Honestly, a giant magnetic rock at the North Pole isn’t the worst explanation for magnetic compasses. It’s certainly more understandable than the electromagneto-thermo-hydrodynamics of a molten iron core to the earth
@@markmuller7962 Wrong, yes, but entirely rational. Say you lived in the Middle Ages. You know that compasses point north, unless there’s a magnet nearby. In that case, a compass points toward the magnet. You’re no dummy, you know the earth is round, and so it has a North Pole. Maybe there’s a giant lodestone there? Remember, you don’t have seismometers to tell you that the earth’s core is liquid metal. If neither you nor anyone you know or have even heard of has been to the North Pole, there’s no evidence this polar lodestone doesn’t exist. It’s like thinking the earth is the center of the solar system. If you don’t have telescopes, you can’t see the phases of Venus and you can’t measure stellar parallax. Your observations seem to indicate the earth is in the center of the universe. It’s not hard to construct a working mathematical model of a geocentric solar system. In fact, our planetarium projection equipment still runs on epicyclic gear systems
Mapmakers have always fascinated me. To tour the world by oceans and seas and land and also somehow map out everything they encounter into fairly accurate maps before things like GPS was invented. It's so difficult to fathom as we live in this modern century, as we benefit from the maps that exist already.
The key skills are still remembered and in some cases still used. Things like Plane table surveying & surveying using a chain. Many of the map makers didn't travel. They talked to sailors, ships navigators & travellers and put maps together from the information they received. At the beginning of GNSS systems like GPS the GPS type system was validated against the very accurate information we had at that time. Those old map makers were often accomplished mathematicians, working out ways to depict the surface of our globe on flat sheets of paper in ways that allow the flat depiction to be useful for navigation etc. Having worked with computer based maps for a couple of decades I have a lot of respect for the 'old guys' like Gerald's Mercator.
Y'know, I've been musing about it and...what if it wasn't? What if someone miscommunicated the concept of, say, dragon boats to Middle Eastern and European mapmakers? I know the assumption is that the mapmakers were just superstitious idiots, but perhaps there's a seedling of truth from which their depiction arose?
4:09 Now I'm just imagining someone hearing about that and traveling to Australia hoping to find a paradise, only to find a nightmare desert filled with the most dangerous animals on Earth.
There's a book exploring this very concept, but for South America. If I remember well, it's premise is roughly that the paradise is very close to the hellish.
@@DB-me7ol "Remember that there are different types of humans. The flogpuff is very gentle and likes to play with animals. But beware the snovbo, because they think they're better than us dragons."
This also raises an interesting question. What maps did said cultures have, and how did they look? Cause I doubt the Native Americans, Australians and other cultures didn't use some form of mapmaking themselves, just in a different format than the Europeans did.
Depends on the people… there’s a culture in the Amazon that doesn’t have words for north, east, etc… their sense of direction is entirely based around the river, they know “down the river”, “up the river”, and “away from the river”.
Like writing, cartography is something that is extremely useful but not strictly necessary, as locating yourself and places can be a knowledge passed on and learned orally or by experience. The peoples on the coast of Brazil knew how to get to the inca empire on the other side of the continent, there were known paths and a knowledge of a continental expanse of land (look up the Aleixo Garcia expedition). Same for the huge area on the north, were people would know which river on the amazon basin led where. (I have heard the story where in the Spix and Von Martius expedition, one of the scientists asked a amazonian indian how he knew where he was, and the guy kept explaining and drawing in the sand the outline of the major rivers, from the Andes to the Ocean)
@@blossomentrails3398 yeah but sometimes I just want to learn about maps. Everyone knows what happened but it loses its value the more you bring it up.
Imagine a medieval mapmaker talking to someone from today: “How do you guys deal with the dragons in Asia? “Uh… there are no dragons.” “Wha- seriously? What about the sea serpents in the Pacific Ocean?” “No sea serpents either.” “What about sirens? There’s gotta be sirens!” “Nope, never heard of them.” *”my whole life is a lie…”*
I'm curious about how people of the past created these maps. How can they predict/guess the shape of a continent? They only had ships and could only see limited length of an island's coastline from it. No photography, no air balloon, so how did they do it?
Maths, mostly. Using accounts of sailors and explorers and computing travel times, positions of stars in the sky, notable landmarks and even direct observation they could approximate the shape and position of lands. Needless to say, they often got things wrong, but that's just how it is.
Well this video answered your question lol: They could not. All the maps back then were really really bad. Very educated ppl could do approximations based on math and overlay of different maps of different perspectives (i.e. maps made by ppl from different countries) but even that was terribly inaccurate.
If you take maps of this period (1400-1700), you'll see that the Mediterranean is quite accurate, being traveled and chartes over and again since the Phoenicians, and that it gets progressively weirder and wonkier from there: the British Isles are deformed, Scandinavia is often shown as an island, and much of Africa south of the Sahara is just plain wrong (some maps show the Niger flowing into the Nile through Lake Chad!)
The first iteration of maps were just drawn as they look from the ground, if the lake looks round, draw it round. The second iteration we learned how to use sextants and the sun and stars to accurately measure latitude. These maps were accurate north and south, but east and west were a hot mess. The third iteration did not come until timekeeping had been invented. Finally east and west were accurate. Today we have refined the process, and we now have an airplane/satellite top down view to go off of.
I think the video should have included Ottoman admiral, navigator, geographer and cartographer Piri Reis. His maps were inspiring for history of cartography.
I am Korean translator of this video, and I had some very meaningful time with learning about what was strength and weaknesses of mapmaking progresses. Thanks to TED-Ed team for giving me an opportunaties to translate this awesome video!
Southeast Asian here. Want to know why Southeast Asia isn't really well-known in the world stage today? The answer is in the first part of the video, here be dragons, and we're doing our best to keep them a secret. Those early Europeans knew too much.
