We all know when and how the American continent was discovered — let us not delve into the unnerving diatribe about “discovering” vs “conquering” here: there’ll be a lot of that around Columbus Day, in October.  It was the Fall of 1492 when good, old Christopher Columbus sailed into the New World, thinking to have reached the Indies: it was the start of a new era in the history of Humanity. Plenty of other expeditions followed, all well documented. 

However, historians have been playing  for quite a while with the idea that those late Renaissance trips to the Americas were not the first. Recent research, in fact, seems to have proved with a relative degree of certainty that the Vikings had made it to the American continent as early as the 10th century.