Vikings were in America by 1021, 471 years before Columbus

Norse explorers from Greenland were cutting wood at L’Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland, in the year 1021, which is 471 years before Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492. It is the earliest year in which Europeans can be shown scientifically to have been in the Americas, and the site remains the only confirmed Norse settlement on the continent.

The popular figure of “500 years before Columbus” is a rounding of the traditional date of about 1000, which came from the Icelandic sagas. Those began as oral stories and were written down centuries later, so they could not give a reliable year.

How the year 1021 was pinned down

In 992 a powerful solar storm sent a burst of radiation into the atmosphere, and trees around the world laid down extra radiocarbon in their ring for 993. A University of Groningen team led by Michael Dee and Margot Kuitems, publishing in Nature in 2021, found that spike in three pieces of wood from Norse layers at the site, each from a different tree and each cut with metal blades, which the local Indigenous people did not make. In all three the signal sat 29 growth rings in from the bark, so the trees were felled in 1021.

The date says the Norse were there that year, not when they first arrived or how long they stayed. The rest of the evidence suggests a short-lived base rather than a colony. Local resident George Decker led Helge Ingstad to the site in 1960, and excavations by the Ingstads and later Parks Canada uncovered eight buildings in all.

The bog beside them held butternuts, butternut wood and linden chips. Butternut trees grow no further north than eastern New Brunswick, so somebody had sailed into the Gulf of St Lawrence. Butternuts ripen in the same places and season as wild grapes, which is the likeliest reason the Norse called the region Vinland. Nearly five centuries later, Columbus made his first landfall much further south.