Early exploration and settlement

• Oceania—Southeast Asia

Large islands, sometimes visible from one another, created a sort of "voyaging corridor" from the tip of mainland Asia to Near Oceania's Solomon Islands. Alternating trade winds and monsoons eased the difficulty of traveling and the similarity of food types on the islands (seafood and native plants) aided both expeditions and eventual settlement. Around 25,000 years ago, at the end of this first wave of migration in the Pacific, a daring age of seafaring began as explorers and colonists ventured into remote ocean reaches, from Melanesia to Fiji to West Polynesia and finally to East Polynesia's most distant islands, such as Hawaii and Easter Island.

• North Atlantic and North America—Norse Expeditions

Between 800 and 1000 CE, seafaring warriors from what we now think of as Scandinavia—Denmark, Norway, and Sweden—expanded into the North Atlantic, in a possible attempt to escape population pressures in their homelands. These were the Norse (“Northerners”), or Vikings. Fully occupying Iceland by 930 CE, from there they founded settlements around the year 985 in Greenland, a colony that lasted almost 500 years. Around 1000, these colonists began to explore North America, landing at the northern tip of Newfoundland and possibly even as far south as present-day New York. Newfoundland's L'Anse aux Meadows is the only authenticated Norse site, probably a place for ships to overwinter, where the outlines of a longhouse and several workshops remain.