Archaeologists found proof Vikings reached North America 500 years before Columbus
In the 1960s, Norwegian explorers Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad excavated the remains of a Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, carbon-dated to around 1000 AD. It's the only confirmed Viking site in North America, matching old Icelandic sagas describing a westward land called Vinland. The find pushed back confirmed European contact with the Americas by nearly five centuries.