Solar storm confirms Vikings settled in North America exactly 1,000 years ago
Analysis of wood from timber-framed buildings in Newfoundland shows Norse-built settlement 471 years before Columbus
Caroline Davies
Thu 21 Oct 2021 09.57 EDT
Half a millennium before Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, the Vikings reached the “New World”, as the remains of timber buildings at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Canada’s Newfoundland testify.
The Icelandic sagas – oral histories written down hundreds of years later – tell of a leader named Leif Erikson and a settlement called “Vinland”, assumed to be coastal North America. But while it is known that the Norse landed in Canada, exactly when they set up camp to become the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic, marking the moment when the globe was first known to have been encircled by humans, has remained imprecise.
Now scientists using a new type of dating technique and taking a long-ago solar storm as their reference point have established that the settlement was occupied in AD1021 – all by examining tree rings.
Three juniper and fir logs that were cut from the Newfoundland settlement date it to exactly a millennium ago, 471 years before Columbus’s first voyage.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/oct/20/vikings-settled-north-america-1000-years-ago-solar-storm
Is the world "encircled by humans" now?
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