The culture and people are named after Cape Dorset (now Kinngait) in Nunavut, Canada, where the first evidence of its existence was found.

The culture has been defined as having four phases due to the distinct differences in the technologies relating to hunting and tool making.

Artifacts include distinctive triangular end-blades, oil lamps (qulliq) made of soapstone, and burins.

The Thule people, who began migrating east from Alaska in the 11th century, ended up spreading through the lands previously inhabited by the Dorset.

"[1] Inuit legends recount them encountering people they called the Tuniit (in syllabics: ᑐᓃᑦ, singular ᑐᓂᖅ Tuniq).

According to legend, the first inhabitants were giants, taller and stronger than the Inuit but afraid to interact and "easily put to flight".

The Dorset were highly adapted to living in a very cold climate, and much of their food is thought to have been from hunting sea mammals that breathe through holes in the ice.

[3] Scientists have suggested that they disappeared because they were unable to adapt to climate change[4] or that they were vulnerable to newly introduced disease.

The Dorset culture was remarkably homogeneous across the Canadian Arctic, but there were some important variations which have been noted in both Greenland and Newfoundland / Labrador regions.

[7] The Dorset people, for instance, engaged in seal-hole hunting, a method which requires several steps and includes the use of dogs.

Settlement pattern data has been used to claim that the Dorset also extensively used a breathing-hole sealing technique and perhaps they would have taught this to the Inuit.

[11] A genetic study published in Science in August 2014 examined the remains of nineteen Dorset people buried in Canada and Greenland between c. 170 BCE and 1320 CE.

The authors of the study suggested that the ancestors of the Saqqaq and Dorset entered North America from Siberia in a single distinct migration about 4000 BCE, after which they remained genetically largely isolated for thousands of years.