Ancestral Diet Gone Toxic

Nearby lies the carcass of a narwhal, a reclusive beast with an ivory tusk like a unicorn's. Mamarut slices off a piece of muktuk, the whale's raw pink blubber and mottled gray skin, as a snack.

"Peqqinnartoq," he says in Greenlandic. Healthy food.

Mamarut's wife, Tukummeq Peary, a descendant of famed North Pole explorer Adm. Robert E. Peary, is boiling the main entree on a camp stove. The family dips hunting knives into the kettle, pulling out steaming ribs of freshly killed ringed seal and devouring the hearty meat with some hot black tea.

Living closer to the North Pole than to any city, factory or farm, the Kristiansens appear unscathed by any industrial-age ills. They live much as their ancestors did, relying on foods harvested from the sea and skills honed by generations of Inuit.

But as northbound winds carry toxic remnants of faraway lands to their hunting grounds in extraordinary amounts, their close connection to the environment and their ancestral diet of marine mammals have left the Arctic's indigenous people vulnerable to the pollutants of modern society. About 200 hazardous compounds, which migrate from industrialized regions and accumulate in ocean-dwelling animals, have been detected in the inhabitants of the far north.

The bodies of Arctic people, particularly Greenland's Inuit, contain the highest human concentrations of industrial chemicals and pesticides found anywhere on Earth -- levels so extreme that the breast milk and tissues of some Greenlanders could be classified as hazardous waste.

Nearly all Inuit tested in Greenland and more than half in Canada have levels of PCBs and mercury exceeding international health guidelines.

Perched atop a contaminated food chain, the inhabitants of the Arctic have become the industrialized world's lab rats, the involuntary subjects of an accidental human experiment demonstrating what can happen when a heaping brew of chemicals builds up in human bodies.

Studies of infants in Greenland and Arctic Canada who have been exposed in the womb and through breast milk suggest that the chemicals are harming children. Babies suffer greater rates of infections because their immune systems seem to be impaired, and their brain development is altered, slightly reducing their intelligence and memory skills.