Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Vinland, Vikings, and Lactose Intolerance (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. 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 North 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 Vinland, Vikings, and Lactose intolerance might have shaped history on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

Starting point is 00:00:57 And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. 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 in 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.

Starting point is 00:01:36 They managed to go up and down the western coast of Europe and their longboats, 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 north 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 make a living with sheep, cattle, and fish. Their descendants have been there ever since.

Starting point is 00:02:16 From Iceland, getting to Greenland was relatively easy. Greenland is much closer to Iceland than Norway. According to legend, it was discovered by Gunn Bjorn Olfson in the early 10th century when he was blown off course trying to get to Norway. In the late 10th century, Greenland was explored by Eric the Red. He arrived on the southeastern coast of the island, which he found uninhabited. The Inuit people who live in Greenland didn't make it that far south for another two centuries. There are a couple of things I should know to help explain what was happening during this period.

Starting point is 00:02:46 During this time when the Vikings were visiting Iceland and Greenland, the climate was very different. It was during a period called the medieval warming period. Temperatures were higher and the ice cap had retreated a bit, making Greenland a better place to settle. The climate began to change in the 15th century getting cooler in an event called the Little Ice Age. So things were a bit different back then than they are today. The other thing has to do with the names, Iceland and Greenland. There's been a story floating around for years that Iceland and Greenland were named on purpose to have people avoid Iceland and go to Greenland. This is only half true.

Starting point is 00:03:20 Eric the Red did give the name Greenland to Greenland, but he wasn't trying to dupe anybody. He really named it as sort of a sales pitch to encourage more Norse people to migrate. And remember, at the time, it actually was much greener than it is today, especially in the far south. The name he gave it was actually Grunland. Iceland was originally named Sneyland or Snowland, but was called Iceland by one of its first settlers who found a harbor full of icebergs when he arrived. So we know that the Vikings were in both Iceland and Greenland. From here, the story gets a bit murkier. The son of Eric the Red was Life Erickson.

Starting point is 00:03:56 According to the Icelandic sagas, which are a collection of poems and stories from that period, Life Erickson sailed west and found three different lands. One was called Helluland, and that was the land of the flood. flat stones. The other was called Markland, or the land of the forests, and the final was called Vinland or the Land of the Vines. According to the Sages, Life Erickson established a settlement in Vinland. He spent two winters in Vinland before returning to Greenland and his father. A few years later, Life's brother Thorvald Erickson led another expedition and stayed at the camp which life had established. In a few years after that, a much more serious attempt at settlement was led

Starting point is 00:04:35 by Thorfin the Valiant. He brought between 160 to 250 men and women, along with cattle, to settle in Vinland. We know that they traded and had good relations with the natives who lived in the region, at least for a while. Two of the goods noted in the sagas that were traded were red cloth and milk. The story here becomes rather vague. Relations with the Vikings and the native inhabitants fell apart. The Vikings left, and never bothered to return. For centuries after, there was a great deal of debate about the Iceland Slavic sagas. Some people weren't even sure if the voyage ever happened, and some thought that it did happen, but they weren't really sure where Vinland was. There were maps created centuries after the fact, which showed Vinland west of Greenland. It would have been located somewhere around

Starting point is 00:05:19 the mouth of the St. Lawrence River all the way down to Cape Cod. This was pretty much the state of things until 1960. Nobody was really sure if the Vikings had made it to North America, and if they did, no one knew where they had been. In 1960, the Norwegian husband and wife team of Anne and Helga Ingstad discovered the location of a Norse community on the island of Newfoundland. It was located at the northernmost tip of the island at a place called Leonsa Meadows. Most people were looking further south because the name Vinland implies vines and grapes. What they found at Launxa Meadows was the remains of a small community. There were several dwellings including a forge and a carpentry workshop.

Starting point is 00:05:58 In addition to the foundations of the buildings, they also found Norse artifacts including a stone lamp, a sharpening stone, a bronze pin, a knitting needle, and part of a spindle. All of these things were not used by the native peoples in the area. The estimates of the number of people who lived at the site ranged from 30, all the way up to 160. They found the bones of many different animals at the site, and one of the more interesting finds was that of butternuts. Butternuts don't grow in Newfoundland, which means that they had to have sailed down to at least New Brunswick. Carbon-14 dating of the wood found at the site dates it to around the year

Starting point is 00:06:32 1,000, which is in line with the time of the Icelandic sagas. By all accounts, the Norse weren't there for very long. The site may have only been occupied for a few years before it was abandoned. What happened to the settlement is pure speculation. What we do know is that the settlement was rather small, and it could be that they just didn't have a large enough population to survive. The Norse population in Greenland at the time was a couple thousand people, and the population in Iceland may have been ten times larger than that. The other problem were the supply lines. Vinland was a colony of Greenland, which was a colony of Iceland, which was a colony of Norway. And both Greenland and Iceland were still relatively new settlements. The ultimate reason might have been the relations with the native

Starting point is 00:07:15 population. One of the most popular theories, although there's very little evidence to support it, is that it may have had to do with what items were traded with the local inhabitants. The two items we know were traded, although there were certainly other things, were red cloth and milk. We know that the Aboriginal people in North America didn't engage in animal husbandry. That meant they wouldn't have created or consumed dairy products. And it's also a well-known fact that many Native Americans are lactose intolerant. The theory goes that the Norse either traded something like butter or cheese or perhaps invited the natives to a meal where milk was served. They then suffered stomach cramps and were sick and thought they were being poisoned. They then attacked the

Starting point is 00:07:56 the Vikings, who would have been vastly outnumbered, and they left. The entire story is built off the fact that we know that they traded milk in the Iceland sagas. Leongsa Meadows is the only known Viking settlement in the Americas outside of Greenland. It isn't known if Launxa Meadows is in fact the settlement spoken of in the sagas. It might be, but there might be another site out there that still hasn't been found. One theory holds that there was a settlement on Baffin Island to the north in the 11th or 12th century, but nothing yet has been discovered. There has also been speculation, that the Vikings may have gotten as far as Mexico or Central America. There's no hard evidence for this, only a lot of stories and coincidences. Likewise, there have been runestones

Starting point is 00:08:37 found in North America with Norse-looking writing on it, some found as far inland as Minnesota, but most of those have been shown to be hoaxes. Coincidentally, not far from Launxa Meadows, just across the Cabot Strait in Labrador, is the archaeological site of Red Bay. Red Bay was a Basque whaling station that was established very soon after Columbus arrived in the Americas. Some people think that the Basques might have arrived in Newfoundland before 1492 and just kept it a secret because it was such a good location for cod fishing. But what we do know for certain is that there was at least some limited European contact with North America about a thousand years ago, a full 500 years before Columbus ever set foot on a sandy beach in the Bahamas.

Starting point is 00:09:20 The associate producers of Everything Everywhere Daily are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I want to give a shout out to all the students at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, who are listening to the podcast. I hope you enjoy learning something new every day, which I'm guessing you're able to do while you're working out or practicing. If any of you make it to the big time, remember the little podcast to help get you there. And remember, if you leave a review or send in a question, you two can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Vinland, Vikings, and Lactose Intolerance (Encore)

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