“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” That little rhyme for decades was the shorthand memory tool for remembering when the Americas were “discovered” by Europeans.
Of course, there were already people inhabiting the continent when those ships full of Spaniards arrived. And now, scientists believe they’ve confirmed that Chris and his crew weren’t even the first Europeans to make their way across the Atlantic Ocean and settle in the “new world.”
In 1960, Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstand and archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, a husband-and-wife research duo, found the remains of what appeared to be a Viking settlement in Newfoundland. Named L’Anse aux Meadows, which can be translated as “the bay with the grasslands,” the site has been studied by scientists for decades, and now they believe they finally have some answers.
In research published Wednesday in Nature, scientists announced that using tree rings that contained the imprint of a rare solar storm, they believe the site was settled in A.D.
1021.
That would make it exactly 1,000 years old this year and would predate Columbus’s voyage by more than 450 years.
Researchers utilized three pieces of wood cut from different trees by the Viking settlers.
Scientists know they were cut by the Vikings because the Vikings used tools made of metal, which cut with greater precision and made cleaner cuts, according to researcher Margot Kuitems of the University of Groningen.
“The local people didn’t use metal tools,” she said.
Scientists were able to use tree rings to determine the point in time that the cuts were made because they had another reference point: a Miyake event. Named for its discoverer Fusa Miyake, the occurrence causes a spike in radiocarbon levels in tree rings.
“At the moment we only have three or four in all of the last 10,000 years,” said Michael Dee, a University of Groningen geoscientist. One of them happened to occur during the Viking age from A.D. 992 to 993. The three samples they had in their possession all showed the same distance from the Miyake event to the point when Vikings sunk metal tools into the wood: A.D. 1021.
However, having an exact date of the settlement doesn’t answer all of science’s questions, and researchers will continue to delve into the mysteries of L’Anse aux Meadows for the foreseeable future.
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