Before Christopher Columbus, Vikings were the first Europeans to reach the Americas. We now know to the year when they were there. Norse people were chopping down trees in Newfoundland in the year AD 1021, so they must have crossed the Atlantic Ocean by then.
“Exactly a millennium ago, human beings for the first time in history had got across [the Atlantic],” says Michael Dee at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
Evidence for a Norse presence in North …
Source: Humans - newscientist.com