Before Christopher Columbus, Vikings were the first Europeans to reach the Americas. We now know to the year when they were there. Norse people were chopping down trees in Newfoundland in the year AD 1021, so they must have crossed the Atlantic Ocean by then.
“Exactly a millennium ago, human beings for the first time in history had got across [the Atlantic],” says at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Evidence for a Norse presence in North America comes from one archaeological site: L’Anse aux Meadows, on the tip of the Great Northern Peninsula in Newfoundland, Canada. Native Americans living there had long been aware of grass-covered mounds, and assumed they were built by their ancestors. Then in the 1960s, husband-and-wife archaeologists Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad realised the mounds were ancient buildings resembling those built by Scandinavian Norse people. L’Anse aux Meadows is now .
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But pinning down when the Norse arrived has been tricky. Carbon dating has been performed on 55 Norse wooden artefacts, but the dates range from AD 793 to 1066, says , also at the University of Groningen.
Obstructions like this led archaeologists to give up on trying to date L’Anse aux Meadows. Then in 2018, researchers led by at the University of Cambridge discovered a new way to pin down the ages of wooden artefacts.
Wood from trees all around the world carries traces of unidentified astronomical events, probably relating to the sun, that create temporary spikes in the amount of radioactive carbon-14 in the atmosphere. : in AD 774 and AD 993.
After learning of this, Dee, Kuitems and their colleagues reanalysed samples of wood from L’Anse aux Meadows to look for the radiocarbon spikes. “Trees lay down annual rings,” says Dee. “If you can find that distinct signal, you know you’re dealing with that exact year.”
Next, having identified which ring contained the characteristic AD 993 radiocarbon spike, the researchers simply had to count the number of additional tree rings formed subsequently to determine the year the tree was chopped down.
The three pieces of wood they tested came from different trees, which were all cut down in the same year: AD 1021. “The result is solid,” says Büntgen. What’s more, from features on the wood it was clear that all three pieces had been cut using metal tools – which Norse people had at that time but Native Americans didn’t – confirming the presence of Europeans in the Americas 1000 years ago.
Could the Norse have arrived even earlier? It’s entirely possible, say Dee and Kuitems. Given the number and size of the buildings, Dee guesses they were there for a few years – but at present there is no way to say for sure. “I wish we could say this was the date they pulled up on the beach,” he says, “but it’s not something one can really prove.”
Unfortunately, the historical records of the Norse in North America are limited. The most contemporaneous accounts are from the Icelandic sagas. “But those are fairly fantastical tales at the best of times,” says Dee.
Despite this, knowledge of the existence of the Americas may have spread around Europe in subsequent centuries. described a document called the Cronica universalis, written by a Milanese friar named Galvaneus Flamma around AD 1340. It mentions a land called “Marckalada”, found to the west of Greenland; the name is similar to Icelandic references to North America as “Markland”.
Dee says the Milanese document isn’t unique. “The knowledge that there was land over the Atlantic sort of persevered through the medieval period,” he says. However, it isn’t clear whether it was common knowledge.
Little is known about what the Norse did while they were in North America. However, it seems likely they explored further, because there is butternut wood and nuts at L’Anse aux Meadows despite the fact butternut trees never grew so far north. “We know they did go further south,” says Dee.
Explorers they may have been, but the evidence that the Norse made a map of North America called the Vinland Map appears to have crumbled. Researchers have argued for decades over whether the map is genuine, but in September a team at Yale University announced that – suggesting it is a 20th-century fake.
Nature
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