The Vikings infiltrated Greenland to harvest walrus tusks, which they held a monopoly on trade for four centuries. This is the conclusion reached by geneticists and historians who published an article in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“Genetic analysis shows that by 1100 AD, Greenland had become the main supplier of walrus bones to Western Europe, with virtually a complete monopoly in this area. The high demand for this material supported the life of the Viking colonies on this island for four centuries. It is not yet clear what exactly led to their disappearance,”says James Barrett, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge (UK).
According to the Viking sagas, the discoverers of the New World and America were not Christopher Columbus and his team, but Norwegian sailors led by Eric the Red and his sons, who were expelled from Norway at the end of the 10th century. After long voyages, Greenland became their new homeland around 986.
The very fact of the presence of the Vikings in Greenland and Vinland - on the island of Newfoundland and the Labrador Peninsula - today does not raise doubts among scientists due to the many archaeological finds and radiocarbon dating. There are two other controversies: why Eric the Red called Greenland a green island and why the Vikings first colonized and then left new lands.
Barrett and his colleagues, who have been involved in the "genetic archeology" of Northern Europe for several years, have found an answer to this question by studying fragments of walrus bones and various decorations from the tusks of these sea giants, found or stored in Norway, in the north-east of England and elsewhere. Europe, where the largest shopping centers of the Middle Ages were located in the past.
During the Ice Age, as scientists note, the walrus population was divided into two halves, one of which lived off the coast of America and Greenland, and the other off the coast of the future Norway and Russia. This division was reflected in the structure of their genomes, making them different from each other.
This gave scientists the idea to extract fragments of DNA from these pieces of walrus bone, decipher it and try to find the real "homeland" of all these jewelry. In total, historians and geneticists have analyzed 36 such artifacts, some of which date from the 10-11 centuries, while others were made much later. This analysis unexpectedly revealed an interesting page in the history of the Vikings of Greenland.
As it turned out, all ancient jewelry was made from the tusks of walruses living on the shores of the Barents Sea and other northern regions of Eurasia. The situation changed dramatically at the beginning of the 12th century - in fact, all the artifacts worked at this time and in later eras contained traces of DNA only from "American" walruses.
Promotional video:
The only source of these tusks, as Barrett notes, could be the two Viking colonies in Greenland and their settlements in Newfoundland, on the banks of which large groups of western walruses still live. Their share in the 12-15 centuries, as the calculations of archaeologists show, accounted for about 94% of the European trade in walrus bone, which made Greenland one of the first economic monopolies.
This is supported by the fact that Greenland paid tithes to the church not with money, but with a walrus bone, and also used it to organize its own bishopric, as well as to bribe hostile leaders and even Norwegian kings.
What made the Vikings leave Greenland and abandon the super-profitable monopoly is not yet clear. According to the archaeologist, this role can be claimed by both natural disasters, such as the onset of the "Little Ice Age" in the middle of the 15th century, and more prosaic things.
For example, walrus tusks could simply go out of fashion, giving way to ivory, and the walrus colonies themselves could be depleted as a result of predatory hunting by the descendants of Eric the Red. As Barrett hopes, the answer to this question will sooner or later be revealed in the annals or other monuments of Viking history.