Possible expeditions from Eurasia and Africa to the Americas before Christopher Columbus. Although Columbus has long been celebrated in popular imagination as the discoverer of the New World, historians now recognize that he was only one, and not necessarily the first, of many early explorers of the Western Hemisphere. Columbus who insisted throughout his life that he had discovered a sea route to the East Indies was preceded by Norse explorers nearly 500 years earlier. In the early 1960s, excavations at L’Anse aux Meadows at the very north of Newfoundland revealed a Viking settlement dating from about 1000 C.E., concrete evidence of a European presence in America before Columbus.<\/p>\n
The first Precolumbian discovery of America took place in the very distant past, between about 30,000 and 10,000 B.C.E., during the ice ages, when ethnic Asians crossed a land bridge over the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska. They were probably neolithic hunters who followed migrating herds of animals through an ice- free corridor into what is now the United States. These neolithic hunters became the ancestors of the Native Americans and during the millennia spread from the far northwestern corner of North America to the extreme southern tip of Tierra del Fuego in modern Chile.<\/p>\n
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Possible expeditions from Eurasia and Africa to the Americas before Christopher Columbus. Although Columbus has long been celebrated in popular imagination as the discoverer of the New World, historians now recognize that he was only one, and not necessarily the first, of many early explorers of the Western Hemisphere. Columbus who insisted throughout his life […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-p"],"yoast_head":"\n