Just five years later, in , Thorfinn the Valiant supplied three ships with livestock and men and women — a proper colony.
Accounts differ as to what happened to this colony, but the sagas mention a peace agreement between the indigenous peoples and the Norsemen. So, we have solid evidence that Vikings — Leif and his extended family — visited America and remained then for at least 10 years.
Feeling threatened and outnumbered, the Vikings presumably left, though they likely returned from time to time to trade. Another interesting piece of evidence was recently found by researchers analyzing Viking tombs: teeth filing. Researchers believe that the Vikings learned the practice from some other culture, but teeth filing was not done by any European culture. The only culture to employ such a practice was in America. Another population who probably visited America way before Columbus are the Polynesians.
The main clue for this behavior is the inconspicuous sweet potato yam. The oldest carbonized sweet potato evidence in the Pacific hails back to about 1, A. However, French scientists found better samples from a herbarium collected by early European explorers. Through genetic analysis, they were able to show that Polynesians took the sweet potatoes from America and spread them across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, where they are now ubiquitous. There are also studies which link Brazilian DNA to that of Polynesians, though another recent study put the findings under question.
It seems very likely that Polynesians did reach America and established some kind of trade route. Another intriguing analysis on Peruvian mummies found that at least one such mummy had been embalmed using resin from a tree that only grew only in Oceania and New Guinea. Both the mummy and the tree were dated to AD.
Polynesian sailors probably also visited South America. Truth was, he was in the Bahamas. He did a little more exploring and then returned to Spain, possibly taking syphilis with him. By , the Florentine merchant and explorer Amerigo Vespucci had figured out that Columbus was wrong, and word of a New World had spread throughout Europe.
America was later named for Vespucci. And, as researchers now recognize, neither man was actually the first to discover the Americas. There were, of course, the natives already here. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Columbus Day is a U. It was unofficially celebrated in a number of cities and states as early as the 18th century, but did not become a More than years after he "discovered" the New World—kicking off centuries of exploration and colonization of the Americas—Christopher Columbus is honored with a federal holiday on the second Monday of every October. However, as historians have continued to dig into the life Christopher Columbus has long been exalted as a heroic figure in American history: the first explorer to establish a European presence in the New World.
Americans have celebrated his arrival as far back as , the th anniversary of his landing. But it would take almost Forget those myths perpetuated by everyone from Washington Irving to Bugs Bunny. There was no need for Columbus to debunk the flat-earthers—the ancient Greeks had already done so.
As early as the sixth century B. In search of fame and fortune, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan c.
En route he discovered what is now known as the Strait of Magellan and became the The story of North American exploration spans an entire millennium and involves a wide array of European powers and uniquely American characters. A decade later, he was serving as governor of the eastern province of Hispaniola when he decided to explore a nearby island, which became John Cabot or Giovanni Caboto, as he was known in Italian was an Italian explorer and navigator who may have developed the idea of sailing westward to reach the riches of Asia while working for a Venetian merchant.
Wisconsin is considered the first U. State to recognize Leif Erikson Day, in For a while, the choice of which explorer to applaud was a controversial political issue , but eventually boosters for both decided they could live in harmony. By , seven states, mostly in the Midwest, hosted some sort observance for the explorer. While translations of sagas telling the Leif Erikson story have long been readily available, finding hard evidence was more difficult.
The Kensington Stone, a rune-covered slab unearthed on a Minnesota farm in that purportedly describes a voyage to Vinland in , is today widely believed to be a modern forgery. But, even though Erikson arrived in Canada instead of the U. And yet both holidays have become a source of pride, for Italian-Americans and Scandinavian-Americans, and have become opportunities for these groups to raise awareness about their roles in the American story.
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