Vikings reached America 500 years before Columbus

At L’Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland, Norse explorers from Greenland established a small base of timber-and-sod buildings around the year 1000 — roughly 500 years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic.

Discovered in 1960, it is the only authenticated Norse site in North America outside Greenland, and the first known evidence of Europeans reaching the Americas. Archaeologists have uncovered dwellings, a forge and workshops; tree-ring analysis has pinned Norse activity there to as precisely as the year 1021.

The settlement was short-lived, abandoned after just a few years, and from it the Norse appear to have explored Atlantic Canada further south. It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, recognised as the earliest confirmed European presence in the New World.