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In 1965, Yale made the map public, and the stories were published in major newspapers. Front page of The New York Times. At the time, school experts believed the map was compiled around 1440, some 50 years before Christopher Columbus sailed west.

Archaeologists and scientists believe that a small number of Scandinavian people reached Newfoundland and St. Lawrence, around 1000 AD, and there is evidence of both voyages and archeology in 13th-century epics. Remains of a Viking settlement on a site called L’Anse aux Meadowsin Newfoundland.

Gisli Sigurdsson, professor of Scandinavian studies at the Árni Magnússon Institute in Iceland, said that on the largest of these voyages there were probably fewer than 100 people, and the travelers landed on the shores where the Indigenous people lived in large numbers.

“The stories that have been told and retold over the generations recall the general state of the country: there are lands beyond Greenland, but they are truly out of our reach, too far and too dangerous to visit,” said Mr Sigurdsson. But he added that the Vikings “kept bragging about what a grand and glorious adventure it was.”

When the Vinland Map appeared in 1965, shortly after exploration of Newfoundland caused a sensation, scientists quickly cast doubt on the parchment. The curator of maps in Yale’s library at the time saw the “incredibly accurate” drawing of Greenland as proof of Viking discovery, while others saw it as an artist’s mark looking at a 20th-century map.

Mr Sigurdsson said Greenland’s northern coast “looks suspiciously like what you see on modern maps”. “Greenland is so close to real Greenland that it’s hard to believe anyone in the Middle Ages would have drawn such a map.”

Nor did it seem unlikely for a medieval writer to know that Greenland, drawn for centuries as a peninsula, was an island. Dr. “Knowledge about the geography of the western Atlantic would take the form of information and advice passed down orally from sailor to seafarer,” Rowe said. “They didn’t use maps for navigation.”