Christopher Columbus is credited with "discovering" America in 1492 in terms of being the first European to make widely recognized contact with the Americas and initiate European exploration and colonization. However, he did not actually discover the continent itself because the Americas were already inhabited by Indigenous peoples and had been visited by earlier explorers such as the Norse under Leif Erikson around 1000 AD. Columbus believed he had reached islands off the coast of Asia, never realizing he had encountered a new continent. The name "America" was given later, after Amerigo Vespucci, who recognized the lands as a distinct continent separate from Asia. Columbus’s arrival marked the beginning of the Age of Discovery and the European colonization of the Americas, but he did not discover America in the absolute sense of first human contact.