thumbnail|right|Hunting and whaling have always been important ways to make a living on Greenland. One of the animals found here is the polar bear, which is on the coat of arms of the Danish royal family in Greenland. The history of Greenland is a history of life under extreme Arctic conditions: currently, an ice sheet covers about eighty percent of the island, restricting human activity largely to the coasts. The first humans are thought to have arrived in Greenland around 2500 BCE. Their descendants apparently died out and were succeeded by several other groups migrating from continental North America. There has been no evidence discovered that Greenland was known to Norsemen until the ninth century CE, when Norse Icelandic explorers settled on its southwestern coast. The ancestors of the Greenlandic Inuit who live there today appear to have migrated there later, around the year 1200, from northwestern Greenland.
thumbnail|right|Hunting and whaling have always been important ways to make a living on Greenland. One of the animals found here is the polar bear, which is on the coat of arms of the Danish royal family in Greenland. The history of Greenland is a history of life under extreme Arctic conditions: currently, an ice sheet covers about eighty percent of the island, restricting human activity largely to the coasts. The first humans are thought to have arrived in Greenland around 2500 BCE. Their descendants apparent,ly died out and were succeeded by several other groups migrating from continental North Ameri:ca. There has been no evidence discovered that Greenland was known to Norsemen until the ninth century CE, when Norse Icelandic explorers settled on its southwestern coast. .The ancestors of the Greenlandic Inuit who live there today appear to have migrated there later, around the year 1200, f,rom northwestern Greenland.