Shadowing Practice: Ancient Animals The Viking Raiders Saw - Learn English Speaking with Video

Everyone who's ever stood under a museum skeleton has played the same game in their head.

What would I do if that thing was alive?

The answer is die.

You would die.

For us, it stays imaginary though.

These animals stay as bones behind glass because we were a few thousand years late.

But the Vikings were not late.

In fact, a thousand years ago, Norse hunters stood on arctic ice within spear range of one-ton animals with tusks built like short swords.

Animals that are now gone.

And to them, that was just the daily job of being a Viking.

Today, you're going to meet a bunch of different creatures the Vikings actually met face to face.

One of them they ate, one they sold to kings as a unicorn, and one they even walked on a leash.

And the last one that we're going to talk about is the one they sailed thousands of kilometers for over and over, right up until the very end of the Vikings' legacy.

Why?

Well, you'll just have to wait to find out.

But let's start on a river in Eastern Europe where a

Norse trader is standing face to face with a wild ox the size of his boat.

And he's realizing the old stories were true.

The aurochs was the wild ancestor of every cow on earth.

And calling it a cow is like calling a wolf a cock or spaniel.

The bull stood about 180 centimeters at the shoulder.

That's 6 feet tall, eye level with the man hunting it, and weighing over 700 kilograms.

Which is an absolute unit that's basically a big pissed off

forklift running at you the horn swept forward they were up to 80 centimeters each

which is longer than your arm those were nearly black with a pale stripe down the spine

and unlike modern cattle this thing was long-legged and fast

and according to the vikings who actually met it they were not particularly afraid of humans

which matters because fear of humans is the main thing

that we teach animals but the aurochs really had that dog in them and didn't give a fuck.

That Norse trader has never seen one before.

In fact, nobody from home had.

By the time the Viking Age starts, around the year 793, there hasn't been a wild aurochs in Scandinavia for centuries.

Their great great grand Vikings ate them all back in the early Iron Age.

So a Viking kid growing up in Denmark knew this animal the same way that you know it he wrecks.

From stories, from drinking horns, from grandpa exaggerating.

The first shelf in the story was empty before the story even starts.

But hold on to that empty shelf.

The Norse are about to spend the next six centuries finding nine more creatures.

Which is exactly why meeting one aurochs was such a big deal.

The aurochs have retreated south and east down the rivers into the forests of central and eastern Europe, and they were getting rarer every decade.

Norse traders and raiders moving through those river systems were passing through the last range of the last wild ox, and it being rare changed what the animal meant to the Vikings

because it stopped being viewed as lunch and started becoming a trophy.

The kind of kill you made specifically so you could tell people that you made it.

And you can literally watch the supply of them run out in the paperwork.

By around 1400, there were only a few hundred aurochs left on the planet, with all of them in Poland under direct royal protection by gamekeepers with laws.

Letters from the time period even call them the greatest attraction in Poland, which is a polite way of saying, stop turning the endangered animals into stakes.

We need them for money, dude.

But it doesn't work.

The herd keeps shrinking anyway.

And in 1627, in the Jackdaro Forest, the last orcs on Earth die of old age.

The wild ancestor of every cow alive's legacy ends as a single lone cow

in a single forest guarded like a thing at a museum.

Except this museum piece would fuck your shit up.

And God, it was probably tasty.

Have I ever mentioned to you guys that I grew up on a farm with cows?

Everyone always says, oh my god, look, cows, they are so cute.

But I, I know the evil truth.

Cows aren't cute.

Cows are evil.

I've been kicked about 20 times by cows as a kid.

That shit hurts.

Cows don't give a fuck.

Cows just kick and it hurts and goddammit, I hate cows.

And that's the reason I love snakes so much.

One more detail though.

A horn from the last bull that died actually got turned into a hunting horn

and then got looted as a war trophy and is now sitting in the Royal Swedish Armory in Stockholm.

The animals the Vikings hunted into a memory came home as the equivalent of a man posting his deer

or fish trophy on Tinder.

Wow, humanity has really come a long way, hasn't it?

So that's the aurochs.

But the next animal has the opposite problem, though.

They just couldn't get rid of it.

The gray wolf in Viking Age Scandinavia was everywhere that the Norse were.

In the same forests, the same mountains, and during the same long winters.

Living in family packs that could take down an elk.

Which, for the record, is an animal the size of a horse with antlers.

Nobody realizes just how big an elk or a moose is, by the way.

I live in Canada where we sometimes see those things, and God, they are absolute chonky boys.

