Scientists Found Evidence That Could Rewrite American History

Hi, it's Katrina! For years, we were told Columbus was first, and then science proved the Vikings beat him to it. But what if the Vikings weren't the only ones? Who arrived to the Americas before them? Scattered across America are clues that tell a much bigger story. From a bizarre carved stone in Minnesota to ancient drawings of Egyptian gods inside an Oklahoma cave, these discoveries are rewriting history. Are you ready? THE TRUE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA The debate is over. We know for a fact that the Vikings reached North America before Christopher Columbus. All speculation came to an end in 1960 with Lansdale Meadows being found in Newfoundland. The site is an ancient Viking settlement, confirmed to have been built by Scandinavians. They reached Canada 500 years before Columbus. But even before 1960, amateur archaeologists had been tripping over evidence that there was a much larger Norse population in America. Around the beginning of the 20th century, certain scientists began wondering just how far the Vikings had spread across the Americas and what other ancient cultures may have preceded them. Some of the earliest evidence of Vikings in the Americas comes from their very own sagas, most of which were written in the 13th century, so a little bit after the Viking Age ended. In the saga of Erik the Red, it's said that around the year 1000 AD, Leif Erikson departed Greenland and went west in search of a rich new world that he had heard about from a mysterious traveler named Bjarni Hervolfsen. Bjarni claimed to have found a lush region with sprawling green pastures as far as the eye could see, endless seas of towering trees, and so many fish they could be plucked from the rivers by hand. The mysterious explorer referred to the region as Vinland. He either brought proof back with him or was convincing enough that the other Vikings believed him, because soon after his return, Leif Erikson packed his suitcase and got on his longship hoping to reach Vinland himself. And he did! In the years that followed, Leif and many other Vikings living in both Greenland and Scandinavia made expeditions to Vinland. They supposedly brought back valuable goods to trade in Europe. And while historians have been saying this is all nothing but a fairy tale for years, there are other historical references that seem to corroborate the tale. One of those references comes from Adam of Bremen, who in 1073 wrote a history of all known archbishops in Hamburg Bremen. It's a completely unrelated historical document to Viking travels, except for one specific note. There is a brief mention in the book of a Danish king who had discovered an island on the other side of the ocean called Vinland, where wild grapes grew in abundance. That doesn't sound like a coincidence, it sounds like confirmation. The reason Bjarni Hergolfsson originally named the land he discovered Vinland was that it was home to wild grapes. With all of these Vikings traveling to the New World, they must have had more than one settlement, right? Landsau Meadows might be the only one ever found, but that doesn't mean it was the only one built. Scientists have only found around 130 T-Rex skeletons, but there were probably billions of them in Earth's history. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Hidden somewhere in North America, perhaps completely reclaimed by nature, scholars believe the lost settlement of Norumbega is still waiting to be found. All the Vikings had to be meeting up somewhere in the Americas, so it would make sense that they had a capital in their newly discovered territory. In the 15th century, after Columbus discovered the Americas, scholars in Europe started wondering if the Norse sagas were true. They speculated that Vinland was North America. Sometime after that, rumors began circulating about an abandoned Norse city found somewhere in the Boston area. Of course, this wouldn't have been a large-scale city of thousands. It would have been more like a lonely outpost, a sort of wild west shantytown where the Norsemen gathered on their trips to Vinland. The Europeans were so sure of it that they included Vinland on maps throughout the 16th century. There are no records of anyone finding the city, but that doesn't mean it wasn't destroyed during the creation of a plantation or a farm or even Boston itself. The original city of the Vikings could be buried under several layers of concrete and pavement. Even without Norumbega being found, the belief that Vikings had reached North America prior to Columbus remained a popular feeling. In 1887, Bostonians erected a statue of Leif Erikson, believing the legendary Vinland was in fact New England. Then in 1890, somebody claimed they discovered Leif Erikson's actual house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That somebody was chemist and Harvard professor Eben Horsford. You may not know the name, but I guarantee you know his invention. He was the fellow who invented baking soda. Eben claimed to have found not only the house, but the ruins of Norumbega as well. It was never proven, and in the years since, the discoveries have been rejected by mainstream science. But take a look at this anyway. It's Eben's floor