It begs the question then of what happened to them? Did they integrate with existing Native Americans? Or did they just die out? Are there stories from Native Americans in the area that report Norsemen in the area?
> Did they integrate with existing Native Americans?
According to the article, no:
"The Icelandic sagas suggest that the Norse engaged in cultural exchanges with the Indigenous groups of North America. If these encounters indeed occurred, they may have had inadvertent outcomes, such as pathogen transmission, the introduction of foreign flora and fauna species, or even the exchange of human genetic information. Recent data from the Norse Greenlandic population, however, show no evidence of the last of these. It is a matter for future research how the year AD 1021 relates to overall transatlantic activity by the Norse. Nonetheless, our findings provide a chronological anchor for further investigations into the consequences of their westernmost expansion."
edit: re-reading this, they may have if they never returned to Greenland
They sailed home to Greenland, presumably, and wrote about their adventures in sagas.
Unfortunately the indigenous peoples of Newfoundland (the Beothuk) were forced into starvation by the encroachment of European fishermen, so we don't have a lot of knowledge of their folklore or oral traditions.
There are different theories. I enjoyed this exploration of the topic.
>One of the most unlikely tales of a society’s fall is the incredible saga of the Vikings of Greenland. Find out how these European settlers built a society on the farthest edge of their world, and survived for centuries among some of the harshest conditions ever faced by man. Discover how this civilization was able to overcome the odds for so long, and examine the evidence about what happened to cause its final and mysterious collapse. Including Viking poetry, Inuit folktales and thousands upon thousands of walrus.
I wonder if they could check the DNA of the natives that were originally from that area for any "old" Europeans markers or if there was too much mixing from the colonization for such a thing to work.
Neither the Dorset nor Beothuk people overlapped in that particular place at that time. Newfoundland is an (enormous) island, and while there were various migrations over time there is no record of other peoples c1000 in that (rather inhospitable) site.