Like, you don't fuck with a moose ever.

Spinosnack life tip, if you fuck with a moose, the moose will fuck with you, and you will likely be impaled, repeatedly, in a very not fun way.

Anyways, wolves were the top natural predator on the peninsula.

They had been the main thing killing aurochs before humans took over that department,

and every winter, they came down to the farms and did their own little resource extraction on Norse sheep, Norse cattle, occasionally even little Norse baby Vikings.

A Scandinavian wolf pack runs maybe 8 to 10 animals weighing 45 kilograms each, all working in coordination.

So the farmers weren't just dealing with one pest, they were dealing with a whole family of big bad wolves, and boy do they know how to huff and puff and blow the houses down.

And picture the Vikings meeting the wolves, because it happened every winter.

You're a Viking.

It's a cold February night and there's snow up to your knees and the sheep start screaming.

You come out with a torch and a spear and at the edge of the light there are these looming horrible shapes.

They've counted your sheep, they've counted you, and they are deciding right now whether tonight is worth it.

And this wasn't just a one-off attack.

The wolves came every winter, all ready to eat all of your yummy little cattle.

Most cultures that lose livestock to a predator just hate the predator.

But the Norse were a weird type of people.

I can say that because my family is actually from Norway before they moved to Canada.

Anyways, the Vikings were weird about wolves.

They honestly simped over wolves.

Like Odin, who's the actual head god dude guy, like the big bad boy, keeps two wolves at his table, Gary and Frecky.

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Their names mean the ravenous and the greedy.

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And to make Odin even more of a badass, he straight up feeds them by hand.

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Yes, that's the god of war keeping the enemy as a pet.

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Elite warriors even fought as Yulfnar, which means wolfcoats.

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These were men who went into battle dressed as the thing that ate their sheep on purpose.

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How badass is that?

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And when they needed someone to end the world, they knew who to call.

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They called Fenrir, a wolf, the son of Loki, who was raised by the gods themselves until he got too big to pretend about.

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He was then chained on magical restraints with a sword propped in his jaws.

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The prophecy is very specific about his purpose too.

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And Ragnarok, he breaks the chain, swallows the sun, and then personally kills Odin.

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Again, that is Odin, the head god dude.

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Eaten by a pet.

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The Vikings didn't just fear the wolves.

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They wrote a whole damn apocalypse into their culture about them.

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Which tells you why the wolf was so important.

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Because every other animal that we will talk about tonight, they all convert into something for the Vikings.

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Like meat, oil, ivory, or favor.

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But the wolf converts into nothing.

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You can't sell it, tax it, trade it, or hand it to a king.

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It's the one creature in the Viking world that only ever took.

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And killing one fed nobody and paid nobody.

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The wolf was literally that guy to the Vikings.

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The south was running out of cows, and the wolves in the woods were hunting back, which is why the Norse looked north instead.

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Because up there, past the tree line, the money had legs.

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And I do literally mean money, because guess what?

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The Vikings had taxes, and reindeer were a core part of those taxes.

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But first, let's talk about the animal, because the animal explains the money and the taxes.

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Wild reindeer moved across the far north in herds of thousands with both sexes carrying antlers.

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They are the only species of deer on earth that does that.

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They had hooves that splayed out wide like built-in snowshoes, allowing them to float over snow that would have swallowed Norse boots up to the knee.

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A herd like that is tons of meat hide and sinew on the move.

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But it was on terrain where the best sailors on Earth could barely walk, so the Norse could see the wealth, but they couldn't chase it.

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So they did what any human group naturally does.

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They taxed it instead.

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Yup, capitalism, baby.

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Around the year 890, an actual Norwegian chieftain named Oet there stood in front of King Alfred, the great of England, and explained his whole business model,

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and a scribe wrote it down, which means we have a Viking's income statement in his own words.

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This was the headline.

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His single biggest source of wealth wasn't raiding, and it wasn't farming.

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It was tribute, gaffal, paid to him by the Sami, the indigenous people of the far north in fur, hides, and reindeer.

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Yes, the scary axe people's best revenue stream was taxing their neighbors' hunting skills.

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But real quick, if you're enjoying this video so far, the like and subscribe buttons are right there.

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And unlike a Viking tax collector, it takes nothing from you.

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Okay, back to talking about Sammy.

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Because they had earned that tribute.

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The Sammy were simply built different and better at this job of hunting.

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They built literal funnel systems of standing stones arranged like scarecrow lines, steering whole herds into pitfall traps and enclosures,

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with stone shooting blinds placed at the exact spot the physics would deliver the animals to them.

