Maps attributed to the 13th-century traveler sketch what looks like the coast of Alaska

Hmmm. perhaps Columbus wasn’t the first explorer to come to America after all!

This comes from a recent report in the Smithsonian… set of 14 parchments, now collected and exhaustively studied for the first time, give us a raft of new stories about Polo’s journeys and something notably missing from his own account: maps.

If genuine, the maps would show that Polo recorded the shape of the Alaskan coast—and the strait separating it from Asia—four centuries before Vitus Bering, the Danish explorer long considered the first European to do so. Perhaps more important, they suggest Polo was aware of the New World two centuries before Columbus.