We have now followed the Thule culture like an old stratum that is to be found under most of the culture forms of the Arctic Eskimos from Siberia and North Alaska, over the central regions to Labrador and North Greenland, a culture that is combined with the hunting of big marine mammals, particularly whales, connected with a people which for the most lived in permanent winter houses and which used a number of very definite types of implements. We have seen how the culture in the western regions has principally remained at the Thule stage, whereas in the central regions it has totally disappeared and in Greenland too, except for the Polar Eskimos, has given place to new forms.
The question is now: where did this Thule culture come from originally, where is its home?
To begin with we are able to state that the Thule culture is a typical Arctic culture; as soon as we move away from the Arctic regions proper, in South Greenland, and South Alaska, it rapidly loses its stamp and disappears — if it has ever got down there at all. The Thule culture must consequently have originated in a region which has an Arctic climate, a place where sea ice forms in winter. Next, the Thule culture is a typical coast culture and seems to have been particularly adapted to the hunting of whales and other big marine animals; it must therefore have originated on a coast, and a coast that abounds with big game, especially whales. Furthermore, for it to have produced such things as the women's boat and the cone-shaped tent, it must have been on a coast where there has been an abundance of wood. These necessary geographic conditions already point to the west.
When going through the elements of the Thule culture we have time after time had occasion to observe the close connection which apparently exists between the Central Eskimo Thule finds and certain groups of Western Eskimos, especially their most Arctic subgroups at Pt. Barrow and East Siberia. That in former times there has here been a very close and intimate connection cannot be doubted. The question is then merely whether the migration has proceeded
