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From celebrated Yale professor Valerie Hansen, a groundbreaking work of history showing that bold explorations and daring trade missions connected all of the world's great civilizations for the first time at the end of the first millennium. In history myth often abides. It was long assumed that the centuries immediately prior to 1000 AD were lacking in any major cultural developments or geopolitical encounters, that the Europeans hadn't yet discovered North America, that the farthest anyone had traveled over sea was the Vikings' invasion of Britain. But how, then, to explain the presence of blonde-haired, blue-eyed people in Mayan temple murals in Chichen Itza, Mexico? Could it be possible that the Vikings had found their way to the Americas during the height of the Mayan empire? Valerie Hansen, a much honored historian, argues that the year 1000 was the world's first point of major cultural exchange and exploration.