dorset

The Vikings actually encountered the Dorset before they disappeared, and later the Thule as they replaced the Dorset.

Disease transmitted from Norse settlers/traders being the cause is also not plausible, as the Dorset disappeared first in the Western stretch of Northern N.

The Dorset were in contact with viking populations in Greenland, whose accounts can be interpreted as showing the rapid replacement of the Dorset by the Thule.

The Dorset culture probably died off due to change in climate and their failure to adapt rather than inuits traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to kill the dorset.

The Dorset were present across Canada's North, and only the Easternmost would have had contact with vikings.

The entire Dorset culture was rapidly displaced shortly after the Thule (Inuit) came across the Bering sea.

Based on the age and region of the artifacts, they are probably related to the Dorset culture.

As such, those of us descended from Vikings are almost as intimately related to the Dorset as the Inuit!

Anyway, the Dorset disappearance is usually blamed on the Inuit (whose oral traditions recount driving off the Dorset people), although they seem to have already been in decline when the Inuit arrived.

It seems like these Vikings encountered the Dorset, not the Inuit, and the Dorset were later wiped out by the Inuit, so no oral tradition of the Viking contact would have survived.

Finally, some small, isolated Dorset populations may have survived until later European contact, although they soon died out as well.

The Thule do have tales of contact with what is now thought to be the Dorset, and they do suggest the result was violent conflict that the Dorset were simply not ready for.

It's also possible that contact with either the Thule or vikings passed on diseases that could have decimated the Dorset.

Other first nations in the area likely share a common, but distant, ancestry with the Dorset.

Heavily implied the Eskimo's killed the Dorset.