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They kept tame decoy reindeer, which were deployed to walk out and convince wild herds that everything here is fine.

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Nothing to worry about, fellow deer buddies!

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And they crossed snow on skis the way the Norse crossed the water.

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Which, by the way, the Norse were very good at crossing water.

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Which is why the Norse made the extremely rational decision to not compete.

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Why hunt reindeer badly when you can just tax people who hunt them perfectly?

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So instead of a hunt, it became a market.

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It got called the fin trade, with metal tools and silver flowing north into a region with no ore of its own, and furs and hides and reindeer products flowing south.

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And this wasn't just some loose barter, because archaeologists keep finding Viking-era trade weights and coins at semi-settlements deep in northern Sweden's interior.

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This was a whole monetized economy running hundreds of kilometers past where the sagas pretend the world ended.

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And the two peoples got closer than the history books usually admit.

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There's a 10th century burial in Norway, a full Viking ship funeral, the whole thing, except when archaeologists examined the boat, it wasn't nailed.

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It was sewn together, stitched together with reindeer's sinew, in the Sammi style, meaning that these two group of people might have been closer together than we initially thought.

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But enough about talking about taxes or land animals.

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Let's talk about some water animals.

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First, the whale.

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The North Atlantic right whale is an 18-meter, 50-plus-ton filter feeder.

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It's the length of two school buses parked nose to tail.

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It has three things about it that mattered enormously to a man in a rowboat.

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It swims slowly, it feeds right at the surface, and it floats when it dies.

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So, later, whalers named it the right whale, as in the right one to kill.

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It is the only animal I know of whose name is literally a customer's review.

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Every other animal name describes the animal.

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Hammerhead, grizzly bear, and then whalers looked at 50 tons of whale and named the species a five-star review.

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Slow, fat, floats, convenient, would recommend to kill again.

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Why not just throw in ugly or stupid in there at this point?

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For Christ's sake, we named a living animal the way that you would rate a mattress.

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Anyway, its head is crusted with pale patches of rough skin called callusites.

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There was actually a different pattern on every whale, much like human fingerprints, which means the men hunting them could tell individuals apart.

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The prey had faces to them.

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The Norse hunting method was patient in a way that should really worry you.

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You row out, you throw an iron-tipped spear into the whale, and then, this is the really important part, just like my ex-wife Becky, you leave and go home.

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Except when I went home, Becky wasn't there because she left and took the kids.

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Anyways, the spear you threw is marked with your personal identifying sign, much like a modern cattle brand.

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And then the wound does the rest.

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Infection sets in, and over the following days, the whale slowly loses a fight against the bacteria.

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Eventually, it dies, floats, and washes ashore.

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And then, when someone finds a 50-ton carcass on a beach, they check it for spears the way you would check a package for a shipping label.

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Found your mark, that's your whale.

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You killed it last Tuesday.

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It just took a while to arrive, much like most Amazon packages.

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So the Icelanders turned it into law.

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The Gragas legal code lays out exactly how a beached whale gets divided.

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A share goes to the hunter whose marked spear is in the body, another share goes to whoever found it, and another share goes to the landowner whose beach it chose.

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If you were to cheat to split and steal from someone else's whale, the penalty would be outlawry, which in medieval Iceland meant anyone was legally allowed to kill you.

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Yes, they had whale murder law.

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That's how serious they took their whales.

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And frankly, it was worth writing laws about, because one right whale is thousands of kilograms of meat and blubber.

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It's the difference between a settlement eating through the winter or not.

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The bones became game pieces.

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Researchers ran genetic tests on heftenol pieces, which is Viking chess basically, that they found from graves in Sweden in the Åland Islands.

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And most of them turned out to be carved from right whale bones, starting in the 500s, which was two centuries before the Viking Age.

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So the Vikings whale killing worked so well that the next whale

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that we're talking about is one that you have never seen in your life.

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Nobody alive has.

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The reason why took scientists until this century to piece it together.

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Here's a fact that sounds wrong.

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There used to be gray whales in the Atlantic.

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Every gray whale alive today is in the Pacific.

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That's where the famous migrations are.

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That's where the whale watching boats go, and for a long time, that seemed like just how gray whales worked.

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Then, researchers took 719 whale bones from European coastal sites and ran collagen fingerprinting by reading the protein signature in old bone,

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which still works when the bone is a shapeless chunk, and after a thousand years of Norse butchery, shapeless chunks were all that were left.

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Sitting in that pile, mixed in with the right whales, were gray whales, a whole Atlantic population's worth.

