216 H. P. STEENSBY. 
entirety since its inception; but SOLBERG, who forms his opinion on the 
archæological material which he has had at his disposal, really only 
speaks about what I call the Neoeskimo colonization. The fact of the 
matter is, no doubt, what THosTruPp! asserts, viz., that for various 
reasons “the objects brought home to museums by expeditions were al- 
most exclusively of recent date.” For this reason SOLBERG had to come 
to the conclusion that the settlement in North-east Greenland was of 
comparatively recent date, and to a certain extent was right in this, 
if one only remembers that a somewhat older colonization of a Palæeskimo 
nature preceded the colonization which he investigated and spoke about. 
The Palæeskimo had a pure stone age culture. On the other hand 
the Neoeskimo hybrid culture had an East-Asiatic metal culture to 
build upon, and as the migrations took place comparatively quickly, 
the knowledge of the metals (copper and iron) carried along from the 
point of origin in West Alaska did not lapse from memory, so that it 
was possible to manufacture new implements of metal as soon as some 
happy opportunity gave access to such material. 
This was the case with the native copper from the Coppermine 
River at Coronation Gulf, and likewise it was the case with the naturally 
occurring iron in Greenland, and also with the iron which possibly, even 
in the middle ages, was occasionally obtained from the wrecks of Eu- 
ropean ships on the east coast of Greenland. SOLBERG has proved that 
it is inconceivable that the Eskimo should have resorted to the em- 
ployment of natural iron of bad quality if it were not that they had 
previously become acquainted with the qualities of wrought iron. But 
SOLBERG could not explain where the Eskimo had learnt the use of iron, 
or whence they could have had the form of their implements which they 
had to express in stone or bone influenced by a metal technique. It 
seems, however, that he was mostly inclined to assume that the know- 
ledge was a borrowing from the old Scandinavians in Greenland. Ac- 
cording to my theory the matter has another and more natural expla- 
nation. 
Thus it seems that Greenland, even in a remote past — which 
probably means some few millenniums back — has through immigra- 
tion from the Archipelago had an ancient population, viz., the, here, so 
called Palæeskimo. These people of the stone age with the pronounced 
Arctic Eskimo culture probably did not reach further south than, at 
the farthest, the innermost parts of Disco Bay on the west coast. 
How far south they went along the east coast, it is also difficult to 
decide. Here the Arctic conditions of nature extend somewhat further 
south, yet one can hardly imagine that the Palæeskimo reached south 
of the great indentations (Franz Joseph Land and Scoresby Sound). 
On the other hand according to Тнозтвор the house-ruins of the men- 
1 THOSTRUP, p. 338. 
