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Long before the ancestors of today's Inuit spread across the Arctic, a different people made the far north their home. Archaeologists call them the Dorset, after Cape Dorset on Baffin Island where their remains were first recognized; Inuit oral tradition remembers them as the Tuniit. Growing out of the earlier Pre-Dorset tradition around 500 BCE, Dorset people occupied the coasts of Arctic Canada, Labrador, and Greenland for some fifteen centuries. They were master cold-country hunters who lived in small, mobile bands, taking seals at their breathing holes through the winter ice, hunting caribou and muskox on land, and lighting their snow houses and sod-walled dwellings with soapstone lamps burning seal oil.
Dorset life left few grand monuments, but it produced one of the most striking small-scale art traditions in the ancient Americas. Dorset carvers shaped walrus ivory, antler, bone, and driftwood into miniature bears, seals, falcons, human figures, and masks, many of them probably used in hunting rituals or shamanic practice. The famous 'swimming bears', only a few centimetres long, show bears gliding through water with an ease that speaks to long observation of Arctic animals. Unlike their successors, the Dorset apparently made little or no use of dogsleds, large skin boats, or the bow and arrow, which shaped both their hunting style and their vulnerability.
Dorset fortunes turned with the climate. After about 1000 CE a warming period shifted sea-ice patterns and game routes, and at the same time the Thule people, ancestors of the modern Inuit, moved rapidly eastward from Alaska with dog teams, large boats, and whale-hunting gear. Dorset communities disappeared as Thule settlements spread; the nature and extent of contact remain debated. The Sadlermiut of Southampton Island, who survived until disease carried by whalers destroyed them in 1902-03, were long thought to be the last Dorset; modern genetic study has shown they were in fact of Thule, not Dorset, descent.
The Dorset were recognized as a distinct culture only in 1925, when archaeologist Diamond Jenness separated their strange artifacts from those of other Arctic peoples. Genetic studies have since confirmed that they were a separate population, largely replaced rather than absorbed by the Thule. Their tiny carvings, now held in museums across the world, remain the most eloquent testimony to a hardy people who thrived for longer than a millennium in one of Earth's harshest environments.
Britannica: Dorset culture
The Canadian Encyclopedia: Dorset Culture