Iutzi-Mitchell_1999 ANTHROPOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS ON THE HUMAN COLONIZATION OF MARS: INSIGHTS FROM THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES WHO FIRST SETTLED EARTH’S ARCTIC
The High Arctic has been the latest region of the earth to be peopled by societies which subsist "off the land ” in the sense of the proposed Mars Direct plan. At latitudes beyond 70° north, environmental factors necessarily include some of this planet's extremes for cold, wind, darkness a...
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| Format: | Text |
| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.454.4723 http://www.marspapers.org/papers/Iutzi-Mitchell_1999.pdf |
| Summary: | The High Arctic has been the latest region of the earth to be peopled by societies which subsist "off the land ” in the sense of the proposed Mars Direct plan. At latitudes beyond 70° north, environmental factors necessarily include some of this planet's extremes for cold, wind, darkness and brightness, predictable and unpredictable food shortages, periodic shortages of fuel (for cooking, lighting, heating, and transportation), limited choices for construction materials, and associated social constraints. Although humans had made use of arctic resources seasonally since the time of our Neanderthal forerunners, no human societies existed in the Arctic year-round until the end of the third millennium BCE. At that time Paleo-Eskimos of the Arctic Small Tool Tradition settled the North American coast of the Arctic Ocean (including Devon Island) to within 700 km of the North. No human communities exist further poleward today than the Inuhuit (Polar Eskimos) of northwestern-most Greenland (and some of whose ancestors migrated through Devon Island in the mid-19th century). (Antarctica is an extremely useful model of frontier entry in the 20th century, albeit of a region colonized but not settled by self-sustaining human communities.) Here I examine aspects of how seasonal migrations, exploratory expeditions, and multi-year immigrations took place, both among Paleo-Eskimo and Neo-Eskimo societies, whose descendants call themselves Inuit. I provide an overview of some of the coherency among Eskimo cultural features (ethical, social, linguistic, epistemological, aesthetic, legal, technological, pedagogical, and political economic systems) fine-tuned for survival and subsistence in extreme environments over the past five millennia. |
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