![l_anse_aux_meadows[1].jpg_w=1240&h=540.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/5qNhy9S.jpg "l_anse_aux_meadows[1].jpg_w=1240&h=540.jpg")
Why aren't the Vikings considered the discoverers of America? Is it because the discovery didn't have any major impact?
I think so, as well as it not really being proven that they really went over to America until rather late.
>>864182
Yup, you answered your own question.
>>864182
Ahem, Lief Ericson?
>>864189
This basically. The settlement in your picture was only discovered about 50 years ago. It takes a lot of time to drastically alter human understanding of such an important event in the history of civilisation. It's difficult to think of any equivalent precedent in history - the closest I can think of is the fact that the Greeks discovered the principle of steam power 2000+ years before the industrial revolution, although I don't know how long we have known this for. It often takes just as long to rewrite history when it's proven incorrect as it took to write it in the first place.
Which part of the journey took the longest and what kind of experience would that have been sailing?
Would they have sailed for weeks without seeing any kind of land?
>>864260
Well, their journeys looked like this.
>>864260
>Which part of the journey took the longest and what kind of experience would that have been sailing?
>Would they have sailed for weeks without seeing any kind of land?
Possibly up to a week, two weeks at the most accounting for bad weather/seamanship. Their vessels were sturdy and their crews would have been peerless sailors, but they weren't realistically meant for long open water sea voyages. This also wasn't the way the Vikings were accustomed to sailing. Their ships were island hoppers and coast huggers - the voyage from Norway would have looked something like this:
>Norway
>Orkney/Shetland Islands
>Faroe Islands
>Iceland
>East Greenland Settlement
>(?) Possible Middle Greenland Settlement
>Western Greenland Settlement
>Labrador Coast
No single segment should have taken much more than a week, the greatest limitation for the crew would have been water which would have necessitated they stop either at known ports or on the coast to scout inland for sources of fresh water. Realistically speaking the first journeys to Iceland and Greenland were probably more daring/risky than the journey to Vinland. The fact that Iceland was found at all is nothing short of an incredible fluke. The voyages to Vinland were likely prompted by the economic need for a convenient source of timber that was otherwise scarce in Greenland and later in Iceland (after it was heavily deforested). Settlements in Vinland were likely abandoned because it proved uneconomical as a source of wood for the Greenland settlements, which could more easily be supplied with timber from Norway.
>>864182
>vikings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan
>>864608
>here is no reliable evidence to indicate that Brendan ever reached Greenland or America
Your link is saying that, So why link it?
What about ice age Frenchmen making i across the Atlantic ice?
>>865377
I think they kinda find one single skull supporting that, which later turned out to probably be Native American.
>>865377
>muh Soultrean hypothesis
It's completely unfounded speculation
>>864254
Some common ideas never lose traction. In my own field of biology, I can think of the old classification system of "Animal, Vegetable or Mineral" still being quoted by the public despite it being over 200 years out of date.
