Where did the mystery of the ancient people of the Arctic Circle, the Eskimos, come from?
What is it like to be forgotten by the world? The Eskimos have the most say. Known as the "loneliest people", they live all year round in the area north of the Arctic Circle, using ice as a house, animal skins as clothing, raw meat as food, no currency, no commodities, and even simple writing. Although not a population that has disappeared, it is no less mysterious than the Maya.
What festival did they have with the Indians? Why have you been isolated for thousands of years? Did it originate in China's Yin Shang, or the Liangzhu civilization?
Lonely and cold Eskimos
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Something important to say three times: Please call me Anuit
It is estimated that many people can not imagine that the most widely circulated "eskimo" is actually a black name! If someone does not believe in evil and dares to greet the other party with this title in person, even the Buddhist Eskimos will rush up and beat you up. The origin of this black name is also very allusive, involving a love-hate relationship between them and the Indians.
As we all know, the living environment of the Eskimos is very harsh. After two migrations from Asia into the Arctic, they have lived for more than 14,000 years, mainly in the Arctic Circle and nearby areas, such as Siberia, northern Canada, Greenland, Alaska and other northern regions.
Because of the harsh climate and thick glaciers everywhere, they are basically struggling on the line of death.
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What areas do modern-day Eskimos live in?
Imagine this picture:
Face months of darkness, fend off the cold and snowstorms of minus tens of degrees Celsius, and travel above the drifting ice floes. In the summer, in order to make a living, they have to rush to the rough sea, only to fight the largest whale on the earth with simple boats and harpoons, and even to fight with one of the fiercest animals on land, the polar bear, with a shuttle marker or even bare-handed.
Once the prey is not captured, the whole family, or even the entire tribe, will starve to death... It can be said that in the world, the Eskimos are undoubtedly the strongest, the most tenacious, the bravest and the most tenacious people. But the Indians don't see it that way, how did this beam come to fruition?
Native American
According to American archival records, the ancestors of the Eskimos met Indians on the North American continent during their migration. At that time, the Eskimos lived in alaska to the north of Quebec, but the nomadic habits of the Indians led to a fierce conflict between the two peoples, regardless of their stage.
Eventually, the militant Indians engaged in a lot of predatory and retaliatory activities against the Eskimos, and the two sides have always lived with prejudice and conflict, and have a deep historical grudge. Therefore, in the eyes of the Indians, the Eskimos' blood-drinking habits were very barbaric, so they gave this black name to the other party, the Eskimos (meaning people who eat raw meat).
Eskimo women and children
This obviously pejorative name was naturally strongly resisted by the Eskimos. They prefer to call themselves "inuit" or "inupiat", which means "real man" in Eskimos and "master of the land". However, the name Eskimo has been widely accepted ...
Until hundreds or even thousands of years have passed, the Americas are no longer the domain of the Indians, and even a new country has emerged, and the Inuit nation seems to have seen a new hope of a proper name. So in 2004 they officially issued a statement.
Since then, U.S. federal law has stopped using discriminatory terms like "Eskimos" when referring to minorities, replacing them with "alaska natives."
Food, clothing, shelter and travel are wild styles
By their name alone, can the Eskimos become a mysterious race second only to the Maya? It's not that simple. Not only do they live in the extremely cold areas where people are inaccessible, but even the painting style of the entire living habit is completely different from that of modern ethnic groups. They are more like "living fossils" of ancient tribes than living in modern times!
clothing:
Eskimo perspective: local materials, keep warm
Modern perspective: rare fur that can't be bought
In extreme cold areas, nature keeps warm and wears what. Cotton, hemp, textile fabrics can not be worn, animal fur is the best warm artifact. The clothes of the Eskimos are made of animal fur, reindeer skins, bearskins, fox skins, seal skins, and even wolf skins, which are light and warm.
An Eskimo girl in rare fur holding a doll
Even the thread for sewing clothes can be made locally, whale tendons are the best material for sewing leather boots and clothes, arctic reindeer intestines up to 40 meters long, walrus more than 30 meters long intestines, can be processed into sewing clothes thread. You say it's a coincidence?
food:
Eskimo perspective: what to eat, no meat is not happy
Modern perspective: the whole aquarium is eaten casually
It is good to be able to fill your stomach and eat, so the Eskimos are based on the principle of relying on mountains to eat mountains and relying on the sea to eat the sea. Whales, seals, walruses, fur seals, Arctic reindeer, polar bears, grizzly bears, musk oxen, arctic foxes, wolves, wolverines, hares, squirrels, muskrats, lemmings... They are all on their menu.
The Eskimos' shops, outside hung with their booty
The way they eat is also wild and uninhibited. Ever eaten raw meat, ever heard of it? There is no point of cooking, just kill and eat.
This is not all because of insufficient fuel to cook cooked food, but because of the lack of plant food, the human body can not get enough vitamins. Cooked meat loses most of its vitamins, greatly reducing the Eskimos' resistance to sepsis.
