What happened to the Greenland Norse?

The Vikings settled Greenland around 1000 A.D. and lived there for centuries before vanishing.  It has been thought that they died out around 1430 A.D. as the climate changed and brought seriously colder winters.  Interestingly, there's a new hypothesis: they left:

In the final phase, it was young people of child-bearing age in particular who saw no future for themselves on the island. The excavators found hardly any skeletons of young women on a cemetery from the late period.

"The situation was presumably similar to the way it is today, when young Greeks and Spaniards are leaving their countries to seek greener pastures in areas that are more promising economically," Lynnerup says. "It's always the young and the strong who go, leaving the old behind."

In addition, there was a rural exodus in their Scandinavian countries at the time, and the population in the more remote regions of Iceland, Norway and Denmark was thinning out. This, in turn, freed up farms and estates for returnees from Greenland.

However, the Greenlanders didn't leave their houses in a precipitous fashion. Aside from a gold signet ring in the grave of a bishop, valuable items, such as silver and gold crucifixes, have not been discovered anywhere on the island. The archeologists interpret this as a sign that the departure from the colony proceeded in an orderly manner, and that the residents took any valuable objects along. "If they had died out as a result of diseases or natural disasters, we would certainly have found such precious items long ago," says Lynnerup.

However, a new book suggests that they didn't return to Scandanavia, but rather tried to settle Labrador or Newfoundland, under the auspices of English and Portuguese explorers in the post Columbus era:

That would still have left the problem of persuading the Norse Greenlanders to join such an overseas scheme willingly. T he Greenlanders would have known about Vínland, Markland and Helluland, but in order to pull up stakes and move westwards they would have had to be persuaded by someone with the leadership and organisational abilities of Eirik the Red – qualities that had also enabled John Cabot, the Corte Real brothers and João Fernandes to arrange their enterprises.

In addition,the Greenlanders would have had to be convinced that they were going to something better than what they would leave behind. If the Norse Greenlanders had adjusted both their domestic and export economy to English demands for stockfish and other fish products that had now dwindled to the point where the Greenlanders were facing complete isolation, they would primarily have required assurance abouttransportation and help to get started with a new life, just as theirancestors had done when opportunity called. Conditions in the Eastern Settlement would not have had to be unspeakable for a new colonising venture to appeal; the first Greenland colonisers had certainly not beenthe most desperate people in Iceland.

Those who probed the Labrador coast for new economic opportunities could not foresee the disasters that became the invariable lot of Europeans when first trying to settle year-round on shores they had experienced only during non-winter conditions. They did not know that the isotherm dips way south in that region, with winter temperatures substantially lowert han at a corresponding latitude in Greenland. If the Norse Greenlanders migrated west to a stretch of Labrador chosen by others, as it appears likely that they did, they may have ended up on the bottom of the Davis Strait before ever reaching the other shore, or they may have perished during their first winter in the new land from new diseases, from starvation or simply from the bitter cold. For them and for any who had stayed behind in Greenland, it would have been the beginning of a rapid decline – and of the end.

The Last Vikings by Kristin A. Seaver is an exhaustive, 250 page history of the Greenland Norse.  It's entirely thought provoking, and on the Internet for your reading and learning pleasure.