Despite what you may have been told, Christopher Columbus and his expedition were not the first Europeans to reach the Americas.

Almost 500 years earlier, a small group of Norse settlers arrived in what is today the island of Newfoundland.

Yet their presence on the continent was

short-lived and no one ever came after them. Learn more about how Vineland, Vikings

and Lactose Intolerance might have shaped history on this episode of

everything everywhere daily. Mind Have Shaped History on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. The idea that someone from Europe had reached the shores of North America before Columbus shouldn't really be that surprising.

If you just look at a globe, going all the way across the Atlantic is really doing it the hard way.

If you go north, it's actually much easier. You can island hop and the total distance and time

you have to spend in open water are much less. This means you don't have to have as large a

boat and it means it could have been done much earlier in history.

The Vikings tore a seafaring people.

They managed to go up and down the western coast of Europe and their long boats raiding and

settling.

Iceland was first settled between the years 870 and 930.

It's possible that there were other Europeans in Iceland before that,

but there was never a native population on the island

before the arrival of Europeans.

The original Norse settlers came from what is today Norway.

While the reasons for the initial migration to Iceland are unclear,

within those first 60 years, thousands of people settled on the island.

The estimates vary, but somewhere between 4,500

and 24,000 people migrated. Life on Iceland wasn't easy but the people there could

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