Origin: A Genetic History of the Americas

archaeologists were convinced they must be very different groups of
people.
The ancestral Inuit were skilled hunters of whales and other marine
mammals. They introduced the dog sled and the umiaq, two technologies
still used by contemporary Inuit. They built winter houses that extended
partially underground. Their tools, clothing, and artwork were entirely
different from the Paleo-Inuit’s.
These peoples are very clearly the ancestors of contemporary Inuit; the
traditional tools, houses, culture attributes, and hunting practices of the Inuit
are direct extensions of what can be seen in the archaeological record, and
the Inuit’s own oral traditions confirm it. Their origins have long been the
subject of debate by archaeologists. Societies with Inuit cultural features
first appear on both sides of the Bering Strait region; they are referred to as
the Old Bering Sea culture (200 BCE to 700 CE), which subsequently gave
rise to Punuk (800 to 1200 CE) in northern Alaska and the Bering Strait
region, and Birnirk (700–1300 CE) in northern Alaska and Chukotka. The
immediate cultural predecessors of the Iñupiat of the North Slope of
Alaska, Inuvialuit of present-day Western Canada, and Inuit, become visible
in the archaeological record around 1000 CE. Exactly where and how their
ancestors’ culture first developed originated is still somewhat debated but it
seems to have emerged out of Punuk and Birnirk during a period of climatic
change. The Thule (a group of ancestral Inuit) migrated from the North
Slope across Canada during a warming period that shifted seasonal sea ice
distribution and with it the ranges of bowhead whales and other marine
mammals. The Thule migration may have been in response to these
environmental changes, or it may have been for other reasons (9).
The totality of the archaeological evidence suggested that the rapid
spread of ancestral Inuit culture across the Arctic was because people were
migrating along the Arctic coast by boat. Furthermore, shortly after the
spread of the ancestral Inuit into Paleo-Inuit regions, the latter disappeared
from the archaeological record. Was it a population replacement, or did the
Paleo-Inuit join ancestral Inuit communities?
This was a question that the Saqqaq genome seemed to answer
decisively: The Paleo-Inuit Saqqaq and the Inuit appeared to be genetically
distinct from each other. The ancestral Inuit migration had resulted in a