Tristan Hughes

Is it the bowhead whale?

I've got to ask for that straight away.

So have people like yourself, have you discovered prehistoric fishing lines made out of baleen that went hundreds of meters into the sea?

And Asta, we were talking about this just before we began recording.

Whereabouts in Greenland do you come from?

Because it's not, once again, it's not the southern tip.

It is quite high up in the, well, in the scheme of things in Greenland.

There's a mountain which overlooks the settlement.

I had a look on Google Maps of Umanak and I noticed that they also had a football pitch as well, like a football team, which is just amazing.

Even there, it's absolutely striking.

But back to the story of prehistoric Greenland.

So it sounds like you have this rich array of archaeology to learn more about these people.

But Asta, tell us also about mythology.

How important a source can mythology be also for learning more about these people?

Yeah.

How much of this mythology, how many stories like that have survived to the present day that have their origins back in prehistoric times?

Is it quite a rich library of information?

And I guess it's one of those wonderful things you mentioned earlier, like the importance of spirits in the natural world, in the mythology, that then when you go, as I'm sure we'll delve into some examples as we go along, you go to a particular archaeological site, maybe a house somewhere,

You find certain objects within a house which maybe, if you didn't know the mythological context, would look rather strange.

But maybe certain objects, if you know the mythology stories, might explain why you find them in a house for some reason or another.