The reason the myth of the Dragon is so prevalent in Asia is because of the high concentration of dinosaur bones there. When they found partial dinosaur skeletons or skulls they used their imagination to fill in the rest and thus created the legendary dragons.
This is wrong. Maybe just maybe the so-called science of carbon dating is highly flawed. The reason dragon tales exist in every culture worldwide is that simply humans lived with them. Dragons demanded sacrificial animals and humans or they would torch your village or spew water on it. Knights were known to slay dragons as well, they didn't just find bones and make this up. Dinosaur is just a modern renaming of the very real dragon.
Every culture on Earth from europe to the Mayans represent dragons. Many had no contact with each other. You believe that they all found bones and made them a huge part of their religions , art, and culture uniformly. Read the story of the Wawel dragon in Poland. They were real and even intelligent.
@@MysteryMonarchWawel dragon literally died, because he got poisoned with a dead sheep filled with sulfur by some random peasant. Not too intelligent, if you ask me.
This makes me excited to think about how people hundreds of years from now look back on OUR maps. What have they discovered since then? How has the format changed? Who will they remember from our time?
@@Username-le4eq I was actually thinking about the ocean! There’s still a lot of unexplored seafloor, so it’s not like we can’t improve our maps of Earth.
@@Username-le4eq You'd be surprised considering how current maps still get the scale wrong in terms of actual land area. Many places are misrepresented to be larger than they should be(like the British Isles, which get beaten by Florida+Georgia alone).
@@setcheck67 that’s not a problem that can be improved on… 500 years from now maps will have the same problem as no flat map can accurately display areas.
One of the most interesting map mistakes recently noticed: After the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, people realized that the supposed positions of certain islands were off by a few miles/kilometers. This was discovered because scientists had calculated when Sputnik was supposed to fly over different places on earth (so people could go out and see it). However, the timings of the sightings over these islands were off. Since the timings were correct in other places, clearly the math around the speed/trajectory/etc. of Sputnik was correct, and so therefore the recorded geographic positions of the islands were wrong. With the ubiquity of photographic satellites in the modern day, it's safe to say we have a pretty good idea of what the terrestrial landscape looks like, although any map (not globe) is always going to be distorted because it's simply impossible to accurately project a 3D surface on a 2D object.
I don’t think it’s fair to criticize these mapmakers for not being 100% accurate all the time. They did the best they could with what they had and probably did a better job than any of us could do with their limited information.
Yes, I found her tone frankly grating. The dismissiveness of the German mapmaper who marked the Americas as a thin sliver of land where the east coast would be. He was entirely right to do so - he mapped according to what was understood at the time and as such took a fairly scientific approach to that; We know it's there, but not how much of it there is. It's one of the poorer videos of this type, sadly, as it mostly displayed that whoever is behind it may know maps but has what appears to be a very thin sliver of understanding of historical context.
This is eye-opening, I'm surprised on how far cartography has gone and how maps became more accurate as time passed, if only this video existed when I was doing a project about it ;-;
Regarding California, I once saw a map in a museum with a note next to the "Iland of California" that stated: "This California was in times past thought to beene a part of the Continent and so made in all maps, buy by further discoveries was found to be an Iland long i700 legues".
My favorite one is “a Mapp of Virginia Discouered To Ye Hills”, a detailed 1651 map of the Chesapeake Bay area depicting the Pacific as being right on the other side of the Appalachians
As a regular traveller to Wales I can confirm that “Here be Dragons” is and accurate description of what lies ahead when you cross the Severn Bridge. 🏴
Turkish admiral Piri Reis, according to historians, was the first cartographer to give an accurate description of America along with a deep insight on circumnavigation of Africa as he presented his work to the Ottoman Sultan Selim I.
@@alexginger1948 Nonsense the concept of Turkish and Turkey existed since the middle ages whereas Ottoman is the dynastic name... Turkish power had become a reality , to the extent that a chronicler of the Third Crusade already gave the name " Turchia ' to Seljuk Asia Minor . The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages Volume 2. 950-1250 pp.465
@@nenenindonu The name of the realm is the Ottoman empire both by governments and commoners , one chronicle isn’t enough to change historical facts and his ethnicity is not even known. You are just assuming he is turkic based on wrong ideas or maybe wishful thinking
@@alexginger1948 Another illogical sentence, China was mostly named after its ruling dynasties like the Ming, Tang, Han yet China was still 'China' and its people Chinese, you seem to have a poor knowledge about this topic I suggest you to do some basic research before getting into an argument
That blob isn't a correctly shaped Sub-Sahara Africa. I assume the makers of this video believe dangling bit next to it is also a super accurate version of India too.
Just imagine making a world map without being able to make use of satellites or even airplanes. Even with all the mistakes they made, it was an extraordinary feat.
"There weren't really dragons anywhere on earth" You really gotta do us like this, huh? This is the saddest thing someone ever told me without realising the tragedy.
Probably the most recent case of "terra incognita" was due to the Cold War, the East German maps that showed little or no detail inside West Berlin which DDR citizens were in fact allowed to travel to (but *only* after they'd reached retirement age).
A rock sorrounded by a whirlpool... That sounds a like Antartica... A continent surrounded by the raging vortex that is the antarctic circumpolar current
"It replicates the curvature of the Earth by compression of areas farthest away from China (most obviously the extreme horizontal squeeze of Europe), their reduced size making both a geographical and a political statement." The scaling was intentional dude, the focus is on East Asia, so they inflate it on purpose.
@@russiasgreatestspinmachine4096 If that's the case, then why is Japan (or is it supposed to be Korea?) so massively inflated relative to China? If the point is to centralize China, then one would expect it to be smaller or equal to its actual size, not exaggerated.
