LUND, SWEDEN—According to a statement released by Lund University, a team of researchers including Peter Jordan and Greer Jarrett of Lund University and Morten Tange Olsen of the Globe Institute in Copenhagen has analyzed walrus DNA taken from samples across the North Atlantic Arctic in order to track the Viking trade in ivory. “What really surprised us was that much of the walrus ivory exported back to Europe was originating in very remote hunting grounds located deep into the High Arctic,” Jordan said. “Previously, it has always been assumed that the Norse simply hunted walrus close to their main settlements in southwest Greenland,” he explained. Jarrett also investigated possible seasonal sailing routes to these remote locations with traditional clinker-built boats. The researchers think that the traveling Viking walrus hunters would have encountered Thule Inuit and other Arctic peoples who were likely to have been hunting walrus and other sea mammals in the same region. “We need to do much more work to properly understand these interactions and motivations, especially from an Indigenous as well as a more ‘Eurocentric’ Norse perspective,” Jordan added. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Science Advances. To read about how Viking settlers likely drove Iceland's walrus population to extinction, go to "The Time Had Come, the Walrus Said."
