To facilitate other researchers’ verification of our work, my partner Caroline Letkeman and I have webbed images of three of these early Aliup drawings as well as the Ilanaaq logo. Neither Inukshuks nor Aliups, naturally, are painted or colored as the logo’s parts are colored, so we colored one of the Aliup images as Ilanaaq is colored to assist in the comparing process.

It is well known that the original Aliup’s briefs were made from a wildcat’s hide, and even when they all roamed the earth together the hides were not blue. There was certainly style back then, however, so the wildcat hides most probably would have been colored blue using naturally occurring vegetable dyes. There were only primitive detergents in existence way back a long time ago, so wildcat hide gonchies, after a period of hard wear, and also quite naturally, could very well have acquired a bluish tone.

The Aliups in the early original records that were still available to us were almost always drawn without shirts or jackets, so why Ilanaaq sported that even darker blue stripe job a space above his blue shorts remained a riddle within our bigger mystery for some time. We solved it by striking on a basic question: If ultraviolet radiation levels had been then what they are now, and you had abs like the Aliup of old, what would you wear?

The answer that now seems so obvious is, obviously, a crop top. Sure enough, when we gave him a long sleeve crop top, made out of a darker shade of blue wildcat hide, what to our wondering eyes should appear, but the stripe! The long sleeves would make total sense to the Inuit because being cool and staying warm have been factors in all their lives since time immemorial.

In the search for Ilanaaq’s provenance, and for his progenitors, since it had been generally agreed by then he was hominid, the greatest amount of controversy has swirled around his skull, this great green block of a head with a mammoth mouth. It was Ilanaaq’s mouth, which cut half way through his head, that would lead just about anyone not an archeologist or with a past like mine to think the creators had been playing God with Pacman.

What had confronted us from the beginning and seemed an insurmountable problem was the fact that in all of the authentic original early drawings, Aliup always had a head full of hair, yet the admittedly stylized Ilanaaq is squarely hairless. This glaring contradiction would actually provide a vital piece of our proof. Applying occam’s razor, Ilanaaq’s creators had simply, and in all likelihood inadvertently, deleted his hair. When we equally simply reversed the process, adding a head full of hair to Ilanaaq, eureka, we had our guy.

The color of Ilanaaq’s indelibly green head, as it turned out, presented no major difficulty. Before we could count to four we were knuckled in our own heads with the answer: Face paint. An early Roughriders fan would do as much, a fact that supports the idea that Ilanaaq represents all of Canada. But “B.C. Green,” which on a color wheel is only a couple of spokes bluer than Ilanaaq’s head, gets 11,000 results on Google, whereas “Roughrider Green” gets only 19. These stats would make me think that Ilanaaq, plus, for the purposes of the games at least, Aliup, are peculiarly British Columbian, or at least peculiarly Pre-British Columbian. It really wasn’t necessary, however, to divine their motivation to validate our investigatory suspicions. When we did nothing more that apply ordinary face paint to Aliup, the color immediately became apparent: green.

Particular thanks to V.T. Hamlin, whose pioneering work with the original Aliups made our research and analysis possible.

The final barrier to a scientifically positive comparison was that virtually all of the available original drawings of Aliup are front or three-quarter views of his head, and the Ilanaaq logo is a profile. Fortuitously, and at the last moment, we unearthed a very rare early silhouette drawing of Aliup, in perfect profile. Employing the techniques of advanced phrenology and electronic metoposcopy, which had not been possible for researchers in other eras, we were able to obtain a virtually flawless match. Ilanaaq, with or without a head full of hair, is Aliup.

© 2005 Gerry Armstrong and Caroline Letkeman