Vikings reached North America roughly 500 years before Christopher Columbus.

Around 1000 CE, Norse explorers associated with Leif Erikson established a settlement at what is now L’Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland, Canada. Archaeologists uncovered the site in the 1960s, and it remains the only confirmed Norse settlement in North America outside of Greenland.

Tree-ring analysis of wood found at the site, which preserves a spike in radiocarbon from a known solar storm, has even pinned the Norse presence there to the year 1021 CE with unusual precision — nearly 500 years before Columbus’s voyages began in 1492.