The findings disrupted the “New World Order” of arrival.
Not only did Christopher Columbus not “discover” America, he was far from the first European to set foot in The New World.
Vikings adventurers reportedly arrived in the Americas 500 years before the legendary Italian explorer and navigator set foot here in 1492, according to a recent study published in the journal “Antiquity.“
“Journeys were being made from Greenland to North America throughout the entirety of the period of Norse settlement in Greenland,” wrote archaeologists from the University of Iceland, who authored the earth-shattering study, The Times Of London reported.
Scientists arrived at this bombshell after examining wood samples from five Northern sites in western Greenland that lived there between the years 1000 and 1400, per the Daily Mail.
They had set out to determine what lumber’s provenance was after examining historical records that showed that the Vikings who occupied Greenland between 985 and 1450 relied upon timber and other materials imported from Europe and the Americas.
The Scandinavian seafarers used this, along with driftwood, for the construction of artifacts, boats and more purposes for which the local lumber was adequate.
In order to determine the proportion of foreign wood, scientists analyzed its cellular structure, identifying some of the trees as Hemlock and Pine.
These species were not grown in Europe during the second millennium, leading researchers to deduce that they were sailed in from the New World.
The findings corroborated historical Viking sagas, which stated that Nordic explorers such as Leif Erickson — the alleged first European visitor to the Americas — brought wood back from Vínland, the Norse term for the region of North American coastline along the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
On a larger scale, the latest discovery meant that “resources were being acquired by the Norse from North America for far longer than previously thought.”
Prior analysis of Viking lumberjack sites at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada found wood-cutting samples that dated back to 1021 AD, per a 2021 study.
The results also confirmed that the Vikings had established multiple trade routes across the Northwest Atlantic possibly a half-millennium before Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
They potentially conducted these transatlantic voyages until just before Europe’s official Age Of Exploration began in 1400.
“These findings highlight the fact that Norse Greenlanders had the means, knowledge and appropriate vessels to cross the Davis Strait to the east coast of North America, at least up until the fourteenth century,” per the study.
Researchers concluded that by “demonstrating the range of timber sources used by the Greenland Norse,” they were able to illustrate the level of “connectivity across the medieval North Atlantic world.”
How the Greenland civilization disappeared remains a mystery. However, researchers have implicated everything from plunging temperatures to poor resource management and even plague and pirate raids.