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And these bones came from butchery sites and settlement trash heaps, meaning that people were eating a whale that science didn't know the Atlantic ever had.

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There's no asterisks on this one, no remnant heard anywhere.

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There's an entire ocean's worth of a whale species gone

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so completely that science had to dig up the receipts just to find out it existed.

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And the gray whale was almost custom built to be caught by people in small boats.

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It's a 12 to 15 meter bottom feeder, about the length of a city bus, and it eats by rolling onto its side and vacuuming the sea floor, straining little animals out of the mud,

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then surfacing with its face full of sediment like a dog that found something in the garden.

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That feeding style keeps it in shallow water close to shore, which is exactly where a shore-based Viking-shaped hunter operates.

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The right whale at least had the option of being far away.

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Unfortunately, the gray whale lived in the kill zone, so the bones tell you the animal was there.

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But here's what says the beatings weren't accidents the record of how Norse coastal communities actually hunted.

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The spearing, the drive hunting, the herding whales into bays and closing the door.

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Well, when you put the bones and the hunting methods together, it points to grey whales being deliberately, routinely hunted by at least the 11th century.

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No, not scavenged off beaches, but hunted.

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The marked spear system that you just learned about had another poor victim.

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Nobody wrote down an ending of the Atlantic grey whales, because nobody really experienced it as an ending.

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No hunter woke up one morning to a Twitter post that the Atlantic gray whales were extinct.

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Each generation just saw slightly fewer than their fathers did.

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And at some point, and we genuinely cannot say when, a gray whale surfaced somewhere off the coast of Europe for the last time.

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And nobody knew.

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This was an animal that had been in that ocean for hundreds of thousands of years, and it went out without a witness.

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Because Vikings didn't understand the concept of extinction.

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To a Viking, it all just feels like fishing.

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And if a whale, an animal that can swim away, an animal with an entire ocean to hide in,

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couldn't survive that pressure, I need you to picture the same Vikings meeting a bird that cannot fly,

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cannot run, and lays its one egg a year on a bare rock in the open at sea level.

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Well, Iceland's shelf was stocked with exactly that.

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The Great Auk was the North Atlantic's version of a penguin, except it invented the look first.

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It was 85 centimeters tall, which would be around hip height on you.

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It was black and white with dense little flipper wings, and it was completely flightless.

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In the water, it was one of the best divers the Atlantic ever produced, being able to chase fish down with seal-level agility.

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On land, it was a walking bowling pin.

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It bred in huge colonies on remote scaries, which were bare rock islets, because its entire defense strategy,

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the whole plan refined over millions of years of evolution was to stand somewhere nobody visits.

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It also laid exactly one egg a year, directly on bare rocks with no nest, no plan B.

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That is a strategy written by millions of years of nothing ever coming to kill it.

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Honestly, it reminds me a lot of the Dodo, and we know how those ended, which the Great Ox strategy actually worked beautifully up until it

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met a very hangry civilization whose entire thing was visiting rocks nobody visits.

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By the Viking Age, the Great Auk was already gone from most of Scandinavia.

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Southern Norway lost it thousands of years before the Norse ever raised a sail and left, and most of the rest of Norway lost it by around the 500s.

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The Auk had been pushed out to Iceland, Greenland, and the Outer Islands, which, unluckily for it, were the exact places the Norse were now colonizing.

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The Vikings kept sailing to the ends of the earth

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and finding the animals that had fled there to get away from people like them.

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At some point, that stops being a coincidence and just makes you think the Vikings really hated Happy Feet.

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Look, Happy Feet was an amazing movie, but honestly, if I was a Viking, I would definitely murder a few million penguins if I was forced to watch Happy Feet 2.

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Fuck Happy Feet 2.

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I hate that movie.

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For Norse settlers, the auk was less an animal to them and more of a living snack, with meat and fat that you could render into lamp oil.

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In fact, the bird was so oily, it practically came pre-packaged as fuel.

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It also had down for bedding, which in a climate where insulation was survival, was pretty important.

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And the hunting barely even qualified as hunting.

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The birds couldn't fly, couldn't run, and had never evolved a reason to fear anything on land.

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So if you were a Viking, you would just walk in there with a club, beat a couple funny not-penguins to death, and be on your way.

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It reminds me of my days clubbing penguins in Ark.

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Ah, good times.

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For centuries, the hunting stayed low level.

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It was a lot, but it was survivable for the species.

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Then, European ships started crowding into the North Atlantic in the 1400s and 1500s, and every crew treated the colonies as free groceries.

