Earlier it was believed that Christopher Columbus discovered America on October 12, 1492. The navigator mistook her for India, in search of the "western route" to which his expedition set off.
First settlement
However, it has been established that the Scandinavian Vikings from Greenland - Eirik the Red and his son Leif Eiriksson, became the first navigators from Europe to appear off the coast of America, and 500 years earlier than Columbus.
In 1004, Leif landed for the first time on the coast of North America, on the Labrador Peninsula and the island of Newfoundland.
These and subsequent events are reflected in the famous Icelandic sagas. So, in the "Saga of the Greenlanders" it is said that at first the Vikings sailed to the land covered with stone and glaciers, and named it Helluland - the Land of stone slabs. Moving south, they saw a flat, wooded land, which was named Markland - Forest Land. Moving on, they came to the shore on which wild grapes grew. Leif named the area Vinland - Grape Country. The Scandinavians failed to gain a foothold in the newly discovered lands due to the hostility of the natives.
In 1960, in Newfoundland, in the town of Lance aux Meadows, an archaeological expedition of the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad discovered the ruins of a Scandinavian settlement, remnants of clothing, and traces of metal smelting. In 1978, a UNESCO conference recognized it as the first authentic Scandinavian settlement in North America.
Promotional video:
Yale Fake
In 1965, the oldest in the United States, Yale University published a geographical map, which, in addition to the Atlantic coasts of Europe and Africa, depicted Iceland and Greenland, and even to the west - a large island designated as Vinland Island. On the map there is neither the date of its compilation, nor the name of the cartographer, but scientists have determined that it was drawn no later than 1440 - half a century before the voyage of Columbus. The Scandinavian Vikings, who by that time had lived in the northern lands of America, were not suspected of the authorship of the map, but it was immediately recognized as the most significant cartographic discovery of the 20th century.
However, there were scientists who began to look for evidence of forgery of this historical document. Ten years later, it was discovered that the ink used to draw the map included a pigment containing titanium. And they learned to make such a pigment only in the XX century. Skeptics triumphed, considering their "discovery" convincing proof that the map was a fake.
But in 1980, physicists from the University of California, led by Dr. Thomas Cahill, irradiated a map with a proton beam and found that titanium is contained in ink only in trace amounts. Dr. Cahill proposed a reexamination of the cartographic rarity.
On February 26, 1996, the London Times wrote that at a recent symposium at Yale University, Cahill presented new facts about the study of the map to the scientific community. He reported that several ancient printed books, the authenticity of which is beyond doubt, were subjected to the same proton beam irradiation, and the ink used to print these tomes contained more titanium than the ink used to draw the Yale map. Thus, the "evidence" of forgery was irrevocably refuted, and there was practically no doubt that the Yale card was the original.
Well, who and on the basis of what information could draw such a map half a century before the official opening of American lands has not been established.
300 years before opening
In 1929, a map drawn on a piece of parchment by the Turkish admiral Piri Reis was discovered in the library of the Imperial Palace in Istanbul. It dated back to 1513. The map shows the west coast of Africa, the east coast of South America and … the north coast of Antarctica!
After the voyage of Columbus, the Spaniards conquered and simultaneously explored the lands of South America, but the study of the Atlantic South American coast was completed only by 1520, when Fernand Magellan passed along the coast to the south and entered the Pacific Ocean through the strait, later named after this navigator. However, Reis's parchment shows the entire eastern coast of South America, as well as the Strait of Magellan, which was seven years away from its discovery at the time of map creation.
As for Antarctica, it is generally believed that it was discovered by the Russian Bellingshausen-Lazarev expedition, which sailed on the Vostok and Mirny ships along the Pacific coast of the southernmost continent in January 1820. However, Reis mapped the Princess Martha Coast, located on the Atlantic coast of Antarctica and part of Queen Maud Land, more than 300 years before mankind became aware of the existence of the sixth continent.
On the margins of the map, the admiral marked the date of its creation and wrote that when drawing up he used other, earlier maps, and that some of them date back to the 4th century BC.
Some have more than once declared the Reis map to be a forgery, but repeated examinations have confirmed its authenticity.
Ancient antarctica
In 1960, an American historian and geographer, Professor Charles Hapgood discovered in the Library of Congress a map of the world published in 1531 by the French geographer Orons Finet (Oronteus Finius), which depicted the Antarctic continent.
In 1569, the Flemish cartographer Gerard van Kremer (Mercator) created a collection of maps called the Atlas. Kremer included the aforementioned Finius map, as well as several of his maps, which also depict Antarctica. "In a number of cases," says Dr. Hapgood, "the details of the outlines and relief of the Antarctic continent are more clearly indicated on Mercator's maps than on Phinius's, and it seems quite obvious that Mercator had sources other than Phineus."
And the French geographer Philippe Buache published a map of Antarctica in 1737, also long before the "official" discovery of the southern continent. When compiling it, he, like Mercator and Phinius, used certain maps created many centuries ago.
All the mentioned maps with the image of Antarctica contain one more riddle.
Now Antarctica is almost entirely covered with ice, the greatest thickness of which reaches four kilometers. Almost the entire contour of the mainland coastline is hidden by floating ice shelves. So the outlines of the Antarctic land proper, not to mention the relief of its surface, became possible to determine only by the methods of seismic exploration, which began in 1949 by a joint Swedish-British Antarctic expedition.
However, on the Voyage map, the coast of Queen Maud Land is shown free of ice. The data of modern research confirm that there was such a period when ice did not cover the coastal part of Antarctica in its history. It only lasted from about 13,000 to 4,000 BC! Could it be that some of the maps that served as the primary sources for the compilation of the Voyage were created during this period of time?
On the Phinius map, Antarctica is depicted in its entirety, the contour of its coastline almost completely coincides with that on modern maps. In the wide coastal strip, mountain ranges and valleys are marked, along which rivers flow into the ocean. These hills and lowlands are shown exactly where, according to modern research, they exist. Mountains and rivers on the map are absent only in the interior of the mainland. All this gives grounds to assume that during the period of compilation of the initial maps used by Finius, ice covered only the central part of Antarctica. And this period ended at least six thousand years ago.
Mysterious civilization
But the biggest sensation was the results of the study of the map of Philippe Bouache. It presents Antarctica in full accordance with the current maps. Particularly impressive is the image of the continent in the form of two land masses, separated by an expanse of water stretching from east to west. Research carried out in 1958 under the International Geophysical Year program confirmed that the image of Antarctica on the Buache map corresponds to the actual configuration of the continent. However, you can only find out that Antarctica is an archipelago by shooting in an ice-free area. But the continent was "dry land" at least 15 thousand years ago! That is, when drawing up his map, Buache had primary sources of the same age.
Thus, using modern knowledge about Antarctica, we are convinced of the awareness of cartographers of the past, as well as the accuracy of the primary sources that have not come down to us, whose age is estimated at tens of thousands of years.
It remains only to answer the question: representatives of what civilization and with the help of what technique created the mentioned high-precision maps-primary sources in such distant times from us? Indeed, according to our ideas, at that time there was no civilization on Earth at all!
Magazine "Secrets of the XX century" No. 17. Vadim Ilyin