The School of Conservation of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, anounced at an international cartographers' conference in Copenhagen today that the 15th century Vinland Map owned by Yale University appears to be authentic "All the tests that we have done over the past five years [on], -- on the materials and other aspects -- do not show any signs of forgery."
The Vinland map believed to have been produced for a 1440 church council at Basel, Switzerland shows both Greenland and a western Atlantic island "Vinilanda Insula," the Vinland of the Icelandic sagas, where Norsemen under Leif Eriksson settled around AD 1000.
The team said wormholes, caused by wood beetles, were consistent with wormholes in the books with which the map was bound and carried out studies of the ink, writing, and parchment of the map, which is housed at Yale University in the United States.
The map shows that the New World was known not only to Norsemen but also to other Europeans at least half a century before Columbus's voyage.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090717/sc_nm/us_science_map_america
The Vinland map believed to have been produced for a 1440 church council at Basel, Switzerland shows both Greenland and a western Atlantic island "Vinilanda Insula," the Vinland of the Icelandic sagas, where Norsemen under Leif Eriksson settled around AD 1000.
The team said wormholes, caused by wood beetles, were consistent with wormholes in the books with which the map was bound and carried out studies of the ink, writing, and parchment of the map, which is housed at Yale University in the United States.
The map shows that the New World was known not only to Norsemen but also to other Europeans at least half a century before Columbus's voyage.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090717/sc_nm/us_science_map_america
