Dorset

The Dorset were a Paleo-Eskimo people of the North American Arctic, flourishing from about 500 BCE to their final centuries between 1000 and 1500 CE and named for Cape Dorset, site of their first identified traces. They hunted seals and walrus at breathing holes, and unlike the later Inuit had no bows and arrows and apparently no dogs.

In the second millennium they faced double pressure: the Medieval Warm Period thinned and shifted their sea ice, while from the eleventh century the Thule people, ancestors of the Inuit, spread east from Alaska across the Arctic. Settlements were abandoned, though radiocarbon dates place some groups at Cambridge Bay as late as 1350.

Inuit tradition remembers them as the Tuniit, strong but shy giants easily driven away; the last Dorset vanished in the following century, leaving tools and carvings as their record.