Greenland DNA could hold key to migration mysteries: researchers

0 Comments | AFP, December, 2007

COPENHAGEN (AFP) — Danish researchers are to sieve through human and skeletal remains on Greenland in a quest to explain an enduring enigma over the island's settlement over thousands of years, one of the scientists said Tuesday.

"We want to track down how the settlement actually happened," Niels Lynnerup, a researcher at Copenhagen University's forensic medicine department, told AFP.

The island, today a semi-autonomous Danish territory, had been colonised at least 3,000 years ago by Arctic Inuit people, who were then forced to leave, apparently because plunging temperatures eventually made the place uninhabitable.

Then came the Norwegian Viking, Erik the Red, who is popularly but wrongly credited with founding the first settlement on Greenland around the...