Very old forests used by the Vikings who inhabited northern Europe are helping to demystify one of the most studied consensuses in schools: who discovered America? The answer is on the tip of the tongue: Christopher Columbus in 1442. But the truth may not be the same as we’ve always been taught.
Before we continue, it’s worth noting that history is a living science. There are people who say that those who devote themselves to this knowledge live from an unchanging past, but this thought is dead wrong. New discoveries, discoveries and forgotten documents can reshape what we have long thought to be the right thing to do. This applies to our understanding of prehistory, but also to more recent events that would have happened around 700 years ago, such as the likely presence of the Vikings.
How can pieces of wood change the history of America’s explorers?
University of Iceland scientist and archaeologist Lísabet Guðmundsdóttir, while studying wooden fragments found in Greenland and dating back more than 700 years using microscopy, may have found a clue that the Vikings were in America before Columbus.
The point is that these logs were removed from five regions inhabited by the Vikings in West Greenland between 1000 and 1400 and brought to the laboratory. Although most of the tree species analyzed originated from the European continent, some species did not exist there and were distributed in North America possibly in the Canadian Rockies. These are cases of pine (Pinus banksiana) or even exotic conifers of the genus Tsuga.
The most likely hypothesis defended by Guðmundsdóttir is that these exotic trees were “imported” from North America for the Viking groups. “These discoveries underscore the fact that the Norse Greenlanders from at least the 14th
Why did the Vikings search for wood from so far away?
The idea proposed by the researcher would be something similar to what the Portuguese did in Brazil when they took away trunks of the native tree PauBrasil (Paubrasilia echinata). Furthermore, Guðmundsdóttir suggests that wood from North America represented a kind of Vikingage luxury, only adopted in the buildings of the local elite.
Although the evidence for importing timber is more solid, there were reports from 14th century (13011400) Italy that the Vikings had reached North America long before Columbus. The discovery of the latest document was made by Paolo Chiesa of the University of Milan and published in the journal Terrae Incognitae.
Source: Antiquity and Terrae Incognitae