plan of the Leif Erikson house that he supposedly discovered. Where that house is today, no one knows. If it ever even existed, or if Eben was making it up, is also unclear. The point is that Americans were fixated on the debate to the point a Harvard professor may have lied to be part of history. Things heated up in 1898 with the discovery of the first rune stone. A Swedish immigrant by the name of Olaf Oman came into some property in Douglas County, Minnesota. While outside working one day, he found a stone lying face down with very weird markings on it. Olaf assumed the markings were probably Native American. Later on, they would be identified as Scandinavian runes. The runes were translated to reveal a dark and foreboding message. The inscription on the rune stone says that 8 Gotlanders and 22 Northmen had journeyed from Vinland to the west, where they made camp one day's journey north from the rune stone. After fishing one day, they returned to camp and found 10 men dead and covered in blood. The inscription doesn't give any details as to what happened to the dead men. Then it goes on to say they had 10 men by the sea looking after their ships 14 days away from the rune stone, and then the inscription marks the year 1362. It's a compelling artifact because if it's genuine, it proves that Norse explorers traveled deep into the North American continent. They didn't just make one paltry settlement in Newfoundland and flee when the weather got bad. They spread across the continent in small roving bands and made seasonal encampments. If the Kensington rune stone, as it's commonly known, is accurate, it looks like they traveled in groups of around 10 people. And this was 130 years before Columbus reached the West Indies. It was also almost 400 years after the founding of L'Anse aux Meadows, which would mean the Vikings had a consistent presence in North America for over 500 years. The descendants of those original Vikings in America could have still been living on the continent when the first European colonists arrived from Spain and England. That is, if the rune stone is legit. And that's something that scientists have not been able to either prove or disprove, leaving the mystery in limbo. Everything from the geology to the discovery of the stone, its weathering, the inscription itself, has all been dissected with a fine-tooth comb. Scholars have also dissected the personality and education of the man who discovered the stone, looking for inconsistencies that might prove a hoax. There are four main issues with the authenticity of the Kensington rune stone. The first is the plausibility of the story in the inscription. The stone claims the Norsemen ships were 14 days away from the rune stone, but that doesn't make any sense. Assuming they were moored on the coast, the only way to get there would be along a river route of 800 miles. You might be able to pull it off in a speedboat, but a 14th century boat would have had a very difficult time. It wouldn't be impossible to sail 800 miles in two weeks, but it is suspicious. And then you've got to wonder why a group of explorers who just walked into a massacre took the time to carve an inscription on a stone. Who was the message for? Let's assume the story is real and the inscription was made to warn others of the danger present in the area. The next problem is the writing and language, both of which are questionable. When experts first analyzed the runes in 1899, they instantly denounced them as fake. They said there were too many discrepancies in the vocabulary when compared to the languages of medieval Scandinavia. Over the last 126 years, most linguistic experts have agreed. Another problem is the condition of the stone. It isn't worn down enough. Having been exposed to wind and rain for the last 700 years, the inscription should be worn down and barely legible. Instead, it looks too new. In 2003, expert Scott Walter claimed the inscription was only 200 years old based on the weathering alone. But maybe the biggest problem is Olaf Oman. He was the man who found the runestone, and he was also the man with the knowledge to create a fake Scandinavian inscription. Olaf knew everything. How to carve the stone properly, how to make it look older, and how to make a believable inscription. Olaf may not have had a formal education, but he did have his own personal library. In that library was a book on runes. He easily could have used that book to craft the Kensington Runestone. He may have also had help from his close personal friend Sven Fogelbard, who also had some knowledge of runes. And listen to this. Both Sven and Olaf supposedly had a strong dislike of academics, whom they may have wanted to make look like fools. It's worth mentioning that neither man ever admitted to a hoax. It's also worth mentioning that the Kensington Runestone has traveled around the world. It was examined in Europe by professionals over there and displayed at the Smithsonian Institution. While some experts claim it's a hoax, others think it's real. There's no definitive answer, but there are other runestones. A very similar artifact was discovered in the foothills of the was just a few miles away from the town of Heavener in Oklahoma. Locals knew about the stone as early as the 1830s, but it wasn't