Commonly referenced in Latin as, "hic sunt dracones," or in English "here are dragons," is the tendency of historical cartographers to include mythological beasts and illustrations in uncharted areas of the map. The icons roughly represent the danger of going into uncharted waters or territories, and also to share knowledge about areas of which there is knowledge, but not enough to map. Serpents and dragons represent dangerous seas. Monsters for dangerous at lands, and so forth. You'll notice that the linked maps correctly identify the South Pacific as having no land, and North America as a body of unexplored land extending northward and westward of the mapped area.
The article's title, if it's intended to be taken literally, is mostly off. It seems that people at the time fell into superstitious, uneducated camps and educated, skeptical camps -- Then as now it seems. The illustrations would then work to serve up both imaginary dangers to the superstitious and knowledgeable best guesses to the skeptical.*
Latin America was home at that time to highly resourceful indigenous peoples, says Alencar Brayner. The Aztecs and the Mayans knew how to work with metals, cultivate land and farm, and preserve artifacts. But the map doesn’t depict these people. Instead, Brazilians are drawn as barbaric cannibals in the midst of butchering and roasting humans.
But the Aztecs and Mayans weren't from Brazil. And the indigenous tribes in Brazil did practice cannibalism and being semi-nomadic, probably had less developed farming and metal technology.
Unrelated, but a friend of mine lives in a house from 1600 or so. The ceiling is painted with hundreds of funny animals, from normal cats, dogs, pigs, bears, through exotic lions, tigers, elephants, crocodiles, apes, and topped with some fantasy dragons and serpents. Many of them doing funny faces and gestures.
The first time I saw it, I had to walk around and just look for 30 minutes.
I would guess that the paintings may be later than the house, perhaps from the early 1700:s but it's hard to tell.
Decoration because decoration. You don't decorate your house because your house is ugly without decoration. No TV means we want things to look at, appreciate including flourishes and complexity in our print, masonry wood work.
Much as I love science, I hate that it's drained so much of imagination out of daily life. 'Magic isn't real, you're just going to be working off generational debt for most of your life unless you get lucky, and many of the super-cool animals that we do have are going extinct' is a pretty shitty realization to have to come to in youth or early adulthood. Technology sort of fills the gap but can also lead into a trap of consumerism. I thought the internet was going to lead to some sort of transcendent human awakening and so on but underestimated the degree to which many people would just use it to find new ways be mean to others.
How much would people have given for thousands of years to be able to speak words into the air and have their homes fill with light at any hour of the day?
Terry Pratchett had it right: magic is far more boring than what we can actually do, the fascinating details that go into how it works, and the effect this has on people (and of people on it).
I know very well how that works - from basic electricity and photoluminescence, to having worked for an electricity provider and knowing about the electrical grid, to knowing enough programming and signal processing and machine learning concepts to appreciate the process of audio recording, speech-to-text, networking, and automation to make the light come on.
The details of this are not that fascinating to me; I'm frankly far more interested to study the economic and political forces that brought such technology to bear and might (or might not) save the biosphere which we are in the process of wrecking. It's not like I don't know what science and technology are good for of what they've achieved.
You know what fascinates me? Magnets. Now that you can 3d print them I'm considering designing a desktop-size particle accelerator to see what happens if you put a source of charged particles next to it. I'm also fascinated by geometry, number theory, and the topology of higher-dimensional manifolds - basic things that work unreasonably well (apart from the manifolds which I've only experienced in imagination) and are rather hard to fathom. Why, for example, does Phi keep showing up in nature, and why do books on it amount to little more than stamp collecting? What governs the distribution of prime numbers? These things are far more interesting to me than technological conveniences.
Nobody really understands transistors. We can build them and priding how they react, but our explanations are all based on other things we don't actually understand. Granted, this is not a great way of looking at the world as everything has the same limitation, but it's also completely accurate.
TLDR; We can model and predict things, but that does not mean we understand them.
>We can build them and priding how they react, but our explanations are all based on other things we don't actually understand.
You can say this about anything. This is science; making models and evaluating their predictive power. The models don't have to capture the underlying "truth", if it even exists.