Eating raw meat is the need for survival. They even love to eat carrion and animal offal, and they often process the hunted animals into pieces of meat and marinate them in whale oil, which can be preserved for several years.
live:
Eskimo perspective: It can also be warm in the igloo
Modern perspective: This is not sleeping on an ice bed
The igloo once became one of the symbols of the Eskimos, but in fact, it was built with great attention! The snow that builds the igloo is the snow that accumulates all year round, and after a long period of strong wind blowing and sunshine, the ice crystals formed inside turn into hard snow, which has enough building strength.
What's even more amazing is that it is built without any auxiliary materials, and skilled builders can handle a room for three or four people to live in alone!
Unique housing - igloo
The highly skilled Eskimos usually choose a suitable piece of snow when building an igloo, draw a wall line, and compact the ground to level it. Some igloos also dig a large pit downward when making the foundation, and use the enclosure of the pit itself to keep warm. Then the snow blocks spiral up in turn into a circle shape, and finally cap.
The Eskimos were building their own igloos
It is said that because of the reasonable design, the dome igloo is very warm, and the temperature inside the house can even reach 16 ° C.
Of course, some Eskimos would also build houses out of whale bones and wood, like turf houses, which looked like yurts.
Where did the Eskimos originate?
As the world's most cold-fearing people, the Eskimos are not only strange in terms of marriage customs and funerals, but also their origins are still a mystery that plagues anthropologists. Traditional historians divide into three groups, arguing that the Eskimos had three main sources: Southern Alaska, Siberia, and Chinese Merchant Culture.
Among them, the relationship between the Eskimos and China is the most widely recognized. However, this theory has been questioned a lot until there is further definitive archaeological evidence. In 2018, the US media broke a new point of view: the Eskimos did not originate from Yin Shang, but China's earlier Liangzhu civilization!
On the left are the feeding stripes, and on the right are the hunting utensils used by the prehistoric Eskimos
This new view is entirely based on the "Yin Shang Theory". In the 1930s, the American archaeologist Henry Collins found that the excavated Eskimo utensils often carved two concentric circles to represent the eyes, and the animal face pattern on the sea ivory artifacts was also very similar to the artistic characteristics of the Shang Dynasty food pattern, which judged that the Eskimos were influenced by the art of the Shang Dynasty.
For the same archaeological evidence, an archaeologist named Qu Feng in China has made new discoveries:
"The Liangzhu culture had an important water hunting economy, and the prehistoric Eskimos had a similar tradition, both of which unearthed a large number of shark bones, whale bones, and canoe wreckage, while some of the wood artifacts unearthed by the Liangzhu culture are very similar to the ivory harp-heads used for hunting in the old Bering Sea culture, and are likely to be in their original form."
On the left is the Liangzhu jade excavated in Zhejiang, and on the right is the Eskimo hunting tool Ha sprayer head
The style is very similar to that of Liangzhu jade
Unexpectedly, the "Liangzhu Source Theory" came out, so that the American scholar William Fitz, who had always agreed that the Eskimos originated from the Yin Shang, also began to defect.
But the question is, liangzhu civilization is located in Zhejiang, but the Eskimos are located in the Arctic, the two are thousands of miles apart, how did the Liangzhu civilization become the origin of the Eskimos? Could it be that during the Ice Age of the Century, the Arctic Circle was reached through the land bridge of the frozen strait?
As we all know, in the prehistoric civilization, all countries in the world have records of floods, and China has the legend of "Dayu Zhishui". The Liangzhu civilization, located in the Taihu Lake basin of the lower Yangtze River in China, is likely to have also suffered a major flood.
Da Yu Zhi Shui
Archaeology has found that above the fault of the Liangzhu culture, there is a thick layer of silt accumulated. Apparently, the Liangzhu civilization disappeared during the same period and was then covered by the mud brought by the Great Flood. The levees built by the Liangzhu people did not save their homes, so they had to move outward.
According to archaeologists, the Liangzhu people at that time were divided into two groups: one migrated to the middle and upper reaches of the Yangtze River with higher terrain, bringing advanced civilizations to the Shu belt, and the outbreak of the Sanxingdui civilization or related to this;
The other tribe migrated to the north, clashing with the then Chinese tribal alliance, that is, the Longshan cultural group, after the defeat, part of the Liangzhu culture was absorbed and integrated by the Longshan culture, while some of the tribesmen may have escaped the disaster and continued to flee to the north, until they passed through the Bering Strait and came to Alaska, and then gradually spread to the Arctic Circle, forming the later Eskimos.
Shamanic dance masks from the collection of the Polar Museum of the University of Alaska
The Eskimos' unique way of singing in the throat is similar to that of the Tuvan, Mongolian and other ethnic groups
But the folk seem to be more inclined to the claim that the ancestors of the Eskimos were Mongols. Their short stature, yellow skin, and black hair not only matched the facial features of the Mongol race, but even built igloos or hide tents that resembled yurts, and they also practiced shamanism. However, the latest genetic studies have found that they are closer to Tibetans