When was us discovered

Their migrations continued southward down the continents, with various peoples adapting to new environments as necessary. A second group, Norwegian sailors called Vikings, probably reached America about the year Viking sagas suggest that Leif Ericson or his son was the first European to set foot on the North American continent at a place the Norsemen called Vinland, which may have been south of Newfoundland, though its site is the subject of controversy.

Repeated fights with natives, called Skraelings, ended their visits around Almost five hundred years later in Europe, a new spirit of curiosity was sparked by the Renaissance and trade with the distant Indies and China. Christopher Columbus, a Genoese sailor seeking a new route to the East Indies, sailed west across the Atlantic Ocean, finding land probably at what he called San Salvador on October 12, While translations of sagas telling the Leif Erikson story have long been readily available, finding hard evidence was more difficult.

The Kensington Stone, a rune-covered slab unearthed on a Minnesota farm in that purportedly describes a voyage to Vinland in , is today widely believed to be a modern forgery. But, even though Erikson arrived in Canada instead of the U. And yet both holidays have become a source of pride, for Italian-Americans and Scandinavian-Americans, and have become opportunities for these groups to raise awareness about their roles in the American story. Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia.

By Olivia B. Get our History Newsletter. Put today's news in context and see highlights from the archives. Please enter a valid email address. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now. Truth was, he was in the Bahamas. He did a little more exploring and then returned to Spain, possibly taking syphilis with him. By , the Florentine merchant and explorer Amerigo Vespucci had figured out that Columbus was wrong, and word of a New World had spread throughout Europe.

America was later named for Vespucci. And, as researchers now recognize, neither man was actually the first to discover the Americas. There were, of course, the natives already here.

There was Ericsson. And there were others.