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Vinland Map of America “No Forgery”
The 15th century Vinland Map, the first known map to show part of America before explorer Christopher Columbus landed on the continent, is almost certainly genuine, a Danish expert said Friday.
Controversy has swirled around the map since it came to light in the 1950s, many scholars suspecting it was a hoax meant to prove that Vikings were the first Europeans to land in North America — a claim confirmed by a 1960 archaeological find.
Doubts about the map lingered even after the use of carbon dating as a way of establishing the age of an object.
“All the tests that we have done over the past five years — on the materials and other aspects — do not show any signs of forgery,” Rene Larsen, rector of the School of Conservation under the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, told Reuters.
He presented his team’s findings at an international cartographers’ conference in the Danish capital Friday.
The map shows both Greenland and a western Atlantic island “Vinilanda Insula,” the Vinland of the Icelandic sagas, now linked by scholars to Newfoundland where Norsemen under Leif Eriksson settled around AD 1000.
Yahoo/Reuters News: ‘Vinland Map of America no forgery, expert says’
CRN comment: If the map is genuine it provides evidence of a relatively ice-free Arctic in the Medieval Warm Period that allowed the Vikings to sail unimpeded to North America.
July 21st, 2009 at 12:34 am
Interesting choice from the IPCC regarding a focus on extreme weather, which is of course associated with global cooling as per the great storm(s) in the Little Ice Age, so it’s good to see that the downtrend since 2002 has been officially recognised…