How did ancient Greenland houses stay warm at -40° with NO firewood?

Greenland has almost no trees. No forests, no logs, no fireplaces. And on the northwest coast, winter temperatures have dropped past -40°, the one temperature where Celsius and Fahrenheit say exactly the same thing. So how did people survive months of polar night in houses with nothing to burn?

The answer is some of the smartest building in human history. The Thule people, ancestors of today's Inuit, dug their homes into the frozen ground, roofed them with whale bones and turf, and built a sunken entrance tunnel that trapped the cold before it could reach the room. Then they heated everything with a single stone lamp burning seal fat.

In this video:
→ Why Greenland's first people, the Saqqaq, relied on driftwood that floated all the way from Siberia
→ The 4,000-year-old hair pulled out of the frozen ground at Qeqertasussuk, and what its DNA revealed
→ How a house sunk into the earth beats the wind and the cold
→ The "cold trap" tunnel, and the simple physics that kept freezing air out of the room
→ The qulliq, a soapstone lamp that heated, lit, cooked, and made drinking water from snow
→ Why everyone slept on a raised platform, and how a whole house became a staircase for heat
→ The Norse settlers who lived on the same island at the same time, and why they disappeared while the Thule stayed

Archaeologists excavated Thule winter houses in Inglefield Land, northwest Greenland, and found the same design again and again: a stone-paved room, a sunken tunnel up to 3 meters long, and soil around the cooking area full of burned blubber and fatty bones.

No electricity. No firewood. Just physics, figured out without ever knowing the word.

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