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And God, it was a slaughter.

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Here is where I would normally make a joke, and I'm not going to, because the genetics show the Great auk was abundant and healthy when the intensive hunting began.

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There was no decline, no disease, nothing wrong with the species at all.

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Every step of what followed was just a Viking murder spree.

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It all ends on June 3rd, 1844 on a scary called Eldiaf,

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Iceland, where three men found the last breeding pair on earth and strangled them for a collector, and then their egg got crushed under a boot.

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That's the whole ending of this bird's story.

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This was a bird that outlasted the ice ages and got finished off by a boot of all things.

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The auk kept Norse settlers alive as food, but it was never going to make anyone rich.

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When it was dead, it was worth a meal.

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But Iceland, it turns out, was also stocked with the opposite kind of animal.

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One worth almost nothing dead and worth a fortune alive.

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Meet the Jyrfalcon, the largest falcon on the planet and medieval Europe's most exclusive status symbol.

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This is an arctic built raptor with a wingspan pushing 130 centimeters, which is about as wide as you are tall, that runs down water fallow and open tundrum.

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And the high arctic ones come in nearly pure white, which matters because medieval falcony had a strict pecking order, written down like law.

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Which bird a man could fly depended on his rank, and at the very top sat the jeer falcons.

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Kings were the only ones who could fly it.

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This wasn't just a pet, it was a status symbol.

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Knowing me, if I had a bird for a status symbol, it would probably be a chicken.

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What about you?

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Let me know your status symbol bird in the comments below.

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Anyways, Iceland settlers figured out fast that they were sitting on a goldmine.

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Jerfalcon exports became such a pillar of the economy that other Icelandic goods got price checked against falcons, meaning the bird was basically a currency.

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And taking one legally required an actual permit.

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A falkebref, which is a falcon letter.

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Yes, Viking paperwork for a bird.

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And earning that paperwork was the worst job in Iceland, because Jir falcons nest on cliff ledges.

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So behind every falcon on a king's glove, there was a man on a rope over the North Atlantic, in the wind, removing an angry apex predator from a rock face with his bare hands.

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In fact, one bird, landed alive and healthy, outpriced whole shipments of the island's staple goods.

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When a 16th century cartographer drew Iceland on the famous Kartana Marina map, the symbol he chose for the entire island was a jir falcon.

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Not a volcano, not a cod, but a bird was the national brand.

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Then the shipping manifests started getting weird.

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Arabic sources

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and falconry manuals describe white jir falcons appearing at the court

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of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad in the late 800s and early 900s if you're keeping track, white jeer falcons don't live anywhere near Bogdod.

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The evidence all points to birds being trapped in Iceland and Scandinavia, then moved alive.

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Yes, a fragile, temperamental Arctic predator that needs feeding,

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cooling, and handling was being moved 5,000 plus kilometers down the Viking river routes through Eastern Europe, hand to hand, all the way to the richest core on Earth.

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The same guys that Cliff's geographers described as terrifying river barbarians were also apparently the world's most extreme bird dealers.

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That was the whole Viking economy in one image.

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Axe in one hand, bird in the other.

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Then in the early 900s, the Baghdad Pipeline went quiet.

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Maybe because the Caliphate hit political chaos, but the other explanation should sound familiar by now if you've been keeping up with the Vikings.

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Over-harvesting.

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Too many falcons were trapped and too few were left.

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This was the same thing that killed the Aurochs

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and the same thing that killed the whales just faster because the falcon population is small and a king's appetite isn't.

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Now, don't relax because the two most expensive animals in the entire Norse world are still coming.

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One of them is actually a lie about unicorns.

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The other one is on a leash.

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And to get either, you had to go where the falcon trade looked sane.

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Greenland.

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For the Vikings, the worse the commute was, the better the profits were.

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Somewhere in the medieval unicorn business, there is a Norse trader who knew exactly what he was selling, and I think about him a lot.

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The narwhal is a small arctic whale with one absurd feature, a single tooth, the left canine that grows straight out through its lip in a perfect spiral.

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It's up to three meters long, which is longer than the bed you sleep on, and a rare few males actually grow two of them,

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which raises questions about the unicorn story that nobody at the time wanted to ask.

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But in short, it's not a horn.

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It's a tooth packed with nerve endings, probably a sensor, and occasionally was used as a jousting pole for sparring males.

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The animal itself lives in pods under the sea ice and dives past 1500 meters, which is a whole vertical mile straight down in the dark,

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and then surfaces in the cracks of the ice.

