For years, researchers were puzzled over why Viking descendent's abandoned Greenland for their ancestral homes.
The descendants had persevered in their North Atlantic outpost for almost 500 years, from the end of the 10th century until the mid-15th century, 'SPIEGEL online' reported.
The Medieval Warm Period had made it possible for settlers from Norway, Iceland and Denmark to live on hundreds of scattered farms along the protected fjords, where they built dozens of churches and even had bishops.
Until now, many experts had assumed that the cooling of the climate and the resulting crop failures and famines had ushered in the end of the Scandinavian colony.
However, now a Danish-Canadian team of scientists believes that it can refute this theory of decline. The scientists conducted isotope analyses on hundreds of human and animal bones found on the island.
Their study paints the most detailed picture to date of the Nordic settlers' dietary habits.
As the research shows, hunger could hardly have driven the ancestors of the Vikings out of their settlements on the edge of the glaciers.
The bone analyses prove that, when the warm period came to an end, the Greenlandic farmers and ranchers switched to a seafood-based diet with surprising rapidity.
From then on, the settlers focused their efforts on hunting the seals that appeared in large numbers off the coasts of Greenland during their annual migrations.
When settlements began in the early 11th century, only between 20 and 30 per cent of their diet came from the sea.
"They ate more and more seal meat, with the animals constituting up to 80 per cent of their diet in the 14th century," said researcher Jan Heinemeier, a dating expert from the University of Aarhus, in Denmark.
Niels Lynnerup, an anthropologist and forensic scientist at the University of Copenhagen, confirmed that the Vikings of Greenland had plenty to eat even as the climate grew colder.
"Perhaps they were just sick and tired of living at the ends of the earth and having almost nothing but seals to eat," he said.
