By 1000 A.D., three cultures existed in the eastern Arctic. The oldest was a people archaeologists call “Dorset”, a Mongolic people who had migrated out of Alaska 3,000 years earlier. For millennia, they had survived unimaginable cold with no dog teams, lamps, igloos, or toggling harpoons.

Between 800 and 1200 A.D., however, the world was warming. Soon, the Dorset were faced with strangers from the west, distant cousins whose dog sleds brought them explosively eastward, toggling harpoons and waterproof stitching allowing ample harvest of the marine mammals they ever pursued. These archaeologists would call “Thule”, and they were the earliest Inuit.

Simultaneously, another people was making its way westward, across the Atlantic. This was a people in whose grip Europe was held, adventurers of mixed Scandinavian descent, today derogatorily called “Vikings”. They settled in Greenland, but explored Baffin Island’s eastern coast, calling it Helluland or “The Place of Flat Stones”.

It would all play out oddly, with the Viking colonists being the first to disappear from the Arctic. And by the time Genghis Khan had begun to form his empire, around 1200 A.D., the Dorset, also, had all but disappeared.

One will never meet a Dorset person today. They are extinct. Yet the memory of them lives on in two peculiar places. The first source is a written record of the Vikings, who called them Skraelings or “Weaklings”. The Vikings note them as a shy people, too easily killed.

The other source, the Inuit oral tradition, remembers these people as “Tunit”. They are said to have originally built the inukssuit – man-like rock structures that drive caribou. Tunit were squat, incredibly shy, immensely strong. They were a paradox, for they taught Inuit a number of survival tricks, and yet used very poor tools and no dogs. Being without lamps, they burned heather for warmth, and so were sometimes called the “Sooty Ones.

Pre-colonial Inuit lived in nomadic camps. Family was their society. Their challenge, then, was to strengthen social ties between each other and other families they occasionally bumped into. Consequently, while their oral tradition became a way of record keeping, it at once served a more immediate purpose: a means of socially connecting a disconnected population. The oral tradition specializes at drawing human beings together on an interpersonal level, where concepts often times penetrate the soul more deeply than via script.

Above, we have an example of the oral tradition being just as strong as the written one. Each tradition, oral or written, is a specific tool to suit a specific need. Each having a different focus.

Writing is most concerned with hard facts and figures. Conveying an emotional, social message through writing requires great art. Yet this is where the oral tradition naturally excels.

We live in an age of unprecedented information exchange, ironically marked by great social isolation. Perhaps the oral tradition is the heart that can balance writing’s brain. This interpersonal need, in humans, is the very reason why many prefer live concerts to recorded music. Like our ancestors of old gathering around a campfire, it touches us on a fundamental, primal level.