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Piri Reis

In 1929 some old maps were found painted on gazelle skin, rolled up on a shelf in the palace at Constantinople. They belonged to the sea captain Piri Reis who sailed the area and made this map around 1513. Two maps of his were already in the Berlin Library and showed remarkably accurate surveys of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean islands. Piri Reis was well known in his day, an Admiral in the Navy of the Ottoman Turks who took part in many successful battles. He was considered an expert in Mediterranean lands. He had privileged access to the Imperial Library where he probably found the many maps he states were used as reference for this one. Reis was put to death by the Sultan Suleiman II for a little tiff they had in 1555.

His map shows the exact coastline of North and South America - including the Andes which were unknown at this time - and Antarctica including their exact topography - mountain ranges, valleys and individual peaks that weren't discovered until 1952, giving their exact altitudes. Antarctica is shown in detail in spite of it not being discovered until 1818, 300 years after the map was drawn. The last time the coastland of Queen Maud land was ice-free was 6000 years ago. Greenland was strangely shown as being three islands. Investigations carried out in recent years show Greenland does indeed rest on three islands.

The Falkland islands are shown at the correct latitude, although they weren't discovered until 1592.

Due to the ice-free state of Antarctica shown on the map, it was estimated the original map(s) used to compile Reis' must have been drawn at least 10,000 years ago. This was also confirmed by an evaluation by the 8th Reconnaissance Technical Squadron of the USAF, Westover AFB, Mass. The subglacial topography of Queen Maudland in Antactica, which the Piri Reis map shows accurately, was not mapped until 1949 by a joint British-Swedish science endevour..

Reis gives us some answers to these puzzles in notes written in his hand along the margins. He states that this map is a compilation from a large number of existing maps, some of which were copies of maps before them. One theory which has gained scientific credibility in the last decade is that the poles were once near the euqators, before a "earth-crust" displacement took place. Even if this is true, it happened about 4000 BC.

Oronteus Finaeus

This map was found in the Library of Congress, Washington DC in 1960 by Charles Hapgood. It was drawn by Oronteus Finaeus in 1531. As with the Piri Reis map, Antarctica is shown to be ice free with flowing rivers, drainage patterns and clean coastline. Some of the mountain ranges shown were only discovered recently. The deep interior didn't show any rivers or mountains which some believe means it was already covered in ice at the time. The Oronteus Finaeus map is more accurate than any other map of the same time. In fact, it is more accurate than any map made anywhere up to the year 1800.

Another tidbit of proof is the Ross sea. Today huge glaciers feed into it, making it a floating ice shelf hundreds of feet thick. Yet this map and the Reis map show estuaries and rivers at the site.

In 1949 coring was done to take samples of the ice and sediment at the bottom of the Ross Sea. They clearly showed several layers of stratification, meaning the area went through several environmental changes. Some of the sediments were of the type usually brought down to the sea by rivers. Tests done at the Carnegie Institute in Washington DC, which date radioactive elements found in sea water, dated the sediments at about 4000 BC, which would mean the area was ice free with flowing rivers up until that time - exactly what is recorded on the Reis and Finaeus maps.

The life of Oronce Fine (Oronce Finé, Orotius Finaeus, Oronteus Finaeus) (1494-1555)

Oronce Fine was born in Briançon in 1494 and educated in Paris. After a brief spell in prison in 1518, he earned a medical degree from the Collège de Navarre in Paris in 1522, although he was to become a mathematician. In 1524, he was once again in prison and in the same year he built an ivory sundial that still exists. Like many mathematicians of the sixteenth century, Fine was considered an expert on fortifications and worked on the defenses of Milan.

In 1531, he was appointed to the chair of mathematics at the Collège Royal in Paris. He wrote voluminously on scientific subjects, his publications including treatises on astronomical instruments and astronomy (he suggested in 1520 that eclipses of the moon could be used to determine the longitude of places); he also invented a map projection, producing a map of the world in 1519 using it. He also drew the first domestically published map of France in 1525 and on another map of the world, drawn in 1531, the name Terra Australis appeared for the first time. Other productions include works on arithmetic and geometry. In 1544, he calculated the value of pi to be (22 2/9)/7, which he later refined to 47/15 and, in De rebus mathematicis of 1556, 3 11/78. In astronomy, he believed that the earth was at the center of the universe (in common with most of his European contemporaries) and he built an astronomical clock in 1553.

Buache

The Buache Map is an eighteenth century map prepared by the French geographer, Philippe Buache, in 1739.

The Buache map shows two southern continents separated by an interior polar sea with two straits on either end (Hapgood 1979, Figure 53 and page 19 of FOG). The "Interior Sea" is centered on the South Pole and its axis, including one strait, lies roughly at a 90 degree angle to the north-south axis of South America. The larger of these continents forms a 220-degree arc that surrounds the Interior Sea. A large peninsula juts northward near one end. For the sake of discussion, it is called the "Large Continent." The smaller continent, which is called the "Small Continent" lies with a flat side across the concave side of the Large Continent separated by two narrow straits and the Interior Sea from it. Except for the large peninsula of the Large Continent, the northern edge of both continents lies generally south of 50 to 55 degree south latitude.