Timeline of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact

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This is a Timeline of contacts between the Americas and the rest of the world.

• Models of migration to the New World
  • To about 47,000 BC (disputed) - Some archaeologists have presented evidence suggesting pre-Clovis culture peoples arrived in America as long ago as 50,000 years. See Archaeology of the Americas and Models of migration to the New World.
  • 14,000 BC to 9,000 BC Ancestors of the modern Indigenous peoples of the Americas are known to have arrived at this time from Asia. Archaeologists have documented at least three waves of migration that brought them to North America:

  • The first wave brought the predecessors of Clovis culture of North and Central America. Most Native Americans are descended from this wave.
  • A second wave included the ancestors to the Na-Dené peoples, including the Tlingit of Alaska and western Canada, the Athabaskan tribes of the Pacific Northwest and the Apachean peoples, such as the Apache and Navajo.
  • The ancestors to the Eskimos and Aleuts came during a somewhat later third wave.
  • 18,000 B.C. to 15,000 B.C. (disputed)- In recent years, molecular genetics studies have suggested as many as four distinct migrations from Asia - studies published in 2008 point mainly to a single migration from Siberia. Other scholars suggest migrants from southwestern Europe could have adopted lifestyles similar to those of the Inuit and Yupik during the Last Glacial Maximum to cross the Atlantic along the edge of the ice sheets of the time and settle in North America (see Solutrean hypothesis).

• Norse colonization of the Americas
  • c.1000 - Erik the Red and Leif Erikson, Viking navigators, discover and settle Greenland, Helluland (possibly Baffin Island), Markland (perhaps Labrador) and Vinland (probably Newfoundland). The Greenland colony lasts until the 15th century, but the estimated duration of the only known site at the Gulf of Saint Lawrence is estimated to be less than a decade.
  • c.1350 - The Norse Western Settlement in Greenland is abandoned.
    • 1354 - King Magnus IV of Sweden authorises Paul Knutson to lead an expedition to Greenland -- may never have taken place
• 1492 - Christopher Columbus lands somewhere in The Bahamas.