Who Discovered America Before Columbus?

Many university scholars have studied the runestone, and it was on display at the Smithsonian Institution in 1948. Most scholars have concluded the runes are fake, but others insist the stone is the real thing.

The idea of Vikings venturing inland continues to intrigue people, but there is no proof to date that the Norse sailed into Hudson Bay or through the Great Lakes.

In 1969, modern explorer Thor Heyerdahl successfully sailed across the Atlantic in an Egyptian reed boat to prove that the ancient Egyptians could have done it. The Greeks and Phoenicians had ocean-going vessels, too. Did any of them cross the Atlantic? No one knows.

There is a persistent legend that a Welsh prince named Madoc arrived in North America in 1170. This story was retold in 1580 to persuade Queen Elizabeth I of England that much of North America belonged to the British.

Explorers who visited or lived with the Mandan people of North Dakota, including the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804-05 and nineteenth-century painter George Catlin, reported that their language was so similar to Welsh that the Mandan people understood it. However, a Welsh traveller named John Evans spent the winter of 1796-97 with the Mandans while searching for the “Welsh Indians”. His conclusion? There weren’t any. If Lewis and Clark found Mandans who understood Welsh, the Mandans had probably learned it from Evans eight years earlier.

It is harder to explain why, prior to known European contact, so many Mandans were light skinned and had brown, blonde or red hair and blue or hazel eyes, instead of having black hair, brown eyes and darker skin like their neighbours. Some people suggest a Norse influence, but the land of the Mandans was a long way from the coastal waters of the Atlantic.

An analysis of Mandan DNA might solve this mystery, but the Mandans were nearly wiped out by smallpox in the 1800s. The few survivors were adopted into other tribes, and intermarriage with those tribes and with people of other nationalities makes it impossible to arrive at an answer using DNA from living Mandan descendants, if any could be found.

The most recent claimant to have discovered America is China. In 2002, amateur historian Gavin Menzies wrote a book claiming that the Chinese Chinese admiral Zheng sailed to North America  in 1421. Four years later, a Chinese lawyer went public with a map supposedly dated 1418 which showed North and South America. The map has been declared a copy of a European map made later in the century, but its origins remain unclear.

Another claim lies with a Scottish earl from Orkney named Sir Henry Sinclair, who supposedly arrived in North America in 1397 on the first of several voyages he made to the New World.

Even if the Chinese or the Scots or the Irish or the Welsh or the Greeks or even the Phoenecians did arrive in North America before the Norse and well before Columbus, the simple fact remains that none of them, not even the Norse, "discovered" America.

Thousands of years ago, the ancestors of today’s Native people were the first to explore the continent, arriving over the Bering land bridge or by sea. So who discovered America? They did.

If your curiosity has been piqued about the stories of these various voyages to the Americas, give these books a try! Whether filled with truths, speculation or a mix of both, they will reveal the complexity of unravelling the true early history of the Americas.