Essay on Did the Vikings Discover America?

Did the Vikings Discover America

To start with, there’s the issue of the term discover’s Eurocentric perspective, which views the contact with the New World through the eyes of men on ships while ignoring the reality that indigenous people had long called it home.

In this sense, historians think that Asian hunters found America by crossing the Bering Strait on foot from Siberia during the previous ice age, or by boat and continuing southward along the coast. In any theory, these people arrived 13,000–35,000 years ago, long enough for their descendants to be deemed Native Americans, the continent’s indigenous peoples.

Instead of asking whether the Vikings were the first non-Native Americans to meet America, we might ask if the Vikings were the first non-Native Americans to experience America.

However, the answer to that issue is contingent on how we define America. If we’re talking about North and South America as a whole, it’s possible that Polynesians were the first to arrive.

Scientists have concluded that Polynesian explorers had an early encounter with South America and transported the sweet potato with them to Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands based on genetic research of the sweet potato, which is native to America. Scholars are persuaded that this interaction occurred before the time of Christopher Columbus, but they are unsure if it occurred before the Vikings’ trips to North America.

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