DNA Traces the Tale of Arctic's Long-Gone 'Hobbits'

Genetic analysis of present-day Arctic residents as well as ancient human remains reveals a previously unknown mass migration into the Americas from Siberia and shows that an isolated Arctic culture known as the Dorset disappeared without a genetic trace centuries ago.

"One might almost say, kind of jokingly and very informally, that the Dorsets were the 'hobbits' of the Eastern Arctic, a very strange and very conservative people that we're only just getting to know a little bit," said William Fitzhugh, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and one of the authors of the research appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

The Dorset people are known only by what they left behind, including primitive stone tools and beautiful wooden and ivory figurines. The DNA analysis suggests that their ancestors came to Arctic Canada and Greenland from Siberia about 4,500 years ago, and lived in chilly isolation for more than three millennia.

The research was based on analysis of more than 150 DNA samples from ancient and present-day humans from Greenland, Canada, Alaska and the Aleutian Islands, and Siberia.

Previously, researchers had thought the Dorset were descended from migrants who came to the New World earlier, but the DNA analysis shows that their ancestors were not part of the three previously known waves of migration that go back as far as 15,000 years. Instead, they appear to represent part of a separate Paleo-Eskimo wave of migration.

Hairs from Greenland trace migration history

The new study also confirms that the Arctic region's modern-day Inuit peoples are descended from the migrants who came after the Dorset. This wave, known as the Thule or Neo-Eskimo migration, occurred about 1,000 years ago. There was virtually no evidence of genetic or cultural interaction between the Dorset and the Thule peoples. Within a couple of centuries of the Thule hunters' arrival, the Dorset had vanished, living on only as "gentle giants" in the tales told by the Inuit.

"The real mystery is therefore why the Dorset disappeared so completely," University of Waterloo anthropologist Robert Park said in a Science commentary.

This carved ivory human figure in the form of a harpoon head is presumed to associated with the Dorset culture. It was found on Canada's Igloolik Island by archaeologist Sue Rowley.

Some have suggested that the Thule invaders wiped out the Dorset people, and Fitzhugh acknowledged that it could have been "an example of prehistoric genocide." The Thule people had developed advanced bows and arrows, whale-hunting tools and dogsleds technologies in which the Dorset were deficient. The Thule also favored a military-style discipline that might have contrasted with the Dorset culture's simpler ways.

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DNA Traces the Tale of Arctic's Long-Gone 'Hobbits'