Geographic anomalies on old maps

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

As a result of the research project, a number of previously unknown anomalies were discovered on old geographical maps. These anomalies do not correspond to modern geographic realities, but show a close correlation with the paleogeographic reconstructions of the Pleistocene.

Usually, discussions about prehistoric relics, possibly reflected on geographical maps, are limited to flooded lands and Terra Australis (see, for example, the works of C. Hepgood and G. Hencock). Yet researchers have escaped a fair amount of relics of prehistoric geography. When searching for them, the old maps of the deep regions of the continents, as well as the Arctic, were poorly analyzed. The purpose of this study is to at least partially fill this gap.

Below is a summary of the findings.

Green Sahara

Over the past half a million years, the Sahara has gone through long periods of rains 5 times, when the greatest desert turned into a savannah, along which rivers flowed for millennia, large lakes were poured, and the camps of primitive hunters for animals unseen in the desert were located. The last rainy season in central and eastern Sahara ended about 5,500 years ago. Apparently, it was this circumstance that stimulated the migration of the population from the Sahara to the Nile Valley, the development of irrigation there and, as a consequence, the formation of the state of the pharaohs.

In this regard, of particular interest is the developed hydrography of the Sahara on medieval maps drawn from the tables of the Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy (II century AD).

Rice. 1. Rivers and lakes of the Sahara in the Ulm edition of Ptolemy's geography 1482

Such maps of the 15th-17th centuries in Central and Eastern Sahara show full-flowing rivers (Kinips, Gir) and lakes that do not exist today (Chelonid bogs, Lake Nuba) (Fig. 1). Particularly interesting is the trans-Saharan river Kinips, which crossed all the sugar from south to north from the Tibesti highlands to the Gulf of Sidra of the Mediterranean Sea (Fig. 2). Satellite imagery confirms the existence of a gigantic dry channel in the area, which is wider than the Nile Valley (Fig. 3). To the southeast of the headwaters of Kinips, Ptolemy placed the Chelonid swamps and Lake Nuba, in the area of which a dry bed of a prehistoric mega-lake was discovered in the Sudanese province of North Darfur.

Rice. 2. The river system of the Libyan basin on the Mercator map according to Ptolemy (1578; left) and on the scheme of the paleo-channels of the Sahara rivers (right).

Rice. 3. Dry bed of the Kinip Ptolemy river near its delta in the image from space.

Ptolemy was not alone in describing the prehistoric realities of the wet Sahara. So Pliny the Elder (1st century AD) mentioned the Triton bog, which “many place it between the two Sirtes,” where now there is a dry bed of the giant paleolake Fezzan, 400 km south of Tripoli. But the last lacustrine deposits of Fezzan date back to prehistoric times - more than 6 thousand years ago.

Rice. 4. Non-existent tributary of the Nile from the Sahara on the map of 1680 (arrows).

Rice. 5. Traces of the same prehistoric influx in the satellite image (arrow).

Another relic of the humid Sahara is the Nubian tributary of the Nile - a river comparable to the Nile that flowed from the Sahara and emptied into the Nile in the Aswan region from the southwest, just above Elephantine Island (Fig. 4). This tributary was not known to either Ptolemy or Herodotus, who personally visited Elephantine. However, the Nubian tributary was persistently drawn by European cartographers, from Beheim (1492) and Mercator (1569) until the early 19th century. On satellite images, the Nubian tributary is traced at 470 km from the Nile as the bay of Lake Nasser, as a dark strip of a dry channel, as a chain of salt lakes, and finally, as “honeycombs” of fields around water-bearing wells (Fig. 5).

Wet Arabia

The Arabian Desert is located near the Sahara. It has also experienced rainy eras on several occasions during interglacial warming. The last such climatic optimum took place 5-10 thousand years ago.

Rice. 6. Arabian desert with rivers and lake in the Ulm edition of Ptolemy's geography 1482.

On maps based on Ptolemy's data, the Arabian Peninsula is shown as rugged rivers and with a large lake at its southern end (Fig. 6). Where there is a lake and the inscription "aqua" (water) in the Ulm edition of Ptolemy's geography (1482), there is now a dry depression 200-300 km across, covered with sand.

Where the cities of Mecca and Jeddah are now located, Ptolemy placed a large river hundreds of kilometers long. Shooting from space confirms that there, in the direction indicated by Ptolemy, stretched a dry ancient river valley up to 12 km wide and one and a half hundred kilometers long. Even the southern tributary, merging with the main channel at Mecca, is well discernible.

Another large Ptolemy river that crossed Arabia and flowed into the Persian Gulf on the coast of the United Arab Emirates is now hidden under the sand dunes. The relics of its delta can be narrow, river-like, bays of the sea and salt marshes between the settlements of Al Hamra and Silah.