until 1923 that Smithsonian scientists documented it. Sure enough, the stone was covered in Norse runes. But unlike the Kensington Runestone, this one was a mix of Elder Futhark runes, known to be used before and during the Viking Age, between 300 and 800 AD. This is crazy because if accurate, it means Lanzao Meadows was not the first Viking settlement in North America. It means that Norsemen found their way to the Americas even before raiding England. In 1967, the Poteau Runestone was discovered by a couple of school boys. It had a similar inscription as the Heavener Stone that was also written in Elder Futhark Runes. Experts think it dates to around 1017 AD. Two years later, the Shawnee Runestone was found in Oklahoma. On the stone is the inscription Medoc, which some have interpreted as the name Madoc, and that's a little nuts. Madoc of Wales was a prince who, according to Welsh folklore, sailed to the Americas in 1170. His name etched in runes could prove the legend to be true. And if the Welsh were traveling to America in the 12th century, I have to assume that others were as well. When you look at each of these runestones separately, you see controversial artifacts that have been denounced as hoaxes. But when you look at all of the runestones together, and when you look at the whole body of evidence, you see something much more remarkable. Maybe one or two of the stones were altered or even outright faked, but surely not all of them. These stones represent consistent evidence of an ancient Norse presence in America, suggesting the Vikings did more than just land in Canada a thousand years ago. They appear to have arrived much earlier, explored a large portion of the continent, and encountered problems with the natives. What do you think happened to these Norse explorers? How far into the Americas did they actually go? Could they have made it all the way down to South America or even sailed the Amazon? And the biggest question of all, did ancient Egyptians beat them to it? The Mystery of the Anubis Caves In the Oklahoma Panhandle, a series of strange caves might just harbor evidence of ancient civilizations from around the world converging in America. When I say ancient civilizations, I'm talking about the Celts, the Libyans, the Romans, the Persians, the Egyptians, and many others all rolled into one place. Welcome to the Anubis Caves. Inside the caves are seriously intriguing carvings that, from a historical standpoint, don't make any sense at all. There is a chart that appears to have been calibrated to track the sun's equinox. There are also phrases that resemble ancient Celtic sayings, but they were written in Libyan scripts. The inscriptions mention Celtic sun gods and Persian deities in the same breath, leading to widespread conjecture and controversy, as you can imagine. But before I get to the controversy, I have to take you back to 1978, when Gloria Farley was shown the Anubis Caves by a local farmer. As soon as she entered the dimly lit cavern, she recognized the figure of a jackal on the wall. When she got a little closer, Gloria realized she was looking at an image of the Egyptian god of death and mummification, Anubis. That first image is how the caves got their name, but there was so much more for Gloria to discover. Lining the walls were references and images that belonged in different places and different times. Gloria handed the reigns over to a Harvard professor of zoology by the name of Barry Fell. It was up to him to translate the unusual inscriptions and to make sense of the bizarre symbols in the caves. He noticed that everything seemed to focus on the sun. Many of these symbols were related to sun worship. The cave itself was aligned with the sun at its equinox. The sunlight shines directly into the cave, dispelling the light and illuminating certain symbols. Experts believe the play on light had something to do with astrological alignments, but they're not entirely sure how. Though to be honest, no one is sure about anything when it comes to the Anubis caves. In the 1980s, ancient astronaut enthusiasts, mythologists, cosmologists, and alternative thinkers flocked to the Anubis caves in hopes of discovering some ancient truth. There was even a documentary made by Scott Monahan, with another one made in the 2000s. The focus of these documentaries is often Mithra, the god who appears throughout the Anubis caves and throughout ancient cultures. In India, starting over 4,000 years ago, people began to worship the sun god Mithra and his partner Varuna. It's believed, though not proven, that the worship of Mithra spread across Asia and into Persia, where his name became Mithra. Hundreds of years later, when the Romans conquered Persia, they adopted Mithra and added an S, worshiping him as their very own god Mithras. He was very popular with Roman soldiers. And Roman soldiers were very good at spreading ideas to the farthest reaches of the Roman empire. It wasn't the statesmen or the priests who found their way to the fringes of the empire, it was the soldiers stationed at outposts at places like Hadrian's Wall in the UK. The worship of Mithras, which had morphed into something known as the Mithraic Mysteries, made it to the farthest corners of the empire in the tents of soldiers. As the soldiers