@@micahbush5397 "by compression of areas farthest away from China " it is also based on distance. Since Korea and Japan are closer they are obviously bigger. Perhaps it is to help detail those two places, as the bigger a map is, the more accurate a point on that map would be. The sizing wouldn't matter as we have established that it was intentional.
All the xvi century Spanish maps depict baja California as a peninsula. The first time Baja California was shown as an Island is in Herrera's Historia (1601), an error corrected by Kino (1705).
Those Spanish cartographers in the 1500’s were just waaaay ahead of their time depicting California as an island cut off from the rest of the country! 😂
to be fair australia is filled with things that may as well be mythic beasts to the people of yore. a bird that laughs like a human? a beast that leaps on two legs as tall as a man that carries its young in a pocket? a creature with the beak of a duck, the tail of a beaver and the fur of an otter that laid eggs and was venomous?
I love the narrator pronunciation when she says "Waldseemüller" (forest-sea-miller.) Second, it's impossible to depict a spherical shape in a plain surface. The Mercator although heavily misrepresenting land size was somewhat accurate regarding distances. Vikings also had a good map from the Americas since they crossed the Pacific and the Atlantic way before anybody else on big vessels.
The northeastern equivalent of island California are the 17c, mostly French, maps that show Lake Champlain as wide east-to-west but narrow north-to-south when it's the opposite. Imagine it stretching from Massena to the VT/NH line with Burlington being on its' south shore and St. Jean-sur-Richelieu on the north shore, and you get the idea.
If you were transported back in time by 500 years or more, no GPS, no satellite imagery, no accurate time-pieces, only the most rudimentary equipment for measuring latitude by sun and star sightings, and working with the anecdotal reports of boastful captains and superstitious sailors, let's see you do any better. As a qualified Cartographer myself, I am in awe of what mapmakers of the era were able to do, and the steady progress over the years.
The last line 04:31 'There were people and culture all over the world, many of whom eradicated by those who put their lands on world maps' summarises transition of humans from hunter gatherers to so called developed modern humans.
2:00 ~ ibn Hawqal is not the name of a man, it is the name of a man's *son.* In Arabic, 'Ibn' stands for "son of," so essentially Ibn Hawqal means "son of Hawqal."
I don't see many mistakes in any of the maps shown... they actually were pretty accurate with the information available to them, plus it must be remarked that the purpose of maps was not necessarily the same of today (if rulers needed a decent visualisation of their surroundings, nobody travelled through the whole world like today), it made perfect sense to introduce Here be dragons (incidentally, a nice way to admit ignorance) or features like the Eden garden. I think the title of the video is incorrect and misleading.
I'm not sure the despiction of Australia with all those tragons and absurd animals is wrong. The only thing they missed is that it's located somewhere like 10 km from the sun
All progress comes through mistakes and primitive experiments, what leads to truth is actually the will to change vision to reality, though vision doesn't match reality, surely enough will lead to progress, or help in progress.
Let us not also forget that those same native people killed each other over those same lands constantly throughout history. We are just the people who won.
Yep, and most of the deaths were caused by disease, not war. The explorers has no idea that the illnesses they were used to would affect isolated people so harshly.
@@Lark88 At first, that was true, but later on there are records of intentional infections to incapacitate indigenous people before attacking them. Not all explorers and colonists were monsters, but some were. History is messy.
At 1:44 there's an error. The T-O map shown is fine, but the narrator describes it as "the world's landmass divided roughly in the shape of a "T" and surrounded by a ring of ocean". Well, the last part is correct, but the "T-O" map is named for the shape of its prominent bodies of water. The vertical staff of the T is the Mediterranean Sea, the right "wing" of the T is the Nile River, and the left "wing" of the T is usually regarded as the Don River (though I have seen others suggested). So the land is not in the shape of a T, the land is divided into three parts, with Asia at the top, above the full bar of the T, Africa at the right of the vertical Mediterranean staff, and Europe on the left. Here's a crude, but very famous, simplification: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/T_and_O_map_Guntherus_Ziner_1472.jpg/330px-T_and_O_map_Guntherus_Ziner_1472.jpg
There used to be dragons in South East Asia. We used to hunt them for food when I was very young. Unfortunately they were too delicious and were hunted to extinction before the Europeans arrived
If you look at modern political maps from various countries around the world, you can see differences in the names and boundaries because there are nations not recognized as if those peoples do not exist.
The "Island of California" is an interesting, little understood phenomenon. The sea going ships of the time had square sails and, as such, could only go up to 90 degrees from the wind. With almost constant trade winds they could not "tack" into the wind and go north to todays US California. In 1736 the "Anza expedition" tried to, and found a land route to the LA area. The rest is history. Also the demise of "Island" idea. Also see "the Fable of California" (an idea of a Muslim nation (or "Calif") on an Island in the Pacific Ocean). Ergo the island idea. Quite interesting, in my humble opinion.
While everyone was getting maps hilariously wrong, Polynesian were put there traversing half the globe with nothing but maps in their minds (and stars)
2:50 Chinese map: "correctly shaped portrayal of sub saharan africa". There is only a small stain with a huge lake in it, while Arabia, India and Madagascar are all missing or completely deformed. After that this video criticises all the European maps and portraying them as idiots over much smaller errors. While these maps have mapped the whole world with a lot of accuracy
Zhang He's journeys to Africa were on the coast only bruh, if you look at it the outline IS pretty correctly shaped. They just didn't go inland and had vague information about a giant lake below the Sahara(which obviously wasn't there). As for the size of the maps: "It replicates the curvature of the Earth by compression of areas farthest away from China (most obviously the extreme horizontal squeeze of Europe), their reduced size making both a geographical and a political statement." basically, it was intentional because the focus is you know, in China.
