New Research
A 2018 discovery raises the question of whether the Vikings, who first arrived in North America, like to smoke cannabis.
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Vikings Summary
The Urantia Book states that the Native Americans of North America did not come in contact with the white Europeans until about 1000 A.D. When it was published in 1955, this was a contested issue because no artifacts or other physical evidence of the presence of the white race in the Americas existed from this time period. The story of Christopher Columbus discovering America in 1492 was the predominant theory.
A small minority of scholars professed a belief, based on writings from around 1300 A.D., that the Vikings landed in North America around 1000 A.D. When a Viking settlement was excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada in the 1960’s, the issue was finally put to rest. There is now extensive archeological evidence from numerous sites that the Vikings arrived in North America around 1000 A.D and were in contact with the Native Americans.
Vikings Review
Prior to the publication of The Urantia Book in 1955, there was a controversy among scholars regarding when Europeans first came to the American continent. The Urantia Book’s position on the subject is unequivocal. It supports what was then the minority position, but which is now considered by most all scholars to be historically accurate.
Regarding when the white race first made it to the North American continent, The Urantia Bookstates that the Native Americans in North America:
(59:5.6-9) . . . remained almost completely isolated from the remainder of the world from their arrival in the Americas down to the end of the first millennium of the Christian era, when they were discovered by the white races of Europe. Up to that time the Eskimos were the nearest to white men the northern tribes of red men had ever seen. …
Excepting the Eskimos in North America and a few Polynesian Andites in South America, the peoples of the Western Hemisphere had no contact with the rest of the world until the end of the first millennium after Christ.2
The predominant perspective in 1955 was that Columbus made the first successful voyage to the American continent in 1492 A.D.
However, there was also a minority opinion, asserting that Leif Eriksson and crew arrived by boat around 1000 A.D and established a settlement. Concerning the medieval time period from about the 8th to the 11th century, this white race of Europeans is commonly referred to as the Vikings. Vikings are also known as Norsemen, which means “people of the North,” and were primarily from south and central Scandinavia. “They established states and settlements in areas which today are part of the Faroe Islands, England, Scotland, Wales, Iceland, Finland, Ireland, Russia, Italy, Canada, Greenland, France, Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Germany.”3
There was not much evidence to support the theory (before it was proven in the 1960’s) that the Vikings settled in Canada. The written records, referred to as “sagas,” were not created until after the story of the Vikings arrival and settlement in North America had been passed down by oral tradition for several hundred years.
Despite many years of searching the coastline from New England to Labrador, no evidence of a Viking settlement or any Norse artifact was ever found. Consequently, some historians doubted the sagas were true. They began to believe the thirteenth century writers had exaggerated the tales of Viking exploration and discovery. They also believed the famous Vinland map, a medieval-style map of the Old World found in 1440, was really a fake.4 . . .
View a pdf to read the rest of the Vikings Report.