People deeply overestimate the value of any single insight, and largely forget about the dozens of mundane but non-trivial details a successful implementation relies on. Great entrepreneurs understand this and know how to solve enough of those "little problems" to enable a big idea to thrive, and that's the magic of it. Bad ones obsess over the idea itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelis_Corneliszoon_van_Uitg...
From their perspective the map looks like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumpolar_peoples
From their perspective North America is simply yet another settled area.
1 or 100,000 the point is people who made the crossing did not get a popup saying "achievement unlocked: new continent!" And then run around telling everyone about it.
Yes, European mapmakers did not known about such crossings, but being a very remote area in 1400's they probably never asked. And from an oral history perspective it would not be anything unusual because a 50 mile ocean crossing is just a regular thing to sea going populations.
Also, DNA evidence is going to be sketchy because it's really hard to say if someone migrated 400 years ago vs 600 years ago.
PS: I am not saying this 100% happened, but it seems very likely.
"1 or 100,000 the point is people who made the crossing did not get a popup saying 'achievement unlocked: new continent!'"
Yes, that is the point that I made above. The people had no idea.
Likewise an interest free loan would be permissible, though there wouldn't be great incentives to offer them except to family members, for example.
(It works up to a point, but it's hard to scale. You can emulate a loan contract between two parties, but you can't have a bond market because the "loans" aren't tradeable)
As a point of comparison, who discovered the existence of North America? Was it Christopher Columbus in 1492? Or was it the Vikings in 900 AD? Or was it some mix of people who first melded together in Beringia, somewhere around 20,000 BC?
Has a fact been discovered if one person learns of it? Or is it only discovered if the news spreads to all of society? If the latter, then science is a social process, not an individual one.
The historian Fernand Braudel points out that an Italian engineer, wanting to show off his skills, built an automated saw mill in Italy, back during the 1200s. The logs were slotted automatically and run through the mill automatically. This engineer had created an important part of the Industrial Revolution, 500 years early!!! Did it matter? No. The project was merely a demonstration. The abundance of wood was never used. How could it be? There was no system of transportation for the abundance of wood, there was no finance to cover operating expenses, nor any finance to support a building boom that might use the wood, nor any modern labor market from which the mill owner could hire more workers to do the initial cutting of trees, nor was there the modern strictness regarding contracts, nor were commoners allowed to bring civil suits against the nobility (in case of default, supposing a nobleman contracted to have a manor built), nor was the judiciary independent, nor... In other words, the Industrial Revolution was a social process, involving the creation of dozens of important modern institutions, and the public's acceptance of the legitimacy of those institutions. No single engineer, however brilliant, could jump start the process.