Viking Artifacts Give Precise Date for Europeans’ Earliest Presence in North America

A new look at wooden artifacts found amid the ruins of an ancient homestead shows that Vikings had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and settled in North America as far back as 1021—exactly 1,000 years ago and almost five centuries before Columbus’s famous voyage.

The finding represents “the first, earliest evidence for Europeans in the Americas and the first evidence that the Atlantic has been crossed in all of human history,” said Michael Dee, an expert on dating techniques at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and the senior author of a paper about the finding published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

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