One of the worst explanation of maps is the size of the Earth which the Americas were missed out in the 15th Century. During the rise of Ottoman Empire, the Turks banned the spice trade which both Iberian kingdoms (Spain and Portugal) made it difficult to pass through the Ottomans on land. Portugal made another route which pass below Africa to reach India, while Spain hired Christopher Columbus to travel across the Atlantic Ocean by using miscalculation claim that Earth was a small sphere, with a distance from Canary Islands to Japan as 2400 nautical miles which in reality is about 15,000 nautical miles westwards. The Americas were continental blockades which Columbus never reached Asia by "discovering" the natives from the Caribbean. And so, the Age of European exploration began for about 300 years, expanding the globe with the addition of Western Hemisphere.
Born too late to explore the continent, born too early to explore the seas, but born just in time to create fan fiction of the planet we live in and publish as official work because no one bothers or have the ability to debunk!
I'm really disappointed with TedEd, this video promotes ignorance. Ancient world maps give us a way of glimpsing into the perspective and worldview of our ancestors. This "mistakes" are what makes them so interesting and important to preserve and learn from. The best way of appreciating this old maps is to understand the mastery behind them, but also to view them from their perspective of the age when they here made. To compare these old maps to modern ones in an attempt to ridiculise them is just sad.
Talking about ancient cartography without referencing the Portuguese and their advanced and top-secret maps is unbelievable and a symptom of general world ignorance of portugueses history, the discoveries and birth of globalisation.
Honestly, a giant magnetic rock at the North Pole isn’t the worst explanation for magnetic compasses. It’s certainly more understandable than the electromagneto-thermo-hydrodynamics of a molten iron core to the earth
But it's wrong
Reminds me of the quote "Reality is stranger than fiction" 😁
"He's a little confused but he got the spirit."
@@markmuller7962 Wrong, yes, but entirely rational. Say you lived in the Middle Ages. You know that compasses point north, unless there’s a magnet nearby. In that case, a compass points toward the magnet. You’re no dummy, you know the earth is round, and so it has a North Pole. Maybe there’s a giant lodestone there? Remember, you don’t have seismometers to tell you that the earth’s core is liquid metal. If neither you nor anyone you know or have even heard of has been to the North Pole, there’s no evidence this polar lodestone doesn’t exist.
It’s like thinking the earth is the center of the solar system. If you don’t have telescopes, you can’t see the phases of Venus and you can’t measure stellar parallax. Your observations seem to indicate the earth is in the center of the universe. It’s not hard to construct a working mathematical model of a geocentric solar system. In fact, our planetarium projection equipment still runs on epicyclic gear systems
They must’ve figured out there’s a strong magnetic force but not sure what it was 🧐
Mapmakers have always fascinated me. To tour the world by oceans and seas and land and also somehow map out everything they encounter into fairly accurate maps before things like GPS was invented. It's so difficult to fathom as we live in this modern century, as we benefit from the maps that exist already.
@@josephmagliocca3628
I agree for sure. It's very cool and impressive.
I hate that it's tainted by all the genocide and violence against native people.
You'd love the book "the phantom atlas"
The key skills are still remembered and in some cases still used. Things like Plane table surveying & surveying using a chain. Many of the map makers didn't travel. They talked to sailors, ships navigators & travellers and put maps together from the information they received. At the beginning of GNSS systems like GPS the GPS type system was validated against the very accurate information we had at that time. Those old map makers were often accomplished mathematicians, working out ways to depict the surface of our globe on flat sheets of paper in ways that allow the flat depiction to be useful for navigation etc. Having worked with computer based maps for a couple of decades I have a lot of respect for the 'old guys' like Gerald's Mercator.
"Here be dragons": the greatest "fill in the homework while the teacher isn't looking" excuse in history.
Y'know, I've been musing about it and...what if it wasn't? What if someone miscommunicated the concept of, say, dragon boats to Middle Eastern and European mapmakers? I know the assumption is that the mapmakers were just superstitious idiots, but perhaps there's a seedling of truth from which their depiction arose?
I believe they found remains of dinosaurs. Footprints , weird creatures .Some today Crocs are still impressive.
I always understood it as "we have no fucing clue whats there" but it looked better for the mapmaker to put SOMETHING there.
4:09 Now I'm just imagining someone hearing about that and traveling to Australia hoping to find a paradise, only to find a nightmare desert filled with the most dangerous animals on Earth.
Maybe that how dragon is made. With how Kangaroo look like and with how many dangerous animals on Australia, that might explain the dragon
Most of their original inhabitants died because of these travellers.
There's a book exploring this very concept, but for South America. If I remember well, it's premise is roughly that the paradise is very close to the hellish.
THERE be dragons.
I mean that's still Australia, so they were not totally wrong
There is something extraordinarily flattering about the mapmakers believing our ancestors coexisted with dragons and beasts.
Either they assume our ancestors tamed the dragons and the mythical creatures. Or the dragons tamed the humans into thinking they were the top dogs xD
How to train your local human 💀
@@DB-me7ol
"Remember that there are different types of humans. The flogpuff is very gentle and likes to play with animals. But beware the snovbo, because they think they're better than us dragons."
People still believe in imaginary deities today. Think about what future humans will think of today's humans.
@@jimmytimmy3680
Well there's stuff like the tooth fairy, etc.
"There weren't really dragons anywhere on Earth."
Komodo dragons: Am I a joke to you?
LOL
I think that they are a joke. It's funny to see a komodo dragon vomit, poop, and then run away when they sense danger.
@@robertfaler1947 wtf aren't they like the apex of the island why would they just run away
@@whyiseverysinglehandletaken2 They are apex predators but they are scared of humans, according to a National Geographic article I read years ago.
@@robertfaler1947 Clever girls. Even if you're the most badass thing around, it's wise to be wary of something you've never seen before.
