Vikings' Darkest Secret Found Frozen in Greenland After 600 Years

Vikings' Darkest Secret Found Frozen in Greenland After 600 Years In September 1408 a woman named Sigrid Bjornsdottir married a man called Thorstein Olafsson in a small stone church on the Greenland coast, two priests read the banns, a certificate was issued, and that was the last anyone ever heard from five thousand Vikings who had been living there for nearly five centuries. No bodies, no records, no explanation. When a Norwegian missionary arrived in 1721 expecting a thriving Christian settlement he found abandoned farms and silent churches, and the story history settled on was that they were too stubborn to adapt. Then researchers began reading the bones. Carbon and nitrogen isotopes locked permanently into a skeleton can tell you exactly what a person ate, and what they found in Norse Greenland bones completely reversed the accepted story. In the earliest generations the Norse were eating eighty percent land food, beef, mutton, dairy, exactly as the textbooks predicted. By the final generations that ratio had almost exactly flipped, eighty percent of their diet was seal meat, the food of the Inuit people the textbooks said they refused to learn from. They had adapted completely and still disappeared. What the science has now pulled together about the real cause of the collapse involves the collapse of a single ivory trade, a volcanic winter across the northern hemisphere, a shipping route that quietly stopped arriving, and a detail about the final years of the colony that I find genuinely one of the more haunting things on this channel. #vikings #greenland #history #archaeology #vikinghistory #hiddenhistory #lostcivilizations #norse #historyfacts #worldhistory