The Vikings reached America before Columbus

At school we learned that Columbus reached America in 1492. What's rarely told is that some sailors had beaten him to it by half a millennium.

Around the year 1000, the Norse explorer Leif Erikson crossed the Atlantic from Greenland and set up a settlement in what is now Newfoundland, Canada. The site, L'Anse aux Meadows, was excavated in the 1960s and confirmed what the Icelandic sagas had told: the Vikings had set foot in America.

In 2021, a study pinned the date down even further. By analysing the rings of logs cut with metal axes (which the natives didn't use), scientists determined that the Norse were there in exactly the year 1021. Columbus didn't discover a pristine continent: he arrived late, almost five centuries behind.