A company I am about to do business with has a domain that is less than 1 year old per WHOIS, but they are supposed to be very old. When questioned, they say that their website is very old but their domain name had expired and they had to get it again, and this is why the WHOIS shows it as so young.
Does this make sense? If so is it possible to see past WHOIS records of this domain? This site is not on Wayback Machine.
The fact that the site is not on the Wayback Machine is already a red flag. A "very old" website has an excellent chance of being recorded at least once. I would suggest that you ask them for proof of existence, since services that provide historical DNS information are usually commercial.
To answer the question, here are some such services (which I have never used). They are not guaranteed to provide information about all registrars and every website.
I can add one more to the @harrymc list.
https://completedns.com/dns-history/ - 5 free check per day, also offers paid plans with API and bulk check - I have used this one.
Unfortunately, services such as "completedns" and most from the @harrymc list have very least data. I suppose it's not a scanning problem, just DB is not so large.
"Whois History" which is actually a "Domaintools" - is not free and ain't cheap. I would recommend use tool suggested by @lindes - "securitytrails".
SecurityTrails (registration needed): https://securitytrails.com/domain/
