ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Early world map

Okay kiddo, so have you ever seen a picture of the whole world? It's actually really big and it can be hard to see everything all at once. A long time ago, people didn't have things like airplanes or satellites to help them see the whole world. Instead, they made maps to try to show what the world looked like.

The first maps of the world were made by ancient Greeks and Romans thousands of years ago. They didn't know what the world looked like all around, so they just made guesses and assumptions. Some of their maps show the world as a big circle with different places marked on it.

As time went on, people started to learn more about the world by exploring different lands and seas. This meant that they could make more accurate maps. One of the most famous early world maps is called the Ptolemaic map, named after a Greek scholar named Ptolemy who made it about 1,800 years ago.

The Ptolemaic map had lots of different places marked on it, but because people didn't travel as much back then, many parts of the map were still pretty guesswork. Some things were pretty accurate, like the Mediterranean Sea in the center, but other areas like Asia and Africa were not very detailed.

It wasn't until hundreds of years later, during the Age of Exploration, that people really started to map out the whole world in more detail. Explorers like Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and Ferdinand Magellan traveled to different parts of the world and made maps to show what they found.

Nowadays, we have lots of tools like satellites and GPS that help us make very accurate maps of the world. But it's still really cool to look back at those early world maps and see how people tried to imagine what the whole world looked like.