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Comment by Thoeu388 | Hacker News Reader

There is Viking settlement somewhere in North America from 11th century.

Not only were the Vikings in North America that early, but they were trading with the locals[0]. This might seem moot at first blush, seeing as these beads were found in Alaska--3,000 miles away from newfoundland! But once you recall that both places fell within the range of the Inuit (who were masters of transportation over water!) the distance hardly seems like an impediment.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leif_Erikson#Norse_encounters_... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland

If I understand right, there is theorised to maybe have been one, the jury is still out on whether the tales of vikings reaching america are true and exactly what and where they reached.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Anse_aux_Meadows

Technically Newfoundland is an island, but I would call that North America

So are Bahamas, Cuba and Haiti.

Even Greenland usually counts as North America unless you explicitly exclude it, as the cited Wikipedia article does: "L'Anse aux Meadows is the only undisputed site of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact of Europeans with the Americas outside of Greenland."

But they didn't exclude Icecland! To a geologist, perhaps even parts of Iceland count as North America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_Ridge#/media/File...

The geology is just a happy accident of naming. Continents aren't defined by plates. Europe and Asia share a plate, except for a bit of western Siberia that's on the North American plate. The Americas have 3-7 different plates, but only 1-2 continents.

Continents aren't defined by anything.

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Continents-Critique-Metageograph...

I'm in SE Canada a region called The Maritimes and supposedly there is evidence of Vikings visiting here. I'm West of Newfoundland but also an island. But Nova Scotia and even Maine in the US may have been visited by Vikings.

> Technically Newfoundland is an island

For anyone who says this I wonder if they are consistent with how they discuss continents:

- They take care to talk about the Caribbean as something in the waters near North America but not in North America itself

- They talk about Indonesia as something that is in the waters close to Asia and Australia—no need for “Oceania” obviously

- Madagascar as an island next to Africa

And so on and so on.

I have never seen anyone claim that this didn’t happen. In particular I have never seen evidence against L'Anse aux Meadows.

This was probably right until the 1960s or so, but there is conclusive evidence that they at least reached Newfoundland, and there is some other newer evidence of settlements on Baffin Island as well.

Any accurately dated artifact?

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