Comment Re:I stand corrected on Greenland (Score 1) 1105
Ah...just my luck to come across a bona fide Greenlander...
And that's not a complaint by any means - frankly, it's fascinating to hear what's been going on over there. I think you may be wrong about the settlements. As far as I understand it, there were two Viking settlements, with the earliest founded around 980. There is a growing settlement, but it starts to decline in the 13th century, around the time of the end of the Medieval Warm Period. The Western Settlement is reported abandoned around 1350-60, and the last written record of the Vikings in Greenland is from 1408 (a wedding). By 1480-1500, ships going to Greenland are reporting that the Norse settlements have completely disappeared.
Jared Diamond has a good section on why the Greenland Norse probably disappeared in his book "Collapse." As I recall, he theorized that part of it was the cooling climate, a large part of it was the fact that the Norse thought that because the soil looked like Scandinavia, it was just like Scandinavia (it wasn't), and as a result destroyed the topsoil, and a large part of it was conflict with the Greenland Inuit combined with an unwillingness to adjust their lifestyle and diet to the changing conditions as farming became untenable.