That's a good point. The best thing about technology is that it makes experimentation more practical without vast resources, eg the 3d printed magnets I mentioned earlier.
Meanwhile, just today some group of wizards divulged that according to a machine we invented that traveled five hundred million kilometers on the heavens, a faraway planet is full of minerals and ice, which combined after being blasted by a supernova.
So what? It's not like you're ever going to any of those amazing places in space articles, and in the unlikely event you get to Mars, you're not going to encounter any megafauna (although I'm hopeful future generations might find something on Europa).
Don't forget that I started with Much as I love science.... Trying to dazzle me with something I'm already abundantly familiar with won't work.
Aren't you replacing your modern viewpoint for the one held by people in the middle ages? Magic is viewed as benevolent and quaint nowadays, but back then it was often a source of fear, not wonder.
Also, at least you know that those super-cool animals exist. Remember that these maps were a exclusive of the enlightened classes. Peasants in feudal Portugal weren't exactly making excursions to the nearest museum. All they had, at most, were fanciful stories - if they even had that.
To some extent, yes. The potential excitement and terrors of the unknown are what give meaning to life. Technology can inspire awe, provide astonishing comfort or yield horrific levels of destruction, but ultimately it's wielded by human beings who are a little bit more evolved than chimps - not as much as most of them would like to think.
I'm not rejecting science. I'm rejecting the reductionist paradigm that currently dominates science and reduces it to an industrial process in a tedious competition for economic advantage, even though the elevation of other paradigms will inevitably be accompanied by a rise of pseudoscience and hucksterism.
Reductionism makes people miserable because it reduces them to mere components in an economic machine. I'm not arguing for abandoning science and technology, but I invite you to consider alternative approaches to it. Consider that recent research on how magic mushrooms and similar psychedelics show great promise in the treatment of depression...and the scientific community's response to this is to talk about the potential for manufacturing it in pill form and allowing people to experience it under professional supervision, as opposed to telling people how to identify psychedelic mushrooms and learn to enjoy them in relative safety. Science has a strong ideological component and I'm attempting to shake you into greater awareness of that.
If magic was real, we'd figure out how it worked, and then it'd be 'science' and you'd call it boring. We've figured out how to fling ourselves across oceans, how to communicate with people in real-time when they're not in earshot, and can even replace a person's heart and lungs in one go and keep them alive.
"Magic" is what we call it when we're ignorant of how something works, and how once you know how a magic trick is done, it's not interesting anymore as a mystery.
As for working for most of your life... so what's new? Ever since we settled down, working all your life has been the norm. Being alive requires work - if someone's not doing it for you, you have to do it yourself.
Bad science has hampered imagination by forcing established paradigms down the throats of students before they've developed their own critical thinking faculties. Good science would empower imagination by arming it with experimentation!
I never said it wasn't fun or interesting. But look at the example you gave in the cartoon; it's not impressive unless you're heavily invested in the process.
Trust me, I know the great feeling when a piece of code works for the first time or some idea I have about signal processing yields an interesting result, or the excitement of getting the color of paint that I want because I learned about an interesting new pigment with excellent lightfastness properties. But nerd excitement isn't that interesting to other people. If you actually found a way to genuinely levitate, by contrast, people would go nuts just to witness it. When was the last time you saw people genuinely go nuts over something? I'm not talking about the last gushing article on the new Curiosity pictures, I mean something that people pay fat money just to have a glimpse of.
I mentioned signal processing above, which provides a useful counter-example. Synthesizers allow you to shape a signal (typically an audio signal) using various combinations of oscillators, filters, and modulators. This is tremendous fun if you're the sort of person who enjoys turning knobs and listening to bizarre sounds or watching them on an oscilloscope (thanks science). But it was also pretty expensive to make. Back in the 1980s as microprocessors became common people started using them or this purpose and it was so much cheaper to manufacture with microprocessors compared to analog circuitry, plus you could do things that were previously impossible thanks to digital precision, that digital keyboards and synthesizers took over the whole market.
After a while some people complained that the digital synthesizers were cool and all, but they just didn't sound that good for many purposes compared to the old analog ones. Proponents of digital argued with great conviction, backed up by lots of data, that digital synthesis could reproduce any imaginable analog signal and produce many