Early Greenlanders

In a recent Science article by - among other people - EBC's Anders Götherström, mitochondrial DNA extracted from a 4500 year old tuft of hair from Greenland shows a genetic relationship not to modern groups of Eskimos or native Americans, but to people who live in Siberia.

Apart from being technically really, really cool, this again tells us the history of Greenland in terms of Musical Chairs - "This group came, that group left, this group came, the whole thing glazed over and we start all over again." Jared Diamond's "Collapse" tells another chapter of Greenland's history with focus on the Viking settlers. It is worth reading.