Environmentalists vs Inuit. And as we all know, the scientists are always right. Even if they don’t live anywhere near the polar bears, they’re always right.

“Nunavut is really not addressing the science, and to date there has not been any report released to back up the position of Nunavut.”

Speaking of science, the polar bear emerged as a species roughly 110,000-130,000 years ago, diverging from the brown bear as it migrated north. It was only about 10,000 years ago that Polar bears changed their molar teeth significantly to adapt to the mainly carnivorous diet during the last glaciation period.

Mankind is currently a part of the Cenozoic era between mass extinctions that periodically wipe out all life on Earth. Bears emerged in the late Eocene to early middle Miocene [38-18 million years], but did not emerge into the recognizable animal we know by sight until the Pliocene period about 4 million years ago. Polar Bears are an evolutionary divergence caused by the glacial Pleistocene epoch, in which we are still technically experiencing, with this species emerging in its current form during the Holocene, a time coinciding with the advent of mankind’s entire recorded history.

Hence, polar bears have been around two-hundredths of 1 per cent of the third era of complex life forms on the planet. If this species is merely an adaption to the last glacial maximum, I don’t see why mankind is so surprised to see them disappear with the retreat of the polar ice.