The first people arrived in Greenland from the Canadian island of
Ellesmere, around 2500 to 2000 BCE, from where they colonized north Greenland as the
Independence I culture and south Greenland as the
Saqqaq culture.
[15] The Early
Dorset replaced these early Greenlanders around 700 BCE, and themselves lived on the island until c. 1 CE.
[15] These people were unrelated to the Inuit.
[15] Save for a Late Dorset recolonisation of northeast Greenland c. 700 CE, the island was then uninhabited until the Norse arrived in the 980s. Between 1000 and 1400, the
Thule, ancestors of the Inuit,
[16][17] replaced the Dorset in Arctic Canada, and then moved into Greenland from the north.
[18] The Norse disappeared from southern Greenland in the 15th century, and although Scandinavians revisited the island in the 16th and 17th centuries, they did not resettle until 1721. In 1814, the
Treaty of Kiel confirmed Greenland as a territory of Denmark.