What is "paleo-eskimo"

The Paleo-Eskimo (also pre-Thule or pre-Inuit) were the peoples who inhabited the Arctic region from Chukotka (e.g., Chertov Ovrag) in present-day Russia across North America to Greenland prior to the rise of the modern Inuit or Eskimo and related cultures. The first known Paleo-Eskimo cultures developed by 2500 BCE, but were gradually displaced in most of the region, with the last one, the Dorset culture, disappearing around 1500 CE.

Paleo-Eskimo groups included the Pre-Dorset; the Saqqaq culture of Greenland (2500 – 800 BCE); the Independence I and Independence II cultures of northeastern Canada and Greenland (c. 2400 – 1800 BCE and c. 800 – 1 BCE); the Groswater of Labrador and Nunavik, and the Dorset culture (500 BCE to 1500 CE), which spread across Arctic North America. The Dorset were the last major Paleo-Eskimo culture in the Arctic before the migration east from present-day Alaska of the Thule, the ancestors of the modern Inuit.