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I don’t think so. Remember that, before the Inuit, there had been at least four previous waves of Native American hunter-gatherers who had arrived in Greenland from the Canadian Arctic, and who had died out one after another. That’s because climate fluctuations in the Arctic cause the large prey species essential for sustaining human hunters—caribou, seals, and whales—to migrate, fluctuate widely in numbers, or periodically abandon whole areas. While the Inuit have persisted in Greenland for eight centuries since their arrival, they too were subject to those fluctuations in prey numbers. Archaeologists have discovered many Inuit houses, sealed up like time capsules, containing the bodies of Inuit families that starved to death in that house during a harsh winter. In Danish colonial times it happened often that an Inuit would stagger into a Danish settlement, saying that he or she was the last survivor of some Inuit settlement all of whose other members had died of starvation.

Compared to the Inuit and all previous hunter-gatherer societies in Greenland, the Norse enjoyed the big advantage of an additional food source: livestock. In effect, the sole use that Native American hunters could make of the biological productivity of Greenland’s land plant communities was by hunting the caribou (plus hares, as a minor food item) that fed on the plants. The Norse also ate caribou and hares, but in addition they allowed their cows, sheep, and goats to convert the plants into milk and meat. In that respect the Norse potentially had a much broader food base, and a better chance of surviving, than any previous occupants of Greenland. If only the Norse, besides eating many of the wild foods used by Native American societies in Greenland (especially caribou, migratory seals, and harbor seals), had also taken advantage of the other wild foods that Native Americans used but that the Norse did not (especially fish, ringed seals, and whales other than beached whales), the Norse might have survived. That they did not hunt the ringed seals, fish, and whales which they must have seen the Inuit hunting was their own decision. The Norse starved in the presence of abundant unutilized food resources. Why did they make that decision, which from our perspective of hindsight seems suicidal?

Actually, from the perspective of their own observations, values, and previous experience, Norse decision-making was no more suicidal than is ours today. Four sets of considerations stamped their outlook. First, it is difficult to make a living in Greenland’s fluctuating environment, even for modern ecologists and agricultural scientists. The Norse had the fortune or misfortune to arrive in Greenland at a period when its climate was relatively mild. Not having lived there for the previous thousand years, they had not experienced a series of cold and warm cycles, and had no way to foresee the later difficulties of maintaining livestock when Greenland’s climate would go into a cold cycle. After 20th-century Danes reintroduced sheep and cows to Greenland, they too proceeded to make mistakes, caused soil erosion by overstocking sheep, and quickly gave up on cows. Modern Greenland is not self-sufficient but depends heavily on Danish foreign aid and on fishing license payments from the European Union. Thus, even by today’s standards, the achievement of the medieval Norse in developing a complex mix of activities that permitted them to feed themselves for 450 years is impressive and not at all suicidal.

Second, the Norse did not enter Greenland with their minds a blank slate, open to considering any solution to Greenland’s problems. Instead, like all colonizing peoples throughout history, they arrived with their own knowledge, cultural values, and preferred lifestyle, based on generations of Norse experience in Norway and Iceland. They thought of themselves as dairy farmers, Christians, Europeans, and specifically Norse. Their Norwegian forebears had successfully practiced dairy farming for 3,000 years. Shared language, religion, and culture