FactSentinel

Norse explorers reached North America roughly 500 years before Columbus's first voyage in 1492. The Icelandic sagas describe Viking voyages to lands they called Vinland, led by figures such as Leif Erikson around the year 1000. These accounts were long treated with skepticism, but archaeology confirmed them. At L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland, Canada, excavations in the 1960s uncovered the remains of Norse-style timber-and-turf buildings, iron working, and artifacts of clear Scandinavian origin. The site was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978. In 2021, researchers used a solar-storm signature in tree rings to date cut wood at the site to exactly 1021 CE, giving the most precise evidence yet of European presence in the Americas before Columbus.

Columbus also never set foot on the North American mainland. His four voyages, beginning in 1492, took him to Caribbean islands, and later to the coasts of Central and South America. Many historians also note that the Americas were already home to millions of people with complex societies, so the idea of Europeans "discovering" the continents is itself misleading.

The claim persists largely because of how history is taught. Columbus's voyages were the ones that led to sustained contact and colonization between Europe and the Americas, which makes them historically transformative. But being the most consequential European arrival is not the same as being the first. Scholars generally credit the Norse with that distinction.