Who was the first person to discover America?

The mapmaker, Martin Waldseemüller, named the New World "America," after the Italian Amerigo Vespucci, who had explored the coastline of South America and was the first to realize that it was a separate continent, not part of Asia. Columbus wasn't the first explorer to "discover" America. read more

First people in the Americas It’s widely accepted that approximately 14,000 years ago, humans walked across the Bering Strait from Siberia into Alaska. From there, they spent the next few thousand years slowly migrating south and east across North America, and then into South America. read more