Christopher Columbus is famous for “discovering” America in 1492. But Norse Vikings beat him there by almost 500 years. Around the year 1000 CE, an explorer named Leif Erikson sailed west from Greenland and landed in a place he called Vinland - what we now call Newfoundland in Canada.
The story was told in old Icelandic sagas, but for centuries nobody knew if it was real. Then in 1960, a Norwegian husband-and-wife team of explorers found the remains of a Viking village at L’Anse aux Meadows on the tip of Newfoundland. They dug up Norse buildings, an iron-smelting workshop, and even a bronze cloak pin.
In 2021, scientists used tree rings from the buildings to pin down the exact year: 1021 CE. That makes it the earliest confirmed European settlement in the Americas. The Vikings didn’t stay long - but they were the first Europeans to make it across, long after Indigenous peoples had already been living in the Americas for thousands of years.
