What drove the Norse out of Greenland?

Greenland was a Hell Hole

Barely inhabitable. It is surprised humans lasted as long as it did
Initially it wasn't...the ice cap wasn't as big. When it got colder, the competition between the Norse and the natives got violent. It's surprising how climate causes such issues....like the origins of the Syrian civil war being a famine due to crops failing.
 
A extended period of drought is thought to have done the deed much more so than temp. change.....That and the decreased value of walrus tusks as elephant tusks overtook them in trade value.....It's figured they just said "no mas" and left with little fanfare as by all accounts it was a pretty hardscrabble life with ever declining birth rates.
 

Four hundred years was a good run.

Not surprising. A lot of the Native American tribes would set up in an area for an extended period of time. When the weather and hunting turned against them, they would move on to greener pastures. They mostly weren't wandering around all the time the way they are portrayed in pop history.
 
Not surprising. A lot of the Native American tribes would set up in an area for an extended period of time. When the weather and hunting turned against them, they would move on to greener pastures. They mostly weren't wandering around all the time the way they are portrayed in pop history.

Except for those tribes who followed the whales, the bison, and the elk herds as a way of life.
 
The name translated as "Greenland" was probably a real estate gimmick to entice settlers. About 2/3 of the island is covered in a permanent ice sheet and the rest is rubble unsuited for farming. The Norse might have made a living from raiding European villages or learned how to fish from the Natives.
 
A extended period of drought is thought to have done the deed much more so than temp. change.....That and the decreased value of walrus tusks as elephant tusks overtook them in trade value.....It's figured they just said "no mas" and left with little fanfare as by all accounts it was a pretty hardscrabble life with ever declining birth rates.
Correct.
Per excerpts from the linked article in the OP;
....
For decades, anthropologists, historians and scientists have thought the Eastern Settlement’s demise was due to the onset of the Little Ice Age, a period of exceptionally cold weather, particularly in the North Atlantic, that made agricultural life in Greenland untenable.

New research, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published recently in Science Advances, upends that old theory. It wasn’t dropping temperatures that helped drive the Norse from Greenland, but drought.
...
They discovered that while the temperature barely changed over that period what happened was the area became drier in Southern Greenland.

Norse farmers had to overwinter their livestock on stored fodder, and even in a good year the animals were often so weak that they had to be carried to the fields once the snow finally melted in the spring. Under conditions like that, the consequences of drought would have been severe. An extended drought, on top of other economic and social pressures, may have tipped the balance just enough to make the Eastern Settlement unsustainable.
...
 
Correct.
Per excerpts from the linked article in the OP;
....
For decades, anthropologists, historians and scientists have thought the Eastern Settlement’s demise was due to the onset of the Little Ice Age, a period of exceptionally cold weather, particularly in the North Atlantic, that made agricultural life in Greenland untenable.

New research, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published recently in Science Advances, upends that old theory. It wasn’t dropping temperatures that helped drive the Norse from Greenland, but drought.
...
They discovered that while the temperature barely changed over that period what happened was the area became drier in Southern Greenland.

Norse farmers had to overwinter their livestock on stored fodder, and even in a good year the animals were often so weak that they had to be carried to the fields once the snow finally melted in the spring. Under conditions like that, the consequences of drought would have been severe. An extended drought, on top of other economic and social pressures, may have tipped the balance just enough to make the Eastern Settlement unsustainable.
...

Must've been AGW
 

Forum List

Back
Top