Toppling the Myth of Columbus

     Pop quiz: who discovered America? It wasn’t Christopher Columbus. He wasn’t even the first European to establish a New World settlement. Viking Leif Erikson did that five centuries before Columbus at about the same time that Polynesian mariners crossed the Atlantic, taking South American sweet potatoes back to their islands.     
     So who were the first explorers? Ancestors of modern Native Americans who arrived fifteen thousand years ago by crossing the land bridge that then con...