

Scientists Find Evidence of Viking Presence in Arctic Canada - Petiver
http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/science-viking-presence-arctic-canada-02349.html

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pyre
I wonder if they have any idea why this Viking presence isn't accounted for in
stories / oral histories of the indigenous peoples. Did the Vikings just wipe
out all that they came in contact with? Did those tribes truly never have
contact with other tribes (to the point were a tribe that didn't directly meet
with Vikings, could wonder what happened to some other tribe that the Vikings
wiped out)?

[A little off-topic, but I wonder if he gets sick of the "The Island of Doctor
Moreau" references (or if it actually isn't a common occurance).]

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Turing_Machine
Wiped out, yes, but not necessarily by the Vikings. The Dorset Culture
mentioned in the article was displaced by the encroaching Thule (Inuit)
Culture.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture)

~~~
drpgq
I wonder if part of the Dorset disappearance was due to Viking pathogens.

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beloch
The Dorset were present across Canada's North, and only the Easternmost would
have had contact with vikings. The entire Dorset culture was rapidly displaced
shortly after the Thule (Inuit) came across the Bering sea. The Thule do have
tales of contact with what is now thought to be the Dorset, and they do
suggest the result was violent conflict that the Dorset were simply not ready
for. There are also some theories that the Thule might be partly responsible
for the abandonment of at least one viking settlement in Greenland. In short,
the Thule were bad-ass, possibly to the point of turning the tables on the
vikings. To be fair, the vikings of Greenland have very little in common with
the vikings of popular culture. They were farmers and traders, not berserkers
and pillagers.

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duaneb
At that point, they were no longer vikings (as in, they never went viking),
they were simply migrant norsemen.

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raverbashing
Well, there were other evidences of Vikings in Canada, but not at that
latitude
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows)

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eric273
I read this and kind of expected like scientists having found evidence of
there currently being a population vikings who were just living in the past
under the radar.

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givan
Scientists are strange, is enough to find a small viking stone in canada as
proof for viking presence but seeing pyramids and megalithic structures all
over the world is not enough to convince them that ancient civilizations on
different continents including america were communicating.

~~~
blueflow
Probably its because pyramids are the most effective way to pile up rocks
without them falling down for a long time, try it out-

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baddox
I would say that cones are better.

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dalke
We tend to call the simple version of those "mounds". There's a lot of them in
the world.

Square pyramids are what you get when you make a mound out of rectangular
dressed stone. Making cones or other types of pyramids out of dressed stone is
much harder because they demand more complicated shapes.