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Vikings in Greenland got them either by hunting or by collecting tusks from the carcasses the orcas had already brutally murdered.

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But however they got the tooth, the getting the tooth was never where the money was, because the money lived over 4,000 kilometers away.

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Because here's the clever part of the scam.

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See, medieval Europe believed hard that a unicorn's horn could neutralize poison and cure disease, which for a medieval king was a big deal.

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So when a spiral ivory horn arrived from the far north, no seller had to claim anything.

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The buyer's imagination closed the deal and prices went to many times the horn's weight in gold.

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And here's the great part about this scam.

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Greenland was thousands of kilometers away.

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The tusks came from the literal edge of the known world.

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No skeptical court physician was ever going to sail to the Arctic to prove

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if the tooth horn actually came from a unicorn.

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The distance did what the forgery couldn't.

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This may have been the Vikings' greatest scam.

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The clientele they were selling to tells you just how much they made off these unicorn horns.

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Ivan the Terrible got one as a gift.

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The privateer Martin Frobisher even handed Elizabeth I of England a tusk valued at £10,000, which at the time was warship money.

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Yes, for one tooth from an animal the seller's cousins were pulling out of a pack of ice.

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It took until the 1600s for anyone to check.

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A Danish naturalist named Ole Worm finally held an arwal skull next to a unicorn horn in front of everybody

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and let the tooth socket do the talking.

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And even then, the tusks kept selling.

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Centuries of momentum does not stop for science.

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The con outlived the con artists, the customers, and the entire civilization that started it.

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But a tooth can only make a king or a viking rich, and kings and vikings were already rich.

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If you wanted a king to remember your name, to owe you, then you didn't hand him ivory.

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You handed him something that was still breathing, preferably something that was so badass and scary that it could kill him.

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For the Record, Iceland does not have polar bears, but Iceland did have polar bears delivered to them.

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Every so often, drift ice from Greenland comes ashore carrying a passenger, and that passenger is the largest land carnivore on Earth,

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weighing 350 to 700 kilograms, which is grand piano territory, by the way.

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This was a seal ambush specialist that also happens to swim open water like a fairy.

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Yep, just an apex predator arriving on your beach hungry from its time of drift.

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Most medieval cultures would call that as a disaster, but the Icelanders called it a business opportunity because they had figured out how a polar bear could become a financial investment.

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Because the Norse were, as far as the medieval records show, pretty much the only people on Earth capturing live polar bears on purpose,

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taming them enough to transport and gifting them to royalty.

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The first documented case was around 880 to 900.

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A settler named Ingenmud the Old catches a mother bear and two cubs off the ice, ships them to Norway, and presents them to King Harald Fairhair.

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The king is so delighted he gives him an entire ocean-going ship loaded with timber.

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To be clear, this is in Iceland, which is a treeless country.

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Timber was wealth that you couldn't buy locally.

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One bear family for one full ship of wood.

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The exchange rate was set, and every ambitious Norseman heard about it.

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Because think about what a bear gift says.

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It says, I went to the edge of the world, this animal tried to kill me, and I wrapped it up like a present.

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God, the Vikings were badass.

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Have I mentioned my heritage is from Norway?

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I love learning about this type of stuff.

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Which brings us to the greatest career move in perhaps history.

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It's the tale of the Ion.

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And it goes like this a broke Icelandic farm and spends his entire net worth, like everything, on one polar bear in Greenland,

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all while planning to gift it to King Sven of Denmark, except his ship docks in Norway, which is ruled by Harald Hardrada, who is at war with Sven,

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and Harald wants the bear, so he offers to buy it.

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Eoin says no, so he offers double.

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No again.

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The king then points out, with the balls of a man who owns an army, that he could simply take it.

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Aeong then says, you could.

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And then this farmhand, a man whose entire net worth is currently a damn bear, explains to the most feared warrior king in Europe

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that the bear is spoken for because he's delivering it to the king Harold is at war with.

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Silence.

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And then Harold lets him go, basically out of respect for the sheer fucking audacity of those balls.

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Aeong delivers the bear and Sven buries him in rewards like silver, a ship of his own, and a funded pilgrimage to Rome.

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The bear was the best investment that man ever made, and it kept working for 200 years.

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Iceland's first bishop hands a polar bear to the Holy Roman Emperor around 1056 and walks away with imperial protection,

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and in 1252, King Hakon of Norway gifts one to Henry III of England, who keeps it at the Tower of London,

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where the bear goes swimming in the Thames on a long leash, catching its own fish, while Londoners watch a piece of the Arctic do laps past their bridge.

