The history of cartography traces the development of cartography, or mapmaking technology, in human history. Maps have been one of the most important human inventions for millennia, allowing humans to explain and navigate their way through the world. The earliest archaeological maps include cave paintings, to ancient maps of Babylon, Greece, China, and India. In their most simple form maps are two dimensional constructs, however since the age of Classical Greece maps have also been projected onto a three-dimensional sphere known as a globe. In the 21st century, with the onset of the Information Age and the subsequenumnavigation of the Earth]], the advent of the Atlas, the development of the Mercator Projection by German-Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator, (which was widely used as the standard projection of the earth up until the 20th century, when more accurate projections were formulated.) And perhaps most consequently, the settlement and documentation of the New World (Although, evidence has been found that the Norse Vikings had discovered and attempted to settle North America as early as the first century A.D. However their efforts were unsuccessful and the knowledge of their discoveries was never widely circulated.)[1]
With the exponential increases in technology over the course of the Early Modern Age and the Information Age, the knowledge of the terrestrial earth has thus increased as well. Modern methods of transportation, the use of surveillance aircraft, and more recently the availability of satellite imagery have made documentation of many areas that were previously inaccessible possible. Services such Google Earth and other free online digital maps has made accurate maps of the world more accessible than ever before.
