We’re taught in school that Christopher Columbus discovered America. Of course, the idea that you can discover a continent already inhabited by millions of other humans is, well, dubious at best, but now there’s more evidence that Columbus was not the first European to set foot on the continent of North America.

A new finding suggests that Romans were the first non-indigenous people to visit the Americas. This claim is supported by the discovery of a sword on Oak Island off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, that appears to be of ancient Roman origins.

“It has the same arsenic and lead signature in it. We’ve been able to test this sword against another one like it and it matches. This goes against everything we have been taught,” Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, the group’s lead researcher, told the Boston Standard.

It’s possible that Romans arrived in North America in the first century AD, possibly even earlier. Further supporting the discovery was the discovery that the Mi’kmaq people, a tribe native to Nova Scotia, drew on their cave walls figures that look like Roman Legionnaires holding swords.

There is now also DNA evidence of Roman ancestry in Mi’kmaq DNA.

“The Mi’kmaq carry the rarest DNA marker in the world which comes from the ancient Levant. You can’t screw with DNA,” Pulitzer said.

Pulitzer also found a plant known as Berberis Vulgaris on Oak Island, which is invasive there but native to Europe. The plant has been used for generations as a spice that wards off scurvy, indicating the Romans may have brought it.

Of course, some reject the idea that Romans visited North America, but it’s not uncommon for challenges to accepted history be rejected.

“The problem is, to rewrite history it would mean rewriting every textbook and university course in the world. That’s the detriment. I think anything that challenges history is very risky, very dangerous and extremely political. But I think the world has matured and history may force politics to mature,” Pulitzer concluded.

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