Vikings reached North America about 500 years before Columbus.
At L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, archaeologists have excavated a Norse settlement with timber buildings and iron-working. Tree-ring evidence dates wood cut there to the year 1021.
Why is this true?
The Icelandic sagas had long described voyages to a land called Vinland, but many historians treated them as legend until the site was found in 1960. The settlement was small and seems to have been abandoned within a few years.
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More about history
History keeps producing facts that ruin your sense of time. A war shorter than a lunch break, an empire that overlaps with the invention of the fax machine, a queen who lived closer to the Moon landing than to the pyramids. The entries here favour events with solid documentation, and each one explains the context that makes the surprise make sense rather than leaving it as a bare curiosity.