This also raises an interesting question.
What maps did said cultures have, and how did they look?
Cause I doubt the Native Americans, Australians and other cultures didn't use some form of mapmaking themselves, just in a different format than the Europeans did.
I know polynisians used bendy sticks and shells to map constellations for their travel i think
@@Username-le4eq That's actually a really cool idea! I didn't know that.
I think ted ed has a video on Polynesian way finding that can answer your question.
Depends on the people… there’s a culture in the Amazon that doesn’t have words for north, east, etc… their sense of direction is entirely based around the river, they know “down the river”, “up the river”, and “away from the river”.
Like writing, cartography is something that is extremely useful but not strictly necessary, as locating yourself and places can be a knowledge passed on and learned orally or by experience. The peoples on the coast of Brazil knew how to get to the inca empire on the other side of the continent, there were known paths and a knowledge of a continental expanse of land (look up the Aleixo Garcia expedition). Same for the huge area on the north, were people would know which river on the amazon basin led where. (I have heard the story where in the Spix and Von Martius expedition, one of the scientists asked a amazonian indian how he knew where he was, and the guy kept explaining and drawing in the sand the outline of the major rivers, from the Andes to the Ocean)
Went from calm map analyzing to “oh yeah there was genocide” so frickin fast.
Yeah right?
I know right? Shocking. Imagine how the people experiencing it must have felt.
Got to shove the woke ideology somewhere. Though I can think of somewhere else they can shove it.
@@blossomentrails3398 yeah but sometimes I just want to learn about maps. Everyone knows what happened but it loses its value the more you bring it up.
just like those colonisers. from wanting spice to commit mass genocide
Imagine a medieval mapmaker talking to someone from today:
“How do you guys deal with the dragons in Asia?
“Uh… there are no dragons.”
“Wha- seriously? What about the sea serpents in the Pacific Ocean?”
“No sea serpents either.”
“What about sirens? There’s gotta be sirens!”
“Nope, never heard of them.”
*”my whole life is a lie…”*
"What about Australia? I heard it's a paradise with fairies and cool stuff."
"Well, actually..."
@@enacrt haha, dreams crushed forever…
"The same goes for this whole conversation."
I would have told them they're real but a lot smaller than we thought
Plenty of sirens here in Iowa, it's the tornadoes you have to worry about.
I'm curious about how people of the past created these maps. How can they predict/guess the shape of a continent? They only had ships and could only see limited length of an island's coastline from it. No photography, no air balloon, so how did they do it?
Maths, mostly. Using accounts of sailors and explorers and computing travel times, positions of stars in the sky, notable landmarks and even direct observation they could approximate the shape and position of lands.
Needless to say, they often got things wrong, but that's just how it is.
Well this video answered your question lol: They could not. All the maps back then were really really bad.
Very educated ppl could do approximations based on math and overlay of different maps of different perspectives (i.e. maps made by ppl from different countries) but even that was terribly inaccurate.
If you take maps of this period (1400-1700), you'll see that the Mediterranean is quite accurate, being traveled and chartes over and again since the Phoenicians, and that it gets progressively weirder and wonkier from there: the British Isles are deformed, Scandinavia is often shown as an island, and much of Africa south of the Sahara is just plain wrong (some maps show the Niger flowing into the Nile through Lake Chad!)
I know theres a LOT of math involved, but I'm not nearly smart enough to know how lol
The first iteration of maps were just drawn as they look from the ground, if the lake looks round, draw it round. The second iteration we learned how to use sextants and the sun and stars to accurately measure latitude. These maps were accurate north and south, but east and west were a hot mess. The third iteration did not come until timekeeping had been invented. Finally east and west were accurate. Today we have refined the process, and we now have an airplane/satellite top down view to go off of.
I think the video should have included Ottoman admiral, navigator, geographer and cartographer Piri Reis. His maps were inspiring for history of cartography.
I am Korean translator of this video, and I had some very meaningful time with learning about what was strength and weaknesses of mapmaking progresses. Thanks to TED-Ed team for giving me an opportunaties to translate this awesome video!
بالفعل، إنه مذهل
@@greatthings1956 شكرًا لك! Thanks :)
Southeast Asian here. Want to know why Southeast Asia isn't really well-known in the world stage today? The answer is in the first part of the video, here be dragons, and we're doing our best to keep them a secret. Those early Europeans knew too much.
*is that where the plague came from?*
We keep our's locked inside mountains to keep them away from the prying eyes of the foreigners.
Shh! Make sure to just pretend this is a joke
Let it be known that we've shrunken down the dragons to make them seem less deadly
Probably most accurate to describe most of these as "history's best possible maps given current context and knowledge."
“We are the middle children of history. Born too late to explore earth, born too early to explore space.” -Anonymous
Spoiler: ain't nobody exploring space besides our probes
Internet be like, "and where did you discover that quote, biatch?"
Born just in time to explore tge internet
Omg!! This literally blew my mind!!!!
We can explore the ocean
The reason the myth of the Dragon is so prevalent in Asia is because of the high concentration of dinosaur bones there. When they found partial dinosaur skeletons or skulls they used their imagination to fill in the rest and thus created the legendary dragons.
This is wrong. Maybe just maybe the so-called science of carbon dating is highly flawed. The reason dragon tales exist in every culture worldwide is that simply humans lived with them. Dragons demanded sacrificial animals and humans or they would torch your village or spew water on it. Knights were known to slay dragons as well, they didn't just find bones and make this up. Dinosaur is just a modern renaming of the very real dragon.
@@MysteryMonarch I appreciate your dedication to that troll reply.
Every culture on Earth from europe to the Mayans represent dragons. Many had no contact with each other. You believe that they all found bones and made them a huge part of their religions , art, and culture uniformly. Read the story of the Wawel dragon in Poland. They were real and even intelligent.
@@MysteryMonarchWawel dragon literally died, because he got poisoned with a dead sheep filled with sulfur by some random peasant. Not too intelligent, if you ask me.
This makes me excited to think about how people hundreds of years from now look back on OUR maps. What have they discovered since then? How has the format changed? Who will they remember from our time?
Prob not much about the earth, but probably about the universe.
@@Username-le4eq I was actually thinking about the ocean! There’s still a lot of unexplored seafloor, so it’s not like we can’t improve our maps of Earth.
@@Username-le4eq You'd be surprised considering how current maps still get the scale wrong in terms of actual land area. Many places are misrepresented to be larger than they should be(like the British Isles, which get beaten by Florida+Georgia alone).
@@setcheck67 that’s not a problem that can be improved on… 500 years from now maps will have the same problem as no flat map can accurately display areas.
One of the most interesting map mistakes recently noticed: After the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, people realized that the supposed positions of certain islands were off by a few miles/kilometers. This was discovered because scientists had calculated when Sputnik was supposed to fly over different places on earth (so people could go out and see it). However, the timings of the sightings over these islands were off. Since the timings were correct in other places, clearly the math around the speed/trajectory/etc. of Sputnik was correct, and so therefore the recorded geographic positions of the islands were wrong.
With the ubiquity of photographic satellites in the modern day, it's safe to say we have a pretty good idea of what the terrestrial landscape looks like, although any map (not globe) is always going to be distorted because it's simply impossible to accurately project a 3D surface on a 2D object.
I don’t think it’s fair to criticize these mapmakers for not being 100% accurate all the time. They did the best they could with what they had and probably did a better job than any of us could do with their limited information.
She sounds so condescending too
@@averageday very
Yes, I found her tone frankly grating. The dismissiveness of the German mapmaper who marked the Americas as a thin sliver of land where the east coast would be. He was entirely right to do so - he mapped according to what was understood at the time and as such took a fairly scientific approach to that; We know it's there, but not how much of it there is.
It's one of the poorer videos of this type, sadly, as it mostly displayed that whoever is behind it may know maps but has what appears to be a very thin sliver of understanding of historical context.
This is eye-opening, I'm surprised on how far cartography has gone and how maps became more accurate as time passed, if only this video existed when I was doing a project about it ;-;
Regarding California, I once saw a map in a museum with a note next to the "Iland of California" that stated: "This California was in times past thought to beene a part of the Continent and so made in all maps, buy by further discoveries was found to be an Iland long i700 legues".
Those violins in the background make this wonderful video feel both epic and nostalgic
My favorite one is “a Mapp of Virginia Discouered To Ye Hills”, a detailed 1651 map of the Chesapeake Bay area depicting the Pacific as being right on the other side of the Appalachians
As a regular traveller to Wales I can confirm that “Here be Dragons” is and accurate description of what lies ahead when you cross the Severn Bridge. 🏴
If you are gonna B&b .....
Turkish admiral Piri Reis, according to historians, was the first cartographer to give an accurate description of America along with a deep insight on circumnavigation of Africa as he presented his work to the Ottoman Sultan Selim I.
Not Turkish rather Ottoman. No Turkish nationality existed at this point and his ethnic background is not necessarily turkic
@@alexginger1948 Nonsense the concept of Turkish and Turkey existed since the middle ages whereas Ottoman is the dynastic name...
Turkish power had become a reality , to the extent that a chronicler of the Third Crusade already gave the name " Turchia ' to Seljuk Asia Minor .
The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages Volume 2. 950-1250 pp.465
@@alexginger1948 his nationality was Ottoman and ethnicity was Turkic
@@nenenindonu The name of the realm is the Ottoman empire both by governments and commoners , one chronicle isn’t enough to change historical facts and his ethnicity is not even known.
You are just assuming he is turkic based on wrong ideas or maybe wishful thinking
@@alexginger1948 Another illogical sentence, China was mostly named after its ruling dynasties like the Ming, Tang, Han yet China was still 'China' and its people Chinese, you seem to have a poor knowledge about this topic I suggest you to do some basic research before getting into an argument
That blob isn't a correctly shaped Sub-Sahara Africa. I assume the makers of this video believe dangling bit next to it is also a super accurate version of India too.
Ah yes utopia, filled with creature that want to drop the beat of your heart to zero
Just imagine making a world map without being able to make use of satellites or even airplanes. Even with all the mistakes they made, it was an extraordinary feat.
"There weren't really dragons anywhere on earth"
You really gotta do us like this, huh? This is the saddest thing someone ever told me without realising the tragedy.
Mesmerizing Ted solves mysteries💙
Oh yeah😅
Dinosaur bones have been found in ancient times. The legend of dragons must come from there...
I thought this video was going to be about actual mistakes not just poor maps due to insufficient knowledge… poor click bait title
They did tho
They are mistakes. Mistakes made due to insufficient knowledge. The title explains the content quite adequately.
Probably the most recent case of "terra incognita" was due to the Cold War, the East German maps that showed little or no detail inside West Berlin which DDR citizens were in fact allowed to travel to (but *only* after they'd reached retirement age).
2:10 The original Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Love you ted ed, keep making fantastic videos
A rock sorrounded by a whirlpool...
That sounds a like Antartica...
A continent surrounded by the raging vortex that is the antarctic circumpolar current
They just depict the wrong pole😂
@@frostincubus4045 and a wrong hole
@@darksecret965 Thats what she said
Trippiest quote Ted Ed ever put out 0:02
2:35 Judging by the scale, the Chinese apparently thought Japan was much larger than Africa.
"It replicates the curvature of the Earth by compression of areas farthest away from China (most obviously the extreme horizontal squeeze of Europe), their reduced size making both a geographical and a political statement." The scaling was intentional dude, the focus is on East Asia, so they inflate it on purpose.