Glaciers of Eastern Europe

During the Pleistocene, Eastern Europe experienced many glaciations. At the same time, the Scandinavian ice sheets covered not only the north-west of Russia, but descended along the Dnieper valley even to the Black Sea steppes.

In this regard, of great interest is the nonexistent mountain system, which Ptolemy placed in place of the "East European Plain" of modern geography. It is important to note that this system correlates with the lowlands of modern geographic maps.

For centuries, geographers have persistently drawn the Hyperborean Mountains, stretching along the parallels 60o-62o from the Rybinsk reservoir to the Urals. Attempts to identify the Hyperborean Mountains with the Urals (Bogard-Levin and Grantovsky, 1983) or with the edge of the last, Valdai glacier (Seibutis, 1987; Fadeeva, 2011) run into glaring contradictions. The latitudinal orientation of the Hyperborean Mountains does not agree with the SW-NE orientation of the moraines on the edge of the Valdai Glacier, and the Urals are generally stretched from south to north. The southern extensions of the Ptolemy mountains along the Dnieper valley (Ripeyskie and Amadoca), as well as along the Oka-Don plain (Hypian mountains) were not identified by historians with specific mountains of modern geography. However, they formally correspond to the two languages of the Dnieper glaciation, which about 250 thousand years ago reached latitudes close to those of the Ptolemy Mountains (Fig. 8). So along the Dnieper valley, the glacier reached a latitude of 48 degrees, which is close to the southern border of the Amadok Mountains of Ptolemy (51 degrees). And between the Don and the Volga, the glacier reached a latitude of 50 degrees, which is close to the southern border of the Hypian Mountains (52 degrees).

Rice. 7. Mountainous view of the edge of a modern glacier with a periglacial reservoir and a similar image of the Hyperborean mountains of Ptolemy on the map of Nikola German (1513)

Rice. 8. The latitudinal orientation of the Ptolemy Hyperborean Mountains and their two ridges in a southerly direction (Basler 1565; left) better correspond to the border of the Dnieper glaciation than the last Valdai glacier on the map of glacial moraines (right).

The Hyperborean mountains proper correspond to the eastern edge of the Dnieper glacier between the Volga and Ob rivers, where its border ran from west to east just along the 60o parallel. The abrupt cliffs at the edges of modern glaciers do indeed have a mountain-like appearance (Fig. 7). In this regard, let us pay attention to the fact that the maps of Nikola Herman (1513) depict the Hyperborean mountains in a similar way - in the form of a cliff with lakes adjacent to its foot, which surprisingly resemble periglacial reservoirs of melt water. Even the Arab geographer al-Idrisi (XII century) described the Hyperborean mountains as Mount Kukaya: “It is a mountain with steep slopes, it is absolutely impossible to climb it, and on its top there are eternal, never melting ice … Its rear part is uncultivated; because of the severe frosts, animals do not live there. This description is completely inconsistent with the modern geography of northern Eurasia, but it is quite consistent with the edge of the Pleistocene ice sheet.

The deflated sea of Azov

With a maximum depth of only 15 m, the Sea of Azov drained when the ocean level dropped by a hundred meters during the epoch of glaciation, i.e. more than 10 thousand years ago. Geological data indicate that when the Sea of Azov was drained, the Don River bed ran along its bottom from Rostov-on-Don, through the Kerch Strait to the delta 60 km south of the Kerch Strait. The river emptied into the Black Sea, which was a freshwater lake with a water level 150 m below the current one. The breakthrough of the Bosphorus 7,150 years ago led to the flooding of the Don channel up to its present delta.

Even Seybutis (1987) drew attention to the fact that in ancient geography and on medieval maps (up to the 18th century) it was customary to call the Sea of Azov "swamp" (Palus) or "swamps" (Paludes). However, the image of the Sea of Azov on old maps has never been analyzed from a paleogeographic point of view.

In this regard, the maps of Ukraine of the French officer and military engineer Guillaume Boplan are interesting. Contrary to other cartographers who depicted the Sea of Azov as a wide reservoir, Boplan's maps show the narrow, winding "Liman of the Meotian swamp" (Limen Meotis Palus; Fig. 9). The meaning of this phrase is in the best way possible corresponds to prehistoric realities, since "estuary (from the Greek limen - harbor, bay), a bay with meandering low shores, formed when the sea floods the valleys of lowland rivers …" (TSB).

Rice. 9. The image of the Sea of Azov as a flooded valley of the Don River on the Boplan map (1657).

The memory of the Don flow along the bottom of the Sea of Azov to the Kerch Strait was preserved by the local population and was recorded by several authors. So even Arrian in the "Periplus of the Euxine Pontus" (131-137 AD) wrote that Tanais (Don) "flows from the Meotian lake (the Sea of Azov. Approx. AA) and flows into the sea of the Euxine Pontus" … Evagrius Scholasticus (VI century AD) pointed to the source of such a strange opinion: "The natives call Tanais the strait that goes from the Meotian swamp to the Euxine Pontus."

Glacial lands of the arctic

During the large-scale glaciations of the Pleistocene, the Arctic Ocean for millennia turned into virtually land, resembling the ice sheet of West Antarctica. Even the deep-sea areas of the ocean were covered with a kilometer-long layer of ice (the ocean floor was scratched by icebergs to a depth of 900 m). According to the paleogeographic reconstructions of M. G. Groswald, the centers of glacier spread in the Arctic basin were Scandinavia, Greenland and shallow waters: the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, the Barents, Kara, East Siberian and Chukchi seas. In the process of melting, the ice domes in these areas could last longer, giving food to the legends of large islands separated by straits. For example, the thickness of the ice dome in the Kara Sea is estimated at more than 2 kilometers, with a typical sea depth of only 50-100 meters.

At the site of the northern part of the modern Kara Sea, the Beheim Globe (1492) shows a mountainous land stretching from east to west. To the south, Beheim depicted a vast inland lake-sea, which exceeds the area of the Caspian and Black Seas combined. The non-existent land of Beheim is located at the same latitudes and longitudes as the Kara glacier, according to the paleogeographic reconstruction of the maximum of the last glaciation of the Earth 20 thousand years ago, carried out using the modern paleoclimatic model QUEEN. The Beheim Inland Sea corresponds to the southern part of the Kara Sea, free from glaciation. In the light of paleoclimatic reconstructions, Beheim's image of a vast land area also becomes clear to the north of Scandinavia, even a little to the north of Spitsbergen. It was there that the northern border of the Scandinavian glacier passed.

Rice. 10. Comparison of the Beheim Globe of 1492 with paleogeographic reconstructions of the maximum of the last glaciation: a) glaciers (white) according to the QUEEN model; b) a sketch of Beheim's globe, published in 1889.

The Polar Island on the Orons Finet map (1531) stretches along a longitude of 190 degrees, which, in terms of the modern prime meridian, is 157 degrees east longitude. This direction differs only by 20 degrees from the direction of the Lomonosov Ridge, now underwater, but bearing traces of the former shallow water or even the above-water position of its individual peaks (terraces, flat peaks, pebbles).

Arctic Caspian

During the Ice Age, a seal (Phoca caspica), white fish, salmon, and small crustaceans somehow entered the Caspian Sea from the Arctic seas. Biologists A. Derzhavin and L. Zenkevich determined that out of 476 animal species living in the Caspian, 3% are of Arctic origin. Genetic studies of crustaceans of the Caspian and White Seas have revealed their very close relationship, which excludes the "non-marine" origin of the inhabitants of the Caspian. Geneticists came to the conclusion that the seals entered the Caspian from the north during the Pliocene-Pleistocene (ie earlier than 10 thousand years ago), although "the paleogeography that would have allowed these invasions at that time remains a mystery."

Before Ptolemy, in ancient geography, the Caspian Sea was considered the gulf of the northern ocean. The Caspian Sea, connected by a narrow channel with the northern ocean, can be seen on maps-reconstructions of Dicaearchus (300 BC), Eratosthenes (194 BC), Posidonius (150-130 BC), Strabo (18 AD), Pomponius Mela (c. 40 AD), Dionysius (124 AD). Now this is considered to be a classic delusion, a consequence of the narrow outlook of ancient geographers. But the geological literature describes the connection of the Caspian with the White Sea through the Volga and the so-called. The Yoldian Sea is a periglacial reservoir at the edge of the melting Scandinavian ice sheet, which dumped excess melt water into the White Sea. You should also pay attention to the rare map of al-Idrisi, dated 1192. It shows the connection of the Caspian Sea with the northern ocean through a complex system of lakes and rivers of northeastern Europe.

The above examples are enough to draw the following conclusions.

1. The alleged relics of prehistoric geography on historical maps are much more numerous and interesting than is commonly believed.

2. The existence of these relics testifies to the underestimation of the successes of ancient geographers. But the hypothesis of the existence of an unknown, sufficiently developed culture in the Pleistocene conflicts with the modern paradigm and is therefore doomed to be rejected by academic science.

See also:

Amazing map of Russia from 1614. River RA, Tartary and Piebala Horde

Amazing map of Russia, Muscovy and Tartary