Long before Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, there were eight timber-framed, grass-clad buildings on the edge of a swamp and stream at the northern tip of the Canadian island of Newfoundland, evidence that the Vikings were the first to reach the new World.
It has long been known that the Vikings were the first Europeans to make the long journey to the Americas, arriving in what is now Canada around the end of the first millennium.
But a new scientific article in the journal Nature is the first to establish an exact date as 1021, exactly a thousand years ago, about 5 centuries before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
And scientists said, last Wednesday, that a new type of dating technique depends on referring to the effects of a solar storm that blew long ago as a reference point in the tree rings, revealing that the settlement was inhabited in 1021 AD, that is, exactly a thousand years ago and 471 years before the journey The first for Columbus.
The findings, the oldest evidence of Viking travel to North America, provide an important context in the history of North America and European travels to the continent.
This technique was used to date 3 pieces of wood that were cut for use in the settlement, all of which refer to the same year.
However, it is not yet clear exactly when the Vikings traveled to establish the settlement of Lans or Meadow.
The journey of the Vikings represents many of the milestones for humanity, as the settlement provides the first known evidence of a successful crossing of the Atlantic.
It is also the place where humans finally managed to circumnavigate the globe completely, thousands of years after they reached North America via a land bridge that once linked Siberia to Alaska.
"A lot of praise should be given to these northern Europeans for being the first human society to cross the Atlantic," said Michael Dee, a geologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands who led the study published in the journal Nature.
Vikings
The Vikings, or the people of Scandinavia, worked as seafarers in the countries now known as Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
They often ventured across the European continent, sometimes colonizing areas, bartering goods or raiding villages at other times.
They possessed exceptional skills in boat building and navigation and established settlements in Iceland and Greenland.
"I think it is fair to describe the trip as an expedition and also a trip in search of new sources of raw materials," De said.
"Many archaeologists believe that the main motive behind their pursuit of these new lands was to discover new sources of timber, in particular. They are also generally believed to have left Greenland, where suitable timber is very scarce."
The disclosure comes in the same month that the American Yale University decided its position on the Vinland map, which depicts the Vikings' journeys from northern Europe to North America, and admitted that it was fake after deceiving historians and experts for a long time.
Since the end of the eighth century and throughout the ninth century AD, England and the European continent were under threat from the Vikings, whose violent raids were a source of fear for the population at that time, and despite the passage of more than a thousand years since the end of their era, the secrets of these northerners are still being revealed by archaeologists.
And the Vikings were Norse Germanic peoples who worked - besides wars and raids - in sea navigation and trade, and although they attacked the British and French coasts and large parts of Europe during the "Viking era" in the 8-11 centuries, the Arabs in the east came into contact with them.