The Dorset culture

Starting around 500 BC and lasting 1500 to 2000 years, the Arctic area of North America was inhabited by the Dorset, a Paleo-Eskimo culture. It is named after Cape Dorset in Nunavut in Canada, where the first evidence of it was found. It is said to have 4 phases due to differences in the technology related to hunting and tool making. Dorset artifacts include triangular end-blades, soapstone lamps, and burins, a specific type of stone tool.

The Dorset were first identified as a separate culture in 1925. They appear to have been extinct by 1500 AD at the latest, and possibly as early as 1000 AD. At some time during the 1000s, the Thule people (a pre-Innuit group) began migrating east from Alaska, and eventually spread through all the land previously inhabited by the Dorset. There is no evidence that the Inuit and the Dorset ever met. In fact, genetic studies show that the Dorset were distinct from later groups and that there is virtually no evidence of genetic or cultural interaction between the Dorset and Thule peoples.

Inuit legends say that they did encounter people they called ‘First Inhabitants’. According to these stories, the first inhabitants were taller and stronger than the Inuit, but they were afraid to interact and were easily frightened off. There is also a controversial theory of contact and trade between the Dorset and the Norse.

Some of the artifacts that indicated a culture different from the Inuit included sophisticated pieces of art. Carvings featured uniquely large hairstyles for women, and both sexes are depicted wearing hoodless parkas with large, tall collars.

Not only do scientists not know for certain what happened to the Dorset people, they aren’t sure where they came from, either. Some have suggested that they may have developed from a previous culture, perhaps the Pre-Dorset, the Saqqaq or - even less likely - from the Independence I. However, these earlier cultures all had bow and arrow technology, while the Dorsets did not. Possibly they set aside the bow and arrow as they switched from land to aquatic hunting.

Another piece of technology that the Dorset lacked was drills. There are no drill holes in Dorset artifacts. Whatever holes they created, they painstakingly carved or gouged into the artifact where it was needed. This was even true of the bone needles that are so common in Dorset sites. It is confusing, since the Pre-Dorset and the Thule had and used drills to great effect.

However little has been discovered about the Dorset people, their history is divided into 4 periods: The Early (500-1 BC), Middle (1-500 AD), and Late phases (500-1000 AD), as well as the Terminal phase from 1000 AD onward. The Terminal phase would have been closely related to the Medieval Warm Period, which began to warm the Arctic around 950 AD. Under those conditions, the sea ice became far less predictable.

The Dorset were adapted to a very cold climate, and it is thought that much of their food consisted of sea mammals that breathe through holes in the ice. A massive decline in sea ice would have forced the Dorset further north. Most agree they disappeared at some point between 1000 and 1500 AD, possibly because they could not adapt to the climate change or perhaps because they were introduced to diseases they had not known before.

I wish the article had included some type of rendition of the triangular end-blades. I have a series of stories in the works about a culture that is based on the number 3, and I keep imagining them developing 3-sided blades of all sizes, even arrow-heads. But I don’t know enough about bladed weapons to know if such a shape would be feasible. Anybody have any ideas about that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset_culture

Boreal Forest

If you want to talk about a forest that is larger than the Amazon jungle, then you will probably talk about the Taiga, the Boreal Forest or the snow forest. They are all one thing, with different names used in different parts of the world. Some say it is one huge forest, stretching from Iceland through the Scandinavian countries, Russia, Mongolia, Alaska and Canada. It is a coniferous forest consisting mostly of pipes, spruces and larches. It covers 6.6 million square miles or 11.5% of the Earth’s land area.

The boreal forest has a subarctic climate, with a very large temperature range between seasons. Summers last 1-3 months, always less than 4 months, and any given 24 hour period during the summer will average 50 °F or less. In Siberia, the average temperature of the coldest winter month is between 21 and -58 °F. The ground being frozen for much of the year, or even permanently frozen, can restrict the growth of deep roots, thereby favoring shallow-rooted trees like the Siberian larch.

Despite these harsh condition, the plants in the boreal forest have a lower threshold to trigger growth, and thus they ‘wake up’ a little earlier than one would expect. Even so, the soil tends to be poor in nutrients. Fallen leaves and moss tend to sit on the soil for a long time in the cold climate, so their organic components are very slow to be added to the soil. Also, acids from the evergreen needles leach the soil, making it even less ‘appetizing’ for anything but lichens and some mosses. On the other hand, diversity of soil organisms is high, comparable to a tropical rainforest.

It seems surprising to me that in a world that is frozen most of the time, fire is one of the most important factors that shape the composition and development of boreal forest. Some members of the boreal forest won’t release their seeds until the pods have been exposed to fire, and I get that, but how does something covered in snow most of the time suddenly burst into flames? Obviously, there is something about the process that I don’t understand.

Most boreal forest fires are either high-intensity crown fires or severe surface fires. These are large, often more than 10,000 hectares (a hectare is 100 acres) and sometimes more than 400,000 hectares. Different areas of the boreal forest burn at different lengths of time; drier areas might burn every 50 years, while wetter areas only burn every 200 to 300 years. And when an area burns, it could take decades, even a couple centuries to get back to ‘normal’. So all that carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) that is released into the air when those trees burn takes those same decades or centuries to be absorbed into the growing forest again.

This is particularly important now, when so much of the boreal forest is burning. Even Greenland - which doesn’t have any boreal forest, but does grow grasses and scrub brushes when enough ice melts to expose ground to seeds being blown around by winds - is on fire. Alaska and Canada are experiencing horrendous fires in their boreal forestland. In northern Siberia, one fire covered 7.9 million acres (over 3 million hectares), and that’s only one fire of 11 (or more) burning in Russia.

It’s been estimated that these fires dumped over 50 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere in June (2019), and they are still at it. 16 million adult trees burn in a day in Russia’s boreal forest fires. The Earth is not ready to absorb that much carbon. If we planted more trees - billions of them - it would help, but possibly not before the climate changes even more in response to that much carbon and carbon dioxide having been freed to begin with.

We really can’t sit around and wait any longer. We have to start facing this problem, and we have to do it NOW. The sky is falling, and doomsday is just around the corner.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/7/31/1875681/-Fire-at-the-top-of-the-world-Earth-s-largest-forest-is-burning-and-it-won-t-be-coming-back-soon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiga