In other words, the true enigma of this 1513 map is not so much its inclusion of a continent not discovered until 1818 but its portrayal of part of the coastline of that continent under ice-free conditions which came to an end 6000 years ago and have not since recurred.
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Unbelievable as it may appear, the evidence nevertheless indicates that some ancient people explored Antarctica when its coasts were free of ice. It is clear, too, that they had an instrument of navigation for accurately determining longitudes that was far superior to anything possessed by the peoples of ancient, medieval or modern times until the second half of the eighteenth century.
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Antarctica was not always covered with ice and was at one time much warmer than it is today. 2 It was warm because it was not physically located at the South Pole in that period. Instead it was approximately 2000 miles farther north. This ‘would have put it outside the Antarctic Circle in a temperate or cold temperate climate’.
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During the envisaged southwards movement of Antarctica brought about by earth-crust displacement, the continent would gradually have grown colder, an ice-cap forming and remorselessly expanding over several thousands of years until it attained its present dimensions.’
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At some risk of over-simplification, the academic consensus is broadly: • Civilization first developed in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. • This development began after 4000 BC, and culminated in the emergence of the earliest true civilizations(Sumer and Egypt) around 3000 BC, soon followed by the Indus Valley and China. • About 1500 years later, civilization took off spontaneously and independently in the Americas. • Since 3000 BC in the Old World(and about 1500 BC in the New) civilization has steadily ‘evolved’ in the direction of ever more refined, complex and productive forms. • In consequence, and particularly by comparison with ourselves, all ancient civilizations(and all their works) are to be understood as essentially primitive(the Sumerian astronomers regarded the heavens with unscientific awe, and even the pyramids of Egypt were built by ‘technological primitives’).
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The Oronteus Finaeus Map, Hapgood concluded, appeared to document ‘the surprising proposition that Antarctica was visited and perhaps settled by men when it was largely if not entirely non-glacial.
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The Ross Sea evidence provides strong corroboration for the notion that Antarctica must have been mapped by some unknown civilization during the extensively ice-free period which ended around 4000
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Basing his cartography on ancient sources now lost, the French academician depicted a clear waterway across the southern continent dividing it into two principal landmasses lying east and west of the line now marked by the Trans-Antarctic Mountains. Such a waterway, connecting the Ross, Weddell and Bellinghausen Seas, would indeed exist if Antarctica were free of ice. As the 1958 IGY Survey shows, the continent(which appears on modern maps as one continuous landmass) consists of an archipelago of large islands with mile-thick ice packed between them and rising above sea level.
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The combined effect of the Piri Reis, Oronteus Finaeus, Mercator and Buache Maps is the strong, though disturbing, impression that Antarctica may have been continuously surveyed over a period of several thousands of years as the ice-cap gradually spread outwards from the interior, increasing its grip with every passing millennium but not engulfing all the coasts of the southern continent until around 4000 BC.
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