Vikingar i Nordamerika

But material uncovered there points to explorations further south, most convincingly in the form of butternuts, a species not found anywhere north of New Brunswick.

Material from the Viking Sagas — tales that blend myth and history — also contain descriptions that align with a route down Newfoundland's west coast.

"For sure, there are other Norse sites out there. L'Anse Aux Meadows was not it. I'm confident that, as we continue to refine our methods and our approaches within the next couple years with new images, new satellites, I think we've got a much better shot of finding it," said Parcak. [...]

"Looking for the Norse in North America is like looking for a needle in a haystack," said Karen Milek, an archeologist specializing in the Norse, and a member of the 2016 dig.

But with the help of the remote images that haystack has become a lot smaller, and that needle a lot bigger. Parcak used such images to scour the Labrador coastline and then Newfoundland's western edge, and at Point Rosee, one buried feature jumped out to her — what looked like a wall, 22 metres by seven metres, the exact same dimensions as a longhouse discovered at L'Anse Aux Meadows.

That, along with a 2014 site survey that pointed to signs of burning, were enough hints of man-made meddling with the landscape to lead to the 2015 dig, which expanded considerably in 2016 with equal parts hope and disappointment.

Solar storm confirms Vikings settled in North America exactly 1,000 years ago

“Much kudos should go to these northern Europeans for being the first human society to traverse the Atlantic,” said geoscientist Michael Dee of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who led the study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“I think it is fair to describe the trip as both a voyage of discovery and a search for new sources of raw materials,” Dee said

Evidence from animal remains shows Norse seafarers settled on the islands centuries before Portuguese explorers

Around AD700 to 800, wind and weather conditions in the northern hemisphere probably helped settlers from higher latitudes and inhibited those from southern Europe, making it easier for people from the north to reach the Azores, the paper adds.