Paleo-Eskimo

The Paleo-Eskimo (meaning 'old Eskimos'), also known as Paleo-Inuit, were the peoples who inhabited the Arctic region from Chukotka (e.g., Chertov Ovrag) in present-day Russia across North America to Greenland before the arrival of the modern Inuit and related cultures (formerly called Eskimo). The first known Paleo-Eskimo cultures developed by 3900 to 3600 BCE, but were gradually displaced in most of the region, with the last one, the Dorset culture, disappearing around 1500 CE.

Paleo-Eskimo groups included the Pre-Dorset; the Saqqaq culture of Greenland (2500–800 BCE); the Independence I and Independence II cultures of northeastern Canada and Greenland (c. 2400–1800 BCE and c. 800–1 BCE); the Groswater of Labrador, Nunavik, and Newfoundland and the Dorset culture (500 BCE – 1400 CE), which spread across Arctic North America. The Dorset was the last major "Paleo-Eskimo" culture in the Arctic before the migration east from present-day Alaska of the Thule, the ancestors of the modern Inuit.