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Bears bought ships, and ships existed for one job, for hunting the animal that you all have been waiting for.

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I want you to stand where the hunter stands, at the sea ice past the edge of the mapped world, and 30 meters away is 800 kilograms of muscle,

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which is a small car's worth with 50 centimeter tusks.

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And the ivory in those tusks is the answer to a question historians chased for years.

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Why did Vikings really colonize Greenland?

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Farmland was a story everyone has been told, but walrus was the reason.

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The genetics lay out the trail like footprints.

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First, they hunted walrus in Scandinavia.

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They were then depleted.

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Then they hunted the Iceland herds right after settlement.

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Depleted.

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So the hunt moved to Greenland.

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And when the local herds then there, Norse crews started making the run north to the northern water Polinia, which is high in the Arctic.

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It's a 6,000 kilometer round trip.

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All the while they were in open boats and they did this to stand on ice next to the herds.

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And up there, up at the top of the world, they met people, the Tunit and later the Thul Inuit.

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Yes, Norse hunters were trading with the peoples of Arctic America, which was 500 years before Columbus, by the way.

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And the ivory literally proves to us that they were there.

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Here's the proof.

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DNA sourcing of medieval ivory artifacts shows up from about 1100 to 1400.

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The overwhelming majority of ivory in Europe came from Greenland walruses, meaning that one colony of a few thousand farmers at the edge of the world supplied a whole continent,

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and this was the job.

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Walrus hauled out in herds, in a herd that spooked stampedes for the water immediately.

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Hundreds of animals would be accelerating towards the sea through anything between them and it, and the Norse worked that gap on purpose.

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Their plan was to stand between a herd of panicking car-sized beasts

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and the ocean with nothing but a spear and the sheer fucking audacity.

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But then the tusks and the shipments started getting smaller, because the big animals are becoming harder to find, so the voyages get longer, the sea is more remote,

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and in the 1200s elephant ivory floods into Europe and the price of walrus crashes.

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Here's the problem.

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The Greenlanders needed ivory to pay for everything, because iron, timber, rain, all of it was imported.

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So when each tusk bought less, they didn't hunt less.

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They did the only thing Vikings know how to do.

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They hunted more.

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Nine times tonight, the animal died and the hunter sailed home.

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But this is the one time it ran the other direction.

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In the 15th century, after 400 years, the Norse Greenland colonies go silent.

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There's no massacre to point to, no final battle, the voyages just stopped paying, and then the voyages stopped, and then everything did.

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A lot of researchers now think that emptied walrus grounds were a central reason why.

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They had hunted the shelf bare, and the shelf was the thing holding up the whole civilization.

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Nine animals we talked about today made the Vikings richer, but the tenth made them over-dependent.

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The business was good until the beasts ran out, and then it took the hunters too.

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If you enjoyed watching this video, make sure to give it a like and comment down below what you learned about the Vikings today.

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If you'd like to watch another one of my videos, you can click the one that's on your screen

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and make sure to like this video and subscribe for more content just like this.

✨ Aanbevolen Video

30 zinnen

Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les

Deze video bevat 439 zinnen en 6189 woorden om na te spreken. Het gesproken deel duurt 32:35. De spreker praat snel, ongeveer 190 woorden per minuut, dus reken op verbonden en ingeslikte klanken. Slechts 76% van de woorden hoort bij de 3.000 meest gebruikte Engelse woorden, dus de woordenschat is pittig.

Belangrijke woorden in deze video

15 minder gangbare woorden uit de video, met uitspraak en betekenis:

