- Danish experts will travel to the U.S. to study evidence
that the Vikings landed in the New World five centuries before Columbus.
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- A controversial parchment said to be the oldest map of
America could, if authentic, support the theory that the Vikings arrived
first.
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- The map is said to date from 1434 and was found in 1957.
Some people believe it is evidence that Vikings, who departed from Greenland
around the year 1000, were the first to land in the Americas.
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- The document is of Vinland, the part of North America
believed to be what is today the Canadian province of Newfoundland, and
was supposedly discovered by the Viking Leif Eriksen, the son of Erik the
Red.
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- Three researchers from the Danish Royal Library and School
of Conservation hope that modern techniques developed in Denmark will be
able to "shed more light on this document whose authenticity is questioned
worldwide", said Rene Larsen, head of the School of Conservation in
Copenhagen and the leader of the project.
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- The trio will on Monday begin their work on the map,
which is kept at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
in Connecticut.
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- The three have been "authorised to, for two to three
days, photograph, analyse with microscope and undertake various studies
of the document and its ink, but not alter it", Larsen said.
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- He said the results of the study would be presented early
next year.
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- "We hope that the new techniques that we have developed
in Denmark ... will help to better [date] the document and ink with which
the map was drawn in order to lift the veil on its authenticity or counterfeit,"
he said.
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- The map was considered a sensation when it was found.
Experts largely agree that the parchment dates from the 1400s, but by the
1970s some experts had begun arguing that the ink used contained materials
that were only developed in the 20th century.
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- U.K. chemist Professor Robin Clark, from University College
London, has meanwhile said he believed the document was a fake.
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- He based his conclusion on the work of another researcher,
Dr Walter McCrone, who in the 1970s found that the ink contained a derivative
of titanium dioxide, which did not exist until the 1920s, according to
the journal Analytical Chemistry.
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