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A R C T I C C U LT U R E : T H E P E O P L E O F T H E I C E

source. The Arctic may look barren to outsiders, but it isn’t that way at all. Over the millennia, there has been plenty to support the indigenous people who live here. Early Inhabitants In2014,an11-year-oldboy in thenorthof Russia found something very interesting. He had stumbled on the bones of an ancient woollymammoth. Scientists determined themammoth had lived about 45,000 years ago.They also determined that it had not died naturally, but had been killed by humans. That meant humans had lived in the Arctic almost 50,000 years ago! Archaeologists know more about more recent Arctic civi- lizations. Those people lived between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago. They began to move in large numbers into areas that now include northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. About 5,000 years ago, people started to come to NorthAmerica.Today, Russia and Alaska are separated by a channel of water called the Bering Strait. Several thousand years ago the geography was different.The sea level was much lower. Land connected the two areas. Archaeologists believe that a group of people known as Paleo-Eskimos (“old Eskimos”) crossed this land bridge. They came east from the Siberian region of Russia into Alaska. Over the next several hundred years, people continued to push their way east, moving across Canada and into Greenland. In the 1950s, archaeologists examined the remains of several ancient settlements throughoutAlaska, Canada, and Greenland.