moved from place to place, they acted as accidental missionaries. The Celts of Britain and Spain incorporated Mithras into their beliefs, associating him with the killing of the sacred bull. The images in the Anubis caves seem to be connected to all of these different cultures, but always while focusing on a sun deity, likely Mithras, which means either one of two things. The first option to explain the strange symbols in the cave is that an ancient culture created them. This ancient culture was presumably influenced by the cult of Mithras, which, you know, spread over thousands of years and across thousands of miles. Could Mithras have reached the Americas? Why not? Maybe an Egyptian voyage got lost and ended up in America, where they drew images of Anubis and the Mithraic god, or maybe the Phoenicians, or an actual ship full of Roman soldiers. Whoever it was, they got lost in the Americas and made this cave into their sanctuary of the sun god. Option two is that it is all a hoax. Someone familiar with Ogham, an ancient language from the British Isles, could have found these caves and written a bunch of gibberish on the walls. Professional archaeologists have long dismissed the Ogham script in the cave as meaning anything, but that could also just mean that the inscriptions are incomplete or maybe made by someone illiterate. When you think about the kinds of people who would have been shipwrecked or exploring new land, they would have been sailors, not scribes. Maybe they were familiar with the language, but not enough to write properly in the style that archaeologists are used to. Ogham was a language mostly used by the Celts, with examples of it found in Ireland and England. Ogham has also been found in Africa and Spain, so it's spread just like Mithras. Put together, it does feel like the natural spread of both the sun god and the language to America, and therefore to the Native Americans. Mainstream scholars say the images in the caves were made by indigenous Americans. If the Romans, Egyptians, or whoever did come to America, they likely shared their sun god with the natives, and maybe their script as well. Since the Ogham in the caves is nonsensical, it would make sense that it was written by someone who couldn't understand it. If the natives saw their mysterious visitors using the script, perhaps they copied it on cave walls. Then again, this could all be just one big elaborate prank. Let me know in the comments whether you think the Anubis caves are evidence of ancient visitors or straight-up fraud. Were humans in the Amazon 27,000 years ago? It feels like every recent new discovery is changing the story of human beings in the Americas. Researchers have discovered giant sloth bones in Brazil from 27,000 years ago. They appear to have been modified by humans, pushing back the date for human habitation in the Americas by nearly double. It's arguably the biggest question in anthropology. When did the first humans arrive in South America? Up until recently, the earliest evidence of humans living on the continent was 14,500 years ago. Now, thanks to some ground sloth bones discovered at the Santa Elena rock shelter in Mato Grosso state, everything has changed. Researchers found osteoderms lying directly next to stone artifacts in a layer of sediment dated to roughly 25,000 to 27,000 years ago. There were three osteoderms discovered, each one intentionally modified with holes. Someone drilled holes into bones prior to them becoming fossilized. It's the earliest known evidence of human manufacturing in South America. Scientists believe the bones were pieces of jewelry, probably worn as necklaces. Before you question the authenticity of the holes, I assure you they were made by people. Scientists could still see the tool marks around the holes, and even parts that had been purposely polished. The team did do their due diligence though, comparing the marks on the bones to things like rodent teeth and what might happen as the bone passed through a digestive tract. But nothing else fits the evidence except for human manufacturing. These bones were crafted as personal objects. It's confirmed. What scientists can't confirm is the purpose of the objects. Mirian Pacheco, the study author at the Federal University of Sao Carlos, said that the meaning of the objects to the people who made them is lost and cannot be recovered. Scientists are so convinced that humans were actively living in Brazil 27,000 years ago that they said there must be more evidence of it at other rock shelters and caves in Brazil. Which is why doctoral researcher Thais Pansani, also from the Federal University of Sao Carlos, is on the case. Thais most recently performed an analysis on ancient ground sloth bones that For a long time, scientists have been saying the bones were charred in natural wildfires, and that they don't have anything to do with humans. With the discovery of the ground sloth bone pendants, Thais is no longer happy to accept that narrative. The sloth bones may have been charred in human campfires instead of naturally occurring wildfires, so that's what Thais is looking into right now. If scientists can prove that humans were roasting ground sloths in Brazil, it will change history. Because right now, the mainstream scientific consensus