Hair preserved in permafrost for 4,000 years has shed light on a tribe of Stone Age hunters who crossed from Siberia to Greenland in an unsung odyssey of migration, scientists said on Wednesday.
Unearthed at a site in western Greenland, the hair provides a vivid portrait of a man who died four millennia ago and overturns a mainstream theory about how humans colonised the Arctic New World, they said.
Greenland’s first known settlers were not Inuit or Native Americans as widely believed, but the direct descendants of Siberians who somehow crossed the Bering Strait to Alaska and then headed east, according to their report, published by Nature.
The tuft of hair and four pieces of bone, uncovered at Qeqertasussuk, are the only human remains ever found of Saqqaq culture, an enigmatic coastal-dwelling community that lived in western Greenland for some 1,700 years.