whale /ˈweɪl/ (zelfstandig naamwoord) — walvis. Any large cetacean, usually with the exclusion of dolphins and porpoises.
wolf /wʊlf/ (zelfstandig naamwoord) — wolf. Canis lupus; the largest wild member of the canine subfamily.
cow /kaʊ/ (zelfstandig naamwoord) — koe. An adult female of the species Bos taurus, especially one that has calved.
falcon /ˈfælkən/ (zelfstandig naamwoord) — valk. Any bird of the genus Falco, all of which are birds of prey.
horn /hɔɹn/ (zelfstandig naamwoord) — hoorn. A hard growth of keratin that protrudes from the top of the head of certain animals, usually paired.
bone /boʊn/ (zelfstandig naamwoord) — been. A composite material consisting largely of calcium phosphate and collagen and making up the skeleton of most vertebrates.
gray /ɡɹeɪ/ (bijvoeglijk naamwoord) — grijs. Of a color between black and white, having neutral hue and intermediate brightness.
medieval /mɪdˈi.vəl/ (bijvoeglijk naamwoord) — middeleeuws, (mediaevaal) mediëvaal. Of or relating to the Middle Ages, the period from approximately 500 to 1500 AD.
ivory /ˈaɪv(ə)ɹi/ (zelfstandig naamwoord) — ivoor, ivoorkleur. The hard white form of dentin which forms the tusks of elephants, walruses and other animals.
hunter /ˈhʌntɚ/ (zelfstandig naamwoord) — jachthond. One who hunts game for sport or for food; a huntsman or huntswoman.
tooth /tuθ/ (zelfstandig naamwoord) — tand. A hard, calcareous structure present in the mouth of many vertebrate animals, generally used for biting and chewing food.
spear /spɪə̯(ɹ)/ (zelfstandig naamwoord) — speer, spies. A long stick with a sharp tip used as a weapon for throwing or thrusting, or anything used to make a thrusting motion.
predator /ˈpɹɛd.ə.tɚ/ (zelfstandig naamwoord) — roofdier n roofvis, predator. Any animal or other organism that hunts and kills other nonplant organisms (their prey), primarily for food.
unicorn /ˈju.nɪ.kɔɹn/ (zelfstandig naamwoord) — eenhoorn. A mythical, horselike creature with a horn on its forehead, supposed to be very rare and to be drawn to virgins and other chaste maidens.
symbol /ˈsɪmbəl/ (zelfstandig naamwoord) — symbool. A character or glyph representing an idea, concept or object.

Phrasal verbs die je zult horen

deal with (werkwoord) — behandelen. To handle verbally or in some form of artistic expression; to address or discuss as a subject.
figure out (werkwoord) — uitvogelen, er achter komen. To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce.
find out (werkwoord) — ontdekken, onderzoeken. To discover, as by asking or investigating.

Uitspraak om op te letten

De spreker gebruikt 45 samentrekkingen en verkorte vormen, zoals couldn't, wasn't, didn't. Spreek ze kort uit, zoals je ze hoort.

De “th”-klanken: tooth /tuθ/, breathe /bɹiːð/
De klanken “sh” en “zh”: shelf /ʃɛlf/, sheep /ˈʃiːp/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, occasionally /əˈkeɪʒənəli/, shore /ʃɔɹ/
Lange woorden — let op de klemtoon: civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, occasionally /əˈkeɪʒənəli/, naturally /ˈnæt͡ʃ.(ə.)ɹə.li/, explanation /ˌɛkspləˈneɪʃən/, evolution /ˌiːvəˈluːʃ(ə)n/

Zo oefen je met deze video

Luister de hele video één keer zonder te spreken en noteer de woorden die je niet kent.
Begin op 0,75× snelheid, spreek zin voor zin na en ga terug naar normale snelheid zodra het makkelijk gaat.
Neem jezelf op en vergelijk met het origineel; let daarbij op woorden als whale, wolf, cow.

Grammatica in deze video

De structuren die de spreker het meest gebruikt, met de exacte woorden uit de video:

Structuur	In de video
Voorwaardelijke zinnen if + zin, will/would + werkwoord — een voorwaarde en het gevolg	if I was a Viking, I would definitely · if you were a Viking, you would just
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — iets dat eerder begon en nog bezig is	you've been keeping · have been waiting
Lijdende vorm be + voltooid deelwoord — het gaat om wat er gebeurt, niet om wie het doet	being viewed · I've been kicked · be impaled
Betrekkelijke bijzinnen who / which + zin — extra informatie over een persoon of ding	Poland, which is · Yulfnar, which means · men who went

Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?

Shadowing is een wetenschappelijk onderbouwde taalleermethode die oorspronkelijk is ontwikkeld voor professionele tolkentraining en gepopulariseerd door polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. De methode is eenvoudig maar krachtig: je luistert naar native Engelse audio en herhaalt het onmiddellijk hardop — als een schaduw die de spreker volgt met slechts 1–2 seconden vertraging. In tegenstelling tot passief luisteren of grammaticadrills, dwingt shadowing je hersenen en mondspieren om echte spraakpatronen tegelijkertijd te verwerken en te reproduceren. Onderzoek toont aan dat het de uitspraaknauwkeurigheid, intonatie, ritme, verbonden spraak, luisterbegrip en spreekvaardigheid aanzienlijk verbetert — waardoor het een van de meest effectieve methoden is voor IELTS Speaking-voorbereiding en echte Engelse communicatie.

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