@@russiasgreatestspinmachine4096 If that's the case, then why is Japan (or is it supposed to be Korea?) so massively inflated relative to China? If the point is to centralize China, then one would expect it to be smaller or equal to its actual size, not exaggerated.
@@micahbush5397 "by compression of areas farthest away from China " it is also based on distance. Since Korea and Japan are closer they are obviously bigger. Perhaps it is to help detail those two places, as the bigger a map is, the more accurate a point on that map would be. The sizing wouldn't matter as we have established that it was intentional.
Beautiful animation ❤️
All the xvi century Spanish maps depict baja California as a peninsula. The first time Baja California was shown as an Island is in Herrera's Historia (1601), an error corrected by Kino (1705).
Why are people disliking this?
TED ED: "Here Be Dragons"
SCP fans: starts sobbing uncontrollably
the drawing in this video are so beautiful
Did you mean you are so beautiful
I am completely sure, that Mercator's map of the north pole can't be created in what we now know as Mercator projection.
Those Spanish cartographers in the 1500’s were just waaaay ahead of their time depicting California as an island cut off from the rest of the country! 😂
to be fair australia is filled with things that may as well be mythic beasts to the people of yore. a bird that laughs like a human? a beast that leaps on two legs as tall as a man that carries its young in a pocket? a creature with the beak of a duck, the tail of a beaver and the fur of an otter that laid eggs and was venomous?
There is some irony in having a video about mistakes in maps feature a globe that is rotating around an incorrect axis...
There were dragons, there still are dragons, on Komodo, which actually doesn't seem to be very far from the "here there be..." warning.
I've never personally feared death by lobster but i will now reconsider my position on the matter.
4:37 when the British Empire draws the Radcliffe line during the Partition of 1947
The history of cartography is absolutely amazing
WOW! Interesting video !!!
What, no shout-out to Amerigo Vespucci, the guy who got two CONTINENTS named after him?
I love the narrator pronunciation when she says "Waldseemüller" (forest-sea-miller.)
Second, it's impossible to depict a spherical shape in a plain surface. The Mercator although heavily misrepresenting land size was somewhat accurate regarding distances. Vikings also had a good map from the Americas since they crossed the Pacific and the Atlantic way before anybody else on big vessels.
I think you mean the North Sea and the Atlantic, I have a hard time imagining vikings in the Pacific... 😉
The northeastern equivalent of island California are the 17c, mostly French, maps that show Lake Champlain as wide east-to-west but narrow north-to-south when it's the opposite. Imagine it stretching from Massena to the VT/NH line with Burlington being on its' south shore and St. Jean-sur-Richelieu on the north shore, and you get the idea.
If you were transported back in time by 500 years or more, no GPS, no satellite imagery, no accurate time-pieces, only the most rudimentary equipment for measuring latitude by sun and star sightings, and working with the anecdotal reports of boastful captains and superstitious sailors, let's see you do any better. As a qualified Cartographer myself, I am in awe of what mapmakers of the era were able to do, and the steady progress over the years.
Nice video.
The first Australians probably met the giant lizard Megalania - look it up! - a real-life dragon if ever there was one.
The last line 04:31 'There were people and culture all over the world, many of whom eradicated by those who put their lands on world maps' summarises transition of humans from hunter gatherers to so called developed modern humans.
Thank you for this
I have always been fascinated by maps and mapping my environment. Translating the tactile world onto paper.
Wow, that was a packed >5 minutes! 👏🏼
In fairness there are Komodo dragons there. So the mapmakers were spot on
Thank you! ❤️
Well this video was just so interesting and I love it
2:00 ~ ibn Hawqal is not the name of a man, it is the name of a man's *son.* In Arabic, 'Ibn' stands for "son of," so essentially Ibn Hawqal means "son of Hawqal."
ye bro no -offence i understand how pronounication of different langauges can be hard , but they really did mispronounce that name
@@rayanbakhtiar8440no offense taken.
🤜🤛❗️
Bro ibn Hawqal is the son of a man who is a man himself so ibn hawqal is a man@@koriw1701
"A correctly portrayed portrayal of sub-Saharan Africa"
Um... If you say so...
Our Ancestors worked so hard for future generations! Can't even imagine it!
I don't see many mistakes in any of the maps shown... they actually were pretty accurate with the information available to them, plus it must be remarked that the purpose of maps was not necessarily the same of today (if rulers needed a decent visualisation of their surroundings, nobody travelled through the whole world like today), it made perfect sense to introduce Here be dragons (incidentally, a nice way to admit ignorance) or features like the Eden garden.
I think the title of the video is incorrect and misleading.
I'm being serious: how did people in the middle ages make maps? Just by walking along the coast of say Europe?
Pretty much, yeah. They measured the distance/direction between different points to slowly figure out where everything is supposed to go.
This is why I subscribe! Incredible, interesting, evolving, and educational! Thanks for your work!
This was a very well done and enlightening video! Keep it up Ted Ed! And may you do more history vs?
Someone spots you once and suddenly you're on every map for centuries. Sheesh. I'm glad we have more privacy laws today.
I'm not sure the despiction of Australia with all those tragons and absurd animals is wrong. The only thing they missed is that it's located somewhere like 10 km from the sun
All progress comes through mistakes and primitive experiments, what leads to truth is actually the will to change vision to reality, though vision doesn't match reality, surely enough will lead to progress, or help in progress.
This video does exactly the opposite of what it was meant to do - educate. Instead used as a smear campaign against the West.
And of course the video had to end with an anti-white/anti-european conclusion.
Let us not also forget that those same native people killed each other over those same lands constantly throughout history. We are just the people who won.
