how come ancient maps.....

[dove]

How are ancient maps that are hundreds of years old so accurate of Antartica. Only recently with modern mapping technology have we been able to penetrate the ice to get a proper outline.  the old maps are almost identical to modern day ones.how?

[kev100]

Thats the million dollar question dove, we are told that exploration on a world scale only started with people like Columbus 1490 ish and even then they couldn't navigate too well, whe Columbus landed in America he thought he had found India.

The best theory that I've ever seen (TV documentary) was on a theory put forward by Charles Hapsgood called the "Earth crust displacement theory".

No lesser luminary than Albert Einstein thought it was brilliant and solves many of the ancient worlds mysteries.

Get to your library it's fascinating.

[Skids]

Other world beings gave us maps from which ancient peoples made copies. This is also why most acient maps are drawn as if seen from space, not as if the Earth were flat.

[dove]

cheers thanx for a good answer and a fast reply

[Grunty]

It's worth looking up the name Piri Reis.  He was a Turkish Admiral, and there is a map that can be traced to his possession in the 16th century.  I am told that one of the things it shows is a range of mountains in Antarctica that were not mapped until the 1950s.  Skids makes his theory sound simple, but it is really very involved and is worth looking at.

[goldenboy]

isnt there supposed to be an old map of antarctica that shows the two distinct islandsunder the ice, a fact only recently discovered

[Sequin]

A lot of these maps are modern fakes!

[jake-the-peg]

There was a theory that the large mass of europe was "balanced" by a similarly large land mass in the Southern seas that had been undiscoverred. Cook was looking for this when he first reached antartica in the eighteenth centuary.

I'd imagine that any genuine maps showing a large southern continent at an early date were based on that.

Do you have a specific map as an example?

By the way map making was limited by people's inability to determine longitude accurately. After Cook and the Harrison Chronometer the quality shot into orbit. Some of the maps Bligh made were still being used up to the second world war.