What do you think about this?
In 1898, a Swedish farmer named Olof Ohman was clearing trees on his land in Solem Township, Minnesota, when he pulled up a slab of stone tangled in the roots of an aspen. The roots had grown around it. Carved into its face was a message written in runes, the old Norse alphabet, and when it was finally translated it told a chilling story.
Eight Goths and twenty two Norwegians, on a journey of exploration west from Vinland. They made camp by two skerries. They went fishing for a day. When they came home, ten of their men were found red with blood, and dead. At the bottom of the stone, a year. 1362. That date would place Scandinavian explorers in the middle of North America a full one hundred and thirty years before Columbus ever set sail.
Most scholars have called it a hoax since the first examination in 1910. Yet the believers point to things that are hard to wave away. The way the tree roots had grown around a stone a farmer supposedly carved himself. The weathering in the grooves. The obscure medieval runes that a Minnesota homesteader would have had no way of knowing.
What if the textbooks have the timeline of who reached this continent, and when, completely wrong?
Real or forgery, what do you think that stone really is?
