It escapes me why anyone would concern themselves, 1000-years or so after the event – when some hungry Norseman killed
the last Icelandic walrus on earth – but, here we have an article on just
that concern.
Norsemen killed or produced everything
they ate, there were no grocery stores to go shopping in for food. So, did they
kill lots of animals? You bet, and so would you if you were hungry. Oh, and they even ate their dogs when necessary, and probably each other - only when necessary, of course.
Whoever was able to kill the last walrus on
Iceland, I say well-done, I am certain the fat and meat fed your family for
quite some time. (Ed.)
***
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Andrew Shiva / Wikipedia |
Ancient
DNA says the extinct Icelandic walruses were a genetically distinct population.
KIONA N. SMITH - 11/4/2019,
7:24 AM
There
are no walruses in Iceland, but, at one time, there were hundreds. The timing
of the walruses' disappearance suggests that the population's loss may be one
of the earliest known examples of humans driving a marine species to local
extinction.
The ghost of walruses past
Walruses
used to be a major feature of life in Iceland. Several settlements and
landmarks along Iceland’s coast still bear names that refer to walruses, and a
few of the medieval Sagas (the stories of the island’s early settler families)
even mention them. The Saga of Hrafin Sveinbjarnarson, written down sometime in
the late 1100s, tells the story of a chieftain who killed a walrus and brought
its tusks and skull to Canterbury Cathedral in England. But the walruses
themselves have been reduced to only a few ancient bones and tusks.
Did
the walruses disappear before or after the Norse arrived? In other words, did
the Norse kill off Iceland’s walruses, or did the population die of natural
causes? Because Iceland has no living walruses today, historians have debated
whether the place names referred to places where walruses were living when
people arrived or just places where settlers found the skulls and tusks of
long-dead animals. The walrus tusks that Hrafin Sveinbjarnarson delivered to
England could have been part of a thriving Icelandic walrus population, but it
could also have been only a lost wanderer from more distant shores.
To
learn more about Iceland’s pinniped past, evolutionary genomicist Xenia
Keighley of the University of Copenhagen and her colleagues radiocarbon dated
and sequenced DNA from 34 samples of bones and tusks from walruses in the
Icelandic Museum of Natural History. The DNA studies also showed that Iceland’s
long-lost walruses were a distinct branch of the walrus family. The oldest
walrus remains in the museum, dating to 5502-5332 BC, were related to the
ancestors of today’s Atlantic walrus population. More recent samples, though,
belonged to a separate mitochondrial branch of the walrus family tree,
genetically distinct from every group that’s known in the North
Atlantic—including the older Icelandic walruses.
“I
would suspect that the most recent clade represent a colonization event that
replaced the lineage represented by the old sample, rather than the old sample
being a direct ancestor to the more recent clade,” co-author Morten Olsen, also
an evolutionary genomicist at the University of Copenhagen, told Ars.
Radiocarbon
dates of the bones, combined with the walruses’ genomes, provided an estimate
of the size of their breeding population, which suggested that walruses had
lived on Iceland’s coasts for around 7,500 years. Although their numbers had
been small—perhaps around 1,000 walruses at any one time—their foothold on the
island had been pretty stable until around 1213-1330 AD, well after Norse
settlement began in 870 AD.