It's a discovery that seems to settle the case for good. The Vikings beat Christopher Columbus to North America.

It wasn't even a close race either with the Vikings getting here at least 500 years

before anyone else and the proof was found in an unusual place.

You see tree farms were important to the Vikings.

After all when you think about their culture you think of two things,

axes and long ships and to build those ships they needed lumber.

So naturally the Vikings became very good at managing and sourcing such an essential resource.

Well a recent study published in the journal Antiquity examined

1,000-year-old lumber used by Vikings in Greenland, and while a lot of the wood

came from tree species exclusive to Europe, some of it came from another place, trees only

known to grow in Canada and modern day New England. In other words, the Vikings had

come here to get it.

One way to look at this revelation is that the notion of home is never simple.

We might live in one place or even pick up and move to another, but we carry little pieces of our past with us every step of the way.

Oftentimes those things are physical and visible, like heirlooms or relics from our past.

After all, anyone with a basement or a garage probably has at least one box of childhood

toys in it.

For me, it's a lot of Star Wars and Transformers from the 1980s.

But obviously, many of the things we transport from place to place aren't as easy to see.

We bring our cultures, our languages, and our family or faith traditions with us transplanting them into new soil

hoping that they take root and grow and of course we also bring our baggage, our

struggles, our flaws, even our biggest failures.

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