Thule people

The Thule, or proto-Inuit, were the ancestors of all modern Inuit and Yupik peoples. They developed on the coast of Alaska around 1000 CE with a whale-hunting economy: umiaks and kayaks, toggling harpoons, dog sleds and winter houses of whalebone and sod that freed them from the treeline. Expanding eastward across Arctic Canada, they reached Greenland by the 13th century, replacing the earlier Dorset culture, and some groups pushed south in a second expansion. Norse sagas knew them as the Skraelingjar, and contact with Viking Greenlanders in the 11th century marks one of the earliest meetings of Europeans and Native Americans. At their height the Thule commanded the entire Arctic coast from Alaska to Greenland, moving bowhead-whale surpluses, iron, copper and soapstone along thousand-mile exchange routes. From the 18th century, intensified European contact compounded by the Little Ice Age broke the great whaling communities apart, and the Thule became the regional Inuit, Inuvialuit, Kalaallit and Yupik peoples of today.