Did humans approach the southern tip of South America more than 18k years ago?
johnhawks.net
johnhawks.net
Which raises the question, why didn't the Inuit explore south?
They're pretty much all gone now.
> Inuit had trade relations with more southern cultures; boundary disputes were common and gave rise to aggressive actions.
That page also addresses your question, saying "The culture and technology of Inuit society that served so well in the Arctic were not suited to subarctic regions, so they did not displace their southern neighbors."
The Athabascans living on the Koyukuk river were supposably the last group of Alaskan natives to make contact with white people. When they met up with Russian fur traders, they already had tobacco and metal artifacts.
Of course, prior to that, people did explore south, in the course of the settlement of the Americas.
> [They] exchanged goods, particularly copper and driftwood, with the Inuvialuit, the Caribou Inuit, and the Netsilik. There were occasional contacts with Athapaskan Indians to their south - http://what-when-how.com/native-americans/inuit-copper-nativ...
In addition to meteoric iron, the Inuit of Greenland also used telluric iron - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telluric_iron .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQdOrE_PO0c
http://www.comedy.co.uk/guide/tv/qi/episodes/7/4/
"- The Arctic Highlanders got their cutlery from metal that came from three meteorites. A man called Ross (after whom Ross Sea is named and who was the first man ever to get up close to the North Pole) observed that a tribe of 200 Inuits in 1818, whom he was the first to encounter, made their cutlery from bone and from the metal taken from three meteorites that they named "The Woman", "The Dog" and "The Tent", after what they thought they looked like. The tribe thought that they were the only people on the planet before Ross met them. 70 years later, Admiral Peary, who claimed to be the first man to reach the North Pole (although the claim is now largely discredited) stole the meteorites and sold them to a museum for $40,000. He also took six Inuit children with him, four of whom died of tuberculosis immediately. One of them survived and was brought up by an American couple. He then discovered that his father's bones where a public exhibit in the Natural History Museum in New York. He complained but Peary refused to do anything about it. However, he did give him enough money to return home. The bones were not returned till 1993."
So for all the examples of Inuit populations that did know there were others, here's one that apparently didn't.
The phrase 'Arctic Highlanders' helped identify them as the Inughuit. http://www.everyculture.com/North-America/Inughuit-Orientati... clarifies it futher:
> Over the decades, the Inughuit have been renamed a number of times by White visitors. "Polar Eskimo," the most common name, was given by Knud Rasmussen in 1903. The Inughuit call themselves "the great and real human beings," and until White contact in 1818, they believed that they were the only humans in the world. "Thule Inuit" is a misnomer, as it refers to the prehistoric culture antecedent to all current Inuit groups.
Do note that this is a small number of the most northern Inuit of Greenland. With your clarification, I think your original 'Inuit communities in Canada' is better stated as 'a few Inuit communities in Greenland'.
And again, most but not all of the Greenland iron came from the meteorites. Quoting the abstract from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/10445803929... :
> Seventy-four iron objects were randomly selected from the archaeological items found in Greenland and have been stored in Copenhagen since about 1850. The objects consist of knives, ulos (knife used by Eskimo women for skinning), and harpoon blades, but also several nonworked fragments and some “hammerstones” were included. The objects were subjected to microscopical examination and x-ray microanalysis to determine their nature and mode of fabrication. The objects may be sorted into three groups. The majority of tools found north of Melville Bay were produced from small fragments of the Cape York iron meteorite shower that fell near Savigsivik over 2000 years ago. Half of the objects found in the Disko Bay area may be traced to occurrences of iron-bearing basalt, while the other half were produced from wrought iron. Some of these wrought-iron tools originated at Norse settlements and were apparently carried as far north as 77° by Norse ships as early as the 12th Century. Other wrought-iron tools were introduced by whalers, mainly of Dutch, Spanish and British origin, after about a.d. 1575. Some tools may derive from iron nails and hoops from wrecked ships. No signs of indigenous iron production have been detected.
What makes us get out of our cozy beds every morning? Probably the fear that somehow the future of the bed and its immediate coziness are threatened by a chaotic world.
Secondly though, if you're struggling to survive in a vast empty landscape already you don't have a lot of time or motivation for ten thousand mile voyages of exploration.
Travel a hundred miles and you're really tired and you're in a different part of Alaska where you don't know where the good food and water sources are.
Keep travelling yet further and eventually you reach a place where you don't even know what food sources look like.
As a sailor (not a kayaker) with an interest in early boats and navigation, I am very interested to read further about how this process is supposed to work. Do you have a link?
Here's a modern link: http://paddling.about.com/od/advancedpaddling/ht/oc_kayak_su...