Yep, and most of the deaths were caused by disease, not war. The explorers has no idea that the illnesses they were used to would affect isolated people so harshly.
@@Lark88 At first, that was true, but later on there are records of intentional infections to incapacitate indigenous people before attacking them. Not all explorers and colonists were monsters, but some were. History is messy.
At 1:44 there's an error. The T-O map shown is fine, but the narrator describes it as "the world's landmass divided roughly in the shape of a "T" and surrounded by a ring of ocean". Well, the last part is correct, but the "T-O" map is named for the shape of its prominent bodies of water. The vertical staff of the T is the Mediterranean Sea, the right "wing" of the T is the Nile River, and the left "wing" of the T is usually regarded as the Don River (though I have seen others suggested). So the land is not in the shape of a T, the land is divided into three parts, with Asia at the top, above the full bar of the T, Africa at the right of the vertical Mediterranean staff, and Europe on the left. Here's a crude, but very famous, simplification: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/T_and_O_map_Guntherus_Ziner_1472.jpg/330px-T_and_O_map_Guntherus_Ziner_1472.jpg
There used to be dragons in South East Asia. We used to hunt them for food when I was very young. Unfortunately they were too delicious and were hunted to extinction before the Europeans arrived
Actually, it's true, since Komodo Dragons are indeed in Southeast Asia, in Indonesia...
Worst are netflix shows maps, especially history documents
Such as?
"There aren't any dragons in South East Asia"
Komodo Dragons: *Adios*
"Every map is wrong"
Even google maps
If you look at modern political maps from various countries around the world, you can see differences in the names and boundaries because there are nations not recognized as if those peoples do not exist.
Wow your voice is so soothing
The "Island of California" is an interesting, little understood phenomenon. The sea going ships of the time had square sails and, as such, could only go up to 90 degrees from the wind. With almost constant trade winds they could not "tack" into the wind and go north to todays US California. In 1736 the "Anza expedition" tried to, and found a land route to the LA area. The rest is history. Also the demise of "Island" idea. Also see "the Fable of California" (an idea of a Muslim nation (or "Calif") on an Island in the Pacific Ocean). Ergo the island idea. Quite interesting, in my humble opinion.
While everyone was getting maps hilariously wrong, Polynesian were put there traversing half the globe with nothing but maps in their minds (and stars)
Subtitles of Central Kurdish have been added, but there is no Russian, German, Chinese. Bravo
2:50 Chinese map: "correctly shaped portrayal of sub saharan africa". There is only a small stain with a huge lake in it, while Arabia, India and Madagascar are all missing or completely deformed. After that this video criticises all the European maps and portraying them as idiots over much smaller errors. While these maps have mapped the whole world with a lot of accuracy
Of course there's that bias but we are not allowed to talk about it.
Zhang He's journeys to Africa were on the coast only bruh, if you look at it the outline IS pretty correctly shaped. They just didn't go inland and had vague information about a giant lake below the Sahara(which obviously wasn't there). As for the size of the maps: "It replicates the curvature of the Earth by compression of areas farthest away from China (most obviously the extreme horizontal squeeze of Europe), their reduced size making both a geographical and a political statement." basically, it was intentional because the focus is you know, in China.
@@russiasgreatestspinmachine4096 the map shown is not from Zheng He's journeys, it's a bit older map, I searched it up, it's actually Korean
@@raa14211 i meant they most probably got the information from Zheng He, since you know, no one else really went to Africa aside from Him?
Narrator's voice is so soothing!
Everybody was a gangster
Until a *Sea* was declared a *River* and a *River* was declared a *Sea*
In the Map....
Caspian -Lake- Sea: *sweats*
If you see those Al Idrisi map, north become south and west become east.
That map very accurate for that time...
"A Guide to Plesant Journeys into Faraway Lands" sounds like a medival version of hitchhikers guide to the galaxy xD
One of the worst explanation of maps is the size of the Earth which the Americas were missed out in the 15th Century.
During the rise of Ottoman Empire, the Turks banned the spice trade which both Iberian kingdoms (Spain and Portugal) made it difficult to pass through the Ottomans on land. Portugal made another route which pass below Africa to reach India, while Spain hired Christopher Columbus to travel across the Atlantic Ocean by using miscalculation claim that Earth was a small sphere, with a distance from Canary Islands to Japan as 2400 nautical miles which in reality is about 15,000 nautical miles westwards. The Americas were continental blockades which Columbus never reached Asia by "discovering" the natives from the Caribbean. And so, the Age of European exploration began for about 300 years, expanding the globe with the addition of Western Hemisphere.
Born too late to explore the continent, born too early to explore the seas, but born just in time to create fan fiction of the planet we live in and publish as official work because no one bothers or have the ability to debunk!
How were you born to early to explore the seas?
@@DoomFinger511 Take a look at these abominations created by the people who thought they are born to explore the seas.
@@DoomFinger511 He's probably talking millions of years ago
"....There are no dragon on earth."
Komodo Dragons be like : *Excuse me.*
"Without Geography, you're nowhere"
-Unknown
I'm really disappointed with TedEd, this video promotes ignorance. Ancient world maps give us a way of glimpsing into the perspective and worldview of our ancestors. This "mistakes" are what makes them so interesting and important to preserve and learn from. The best way of appreciating this old maps is to understand the mastery behind them, but also to view them from their perspective of the age when they here made. To compare these old maps to modern ones in an attempt to ridiculise them is just sad.
Talking about ancient cartography without referencing the Portuguese and their advanced and top-secret maps is unbelievable and a symptom of general world ignorance of portugueses history, the discoveries and birth of globalisation.
"Here be Dragons" actually never was written on a historical map. The phrase was "Here be Lions" or to be more specific: "here lions abound".
I adore and collect historical maps and this just made my day! Much appreciated!🗺️