Columbus Discovered America

He wasn't the first. He wasn't even the first European. The Americas were inhabited continuously for at least 15,000 years before 1492 by tens of millions of people across hundreds of nations, languages, and civilisations, including the Mexica (Aztec) Empire, the Inka Empire, the Mississippian and Pueblo civilisations, the Iroquois Confederacy, and many more. The 'discovery' framing is colonial. It also gets the European chronology wrong. Norse settlers under Leif Erikson reached L'Anse aux Meadows in modern Newfoundland around the year 1000, established a small settlement, and lived there for several years; the archaeological evidence has been confirmed since 1960. There is also strong evidence for sustained pre-Columbian transoceanic contact between Polynesians and South America (sweet potato genetics, chicken bones, language traces). Columbus did make four voyages between 1492 and 1502, did open large-scale European-American contact, and did set off the demographic and ecological catastrophe that followed (the 'Columbian Exchange' and the death of perhaps 90 percent of the indigenous population from disease over the next century). What he did was significant. What he didn't do was discover an unknown continent. There were people there. There had been Norse there. There were probably others.