed bountiful harvests and the Norse voyaged more freely in the North Atlantic, but, like Eurasia and West Africa’s Sahel, the American West suffered under megadroughts.

  THE GRAY LIGHT of a clear sky before dawn spreads across a dry lake bed. The men crouch low among the shrubs on the dry floor of a huge, rapidly shrinking lake in what is now California. This is the driest year they can remember. The lake has shriveled before their eyes through months of great heat, leaving extensive sand flats in its place. They and their neighbors have camped where water once stood. The men have moved into position well before sunrise, using boulders and the streambed to stay out of sight. Each hunter carries a bow and quiver of arrows, eyes casting left and right for a sight of the deer feeding in the cool of morning. Most likely, the beasts will be close to a small water hole at the lake’s edge. Two of the young men exchange glances as they spot a feeding buck. They move softly, stalking their quarry, alert for the slightest whisper of a morning breeze that could carry their scent. With infinite care, they approach ever nearer to the feeding deer. After half an hour they are within range. Suddenly, their prey looks up, sniffing the air. Perhaps he has caught a whiff of human scent. The men freeze, weapons still. Minutes pass as the buck scans his surroundings. Finally, reassured, he resumes feeding. The men raise their bows, slowly notch their stone-tipped arrows in place. They crouch for the best shot, but someone’s foot taps a stone on the ground. The startled deer is instantly on the move. Two arrows fly, but miss, skittering harmlessly across the lake bed. By now the sun is rising fast, so the hunt will have to wait for evening or another day.