I did not mean to imply that you were rewriting history, I was trying to make a (bad) joke about the fact that under Communism they could pick any date they wanted and anybody they wanted to discover America. They wrote fake history. It is called mind control. And my mother as a teacher had to teach it or be put in jail.

In my opinion, many historical stories are really probably parables, like in the Bible they are meant to teach us. Whether they actually happened or not is of secondary importance. History is such a tricky science. So much depends on whose view point it is written from. Still, dates and names sound like things we should be able to agree on. My background is applied sciences, especially after my Communist history classes.

Leif Erikson discovered NORTH America some time in the 1st century. He set foot on what is now called Newfoundland, and the ruins/remains of the Norse settlement have been preserved and remain today.

Amerigo Vespucci is the man who discovered that the South American continent was, in fact, a continent and not just a branch connected to Asia. He showed up after Columbus, who failed to notice that fact since he was looking for a path to the West Indies, and not for the Americas - which he didn't know existed. That is why the Americas are called the Americas; because it was a man named Amerigo who made that distinction for Europe.

:) Been there..... done that!

Think you mean around 1000? The Viking Explorer Who Beat Columbus to America - HISTORY

The original native peoples, who discovered and then settled North America, were actually a Stone Age European tribe (blond haired & blue eyed) known as the Solutreans who came from France and Spain. This happened about 20,000 years ago. The phrase “Iberia, not Siberia” pertains.

Interestingly enough, because the Ice Age was then in full force, they were able to make it across the Atlantic in small boats. (The Earth has been warming ever since and it happened long before fossil fuels came upon the scene, but I digress.)

When Asiatic people came across the Bering Straight a long time thereafter, they populated the continent. They were apparently better fighters, with better weapons and they eventually subjugated the descendants of the Solutreans, intermarried and so forth.
Thus, when Columbus arrived, he (unknowingly) reclaimed North America for the descendants of the Solutreans who had been in Spain for many millennia.