The Migration Mysteries of Ice Age Geopolitics

This is the fifth part of a series about how the Arctic was formed from 600 million years ago to today.

The debates behind the theories of Beringian migration, and the politics of the routes supposedly taken, and their alignment with archaeological, palaeobiological, and Indigenous origin legends, also reveal to us the passions unlocked in looking back deep in time. Science does seem to support a more complex history and prehistory than many presume, and perhaps a longer sojourn in Beringia that cultivated the emergence of a new, Arctic or trans-Arctic culture, something like the mythical lost continent of Atlantis that was swallowed up by the sea covering the tracks left behind.

It shows us how the Arctic has been part of globalization for at least 20,000 years, shaping the destiny not only of the North, but of the continent and hemisphere perhaps the world. We see in our look back that there was an Age of the Arctic long before there were theorists to postulate the emergence of such an age. And visionaries like William H. Seward who foresaw a destiny in the Arctic for the United States, were prescient in seeing value in this far and remote geography for a nation just exiting the maelstrom of civil warfare, and reuniting as a people, though the ages of the Arctic and its dynamism as a catalyst for the evolution of complex life, and later the globalization of humanity, has roots deeper in time.

For humanity, it was every bit as important that the Ice Age started as it ended, and at both the beginnings and ends of the Last Glacial Maximum, it brought Earth’s continents, seas and peoples together, stimulating march of humanity to the Americas from Eurasia, completing the human journey, the Arctic’s first wave of globalization – the Arctic as a crossroads that would reappear millennia later, in our time.

A variation of classic Beringian Land Bridge Theory that better corresponds to the more complex archaeological and genetic record is the Standstill Theory, postulating the emergence and genetic differentiation of “Beringians” as distinct from Asian peoples, thus emerging as a separate trans-Arctic group that started arriving as far back as 36,000 years ago, and “stalled” in Beringia around 21,000 years ago, enjoying upwards of 5,000 years of Beringian isolation and civilizational and cultural development before splitting into three separate waves as post-Ice Age warming commenced, migrating south (to South America), southeast (to the rest of North America), and finally, northeast (into the Arctic), bringing Aleut, Yupik and Inuit now indigenous to Arctic North America.

The Dorset people, called the Tuniit by the Inuit, came before the modern Inuit, and peopled the Arctic from around 500 B.C. through to the middle ages (1000 to 1500 A.D.), subsisting primarily by seal hunting and land mammal hunting but not apparently by whaling; they were eventually displaced by the more modern Thule migration, which started around 1000 A.D., and which introduced new technology including whale and walrus hunting tools and long distance sleds, and the Thule either crowded out the Dorset, outcompeting them for game, or possibly annihilated them through war.

It is quite possible that the Inuit thus “conquered” a hitherto peopled Arctic from an earlier Indigenous people, practicing a form of expansion we nowadays associate with state expansion that either absorbs, displaces or annihilates smaller, sub-state entities in the path of expansion. At the very least, the Inuit expansion across the Arctic, which has roots in late prehistory (commencing just a few thousand years ago), has continued into the mid-20th Century facilitated by the modern state, in particular Canada – which sought to settle the Queen Elizabeth Islands with an “indigenous” populace that was in fact exogenous to the High Arctic, the Inuit of northwestern Quebec in the 1950s.

Thus completed, in contemporary times, a migration with ancient roots and is thus not entirely rooted in the distant haze of prehistory known as “Time Immemorial,” challenging our conception of Indigeneity, forcing us to recognize peoples from prehistory, and early history, were not necessarily unique in their trans-Arctic geographical migrations and expansions from our own time, and may well have practiced a form of colonial and imperial expansion we now associate with states.

This not only challenges our understanding of what Indigeneity is, but forces us to re-align our conception of sovereignty with mobility as the early Ice Age cultures were on the move, and even once settled practiced much dynamic seasonal migration in search of game or living marine resources.

The epic Thule migration, according to some, may have crossed the entirety of the Arctic from Alaska to Greenland in just a few years (owing to the survival of fragile pottery found along the entire migration route, which is not thought to have been able to survive much longer.)

And so we gain insight from the past not only into the deep-geological time impacts of “Arctic” climate (when “Arctic” could be said to define the planetary state during Snowball Earth) on life and its evolution, but also the broad, millennia-long impact of “Arctic” geopolitics on humanity (with Ice Age origins, when “Arctic” extended across much of North America), and the ambitions of humanity as it encountered new lands and waters, crossing new frontiers, and settling new territories far from their starting point.

—Barry Zellen is a former Yellowknife resident who is now an independent scholar specializing in Arctic geopolitics.