is this. Human beings arrived in South America around 15,000 years ago, establishing themselves at the Monte Verde II site in Chile. Up until this new discovery, it was the oldest site of human habitation anywhere in the Americas. But hold on, because Chile is not exactly near Brazil. The Monte Verde site is in the south of Chile, near Patagonia. Following the known dates, it looks like humans arrived in Brazil first and then slowly migrated through the jungles to reach Chile or down the coastlines and up through Patagonia. This is crazy because for as long as archaeology has been around, archaeologists have been telling us that humans arrived in the Americas from Siberia, walking across the Bering Land Bridge. Then they changed their minds and started telling us that humans sailed in primitive boats from East Asia, possibly Siberia, along the fringes of the ice sheets and down the west coast. The first place these seafarers found that wasn't frozen solid was the Pacific Northwest, so that was where the first humans landed. The rest supposedly sailed down the west coast, stopping every now and again to form a new colony that would thousands of years later forge its own unique civilization. But never have scientists thought about humans arriving in the east. That just hasn't been part of the narrative. But some of the earliest sites in the Pacific Northwest only date to around 14,000 years ago. Contemporary The Santa Elina site in Brazil is 12,000 years older, so it looks like humans arrived in South America on the eastern side long before they ever made it up to North America. And here's a little more proof to back that up. The ghostly footprints of White Sands. Discovered in New Mexico's White Sands National Park, the White Sands footprints are the oldest documented human tracks in the Americas. At 23,000 years old, they provide the earliest confirmed evidence of humans in North America, dating roughly 4,000 years after the Brazilian Groundsloth site. I always come back to this discovery because it is the missing puzzle piece of this whole story. If the oldest evidence of human beings in the Americas is from Brazil 27,000 years ago, it stands to reason that people migrated north and west. 4,000 years later, they arrived in New Mexico, where a family left their footprints preserved in the sand. A few thousand years later, they'd migrated as far north as Canada. Looking at all the prehistoric sites in the Americas and lining them up, you start to see a pattern of movement starting in Brazil and moving diagonally up towards Canada. If scientists can prove this, it will be the biggest game-changer since the discovery of America itself. But since they can't prove it yet, let me tell you about the footprints. A study in 2021 by the U.S. Geological Survey proved the dating of the footprints using standard radiocarbon dating methods. If you're curious how you can date a footprint, you can't. Scientists dated the pollen and ditch grass seed found in the footprints and inside the layer of hardened mud. Since the mud hardened at the same time as the footprints, the pollen revealed the date. The footprints themselves give us a picture of what was happening in America all of those years ago. They were preserved inside the clay mud of a recently dried-up lake called Lake Otero. The Ice Age was winding down to its end, the glaciers were retreating, and the world was warming up. In this changing landscape, a mother walked very fast for nearly a mile across the flat terrain. Scientists followed her tracks very carefully to recreate exactly how she was moving. They know it was still wet and muddy because she kept slipping as she hurried on her way. She was also carrying a rather heavy toddler on her hip. Scientists know about the toddler because every now and again, a tiny pair of children's footprints appear next to the woman's. It seems she got winded and kept putting the kid down so she could catch her breath. Where was this woman going? What was she doing? Was she running from something, like a predator? Or was she playing? The reason I mention playing is that many of the human footprints here belong to children, and they appear to have been splashing in the mud together. But then there's this woman's track zooming across the dry lake bed as if fleeing a pack of saber-toothed cats. These footprints reveal another fact about prehistoric life in the Americas. Humans lived alongside massive creatures, seemingly sometimes in harmony. The white sand's tracks are interwoven with the footprints of extinct giant animals. One of them belongs to a giant ground sloth, creatures who made really good bone pendants. Other tracks show human beings walking directly past mammoths as if they couldn't have cared less. It's an unbelievable snapshot of daily life 23,000 years ago. Children splashing through the mud alongside mammoths, and a young woman hurrying across the landscape with a toddler perched on her hip. But where did these early travelers come from? And given what we know, did humans set foot in North or South America first? Drop your theories in the comments below. I'd love to hear your take! Thanks for watching! Don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already and I'll see you soon for more videos of ancient history. Bye!