In the 1970s, the late academic, Thomas McGovern who was well known in environmental circles at the time proposed a nice explanation for why the Norse settlements in Greenland vanished around 1400 A.D.
His theory was that the Norse settlers refused to adapt to the indigenous Inuit fishing traditions, instead preferring to stick to land-based European farming methods. This meant that when the mini ice-age hit and it got too cold for them to farm anymore, they either starved to death, abandoned ship, or most likely, just stopped having children as life got increasingly harder. They didn’t adapt, so they died out.
The evidence seemed airtight. Archaeological digs through Norse middens (ancient trash piles) turned up farming tools, animal bones, all the usual stuff. But they couldn’t find any fish bones. No fishing gear. No nets. Nothing to suggest a people who lived on an island and ate from the sea.
The theory got traction quickly. It fit both the environmentalist and the anti-Western-colonialism agendas very nicely, which were just beginning to take off in academic circles. So Norse studies suddenly became a hot topic. Money poured in. Departments expanded. And with the funding came new equipment, like radio carbon analysis (RCA) machines they couldn’t afford before.
Those machines ironically destroyed the theory.
It turns out, food from the sea gives off different isotopes than food from the land. Examining Norse human remains, the RCA machine picked that up immediately. Like their Inuit neighbors, the Greenland Norse ate mostly fish, no doubt about it.
But what about the mystery of all the missing fish stuff? That was easily explained.
The Norse didn’t throw away their bones. They ground them into powder and used them as a food supplement. The remaining fish heads and other bits went to the goats. Fishnets decay, so they didn’t last long enough to be discovered. Plus the fishnet weights were there the whole time, they were just mistakenly misidentified as loom parts. And iron fishhooks either got melted down or ended up at the bottom of the sea.
The colony failed, as it turns out, for boring reasons. The mini ice age made Greenland increasingly unlivable. People went back to Scandinavia. Birth rates dropped. The settlement wound down. No great lesson about cultural stubbornness. Just the weather as it turns out.
Ada Palmer tells this story in her book, “Inventing The Renaissance:” Myths Of A Golden Age” which was also the basis of an interesting interview she did recently with Dwarkesh Patel.
Palmer uses this story not to reprimand the anti-colonial faction of academia, but to show us how research, knowledge and innovation actually work. It’s messy, it’s clunky, it’s often wrong. Intuition, common sense and the consensus are highly fallible.
And perhaps most importantly, to show us that being wrong is often a necessary part of eventually being right. Welcome to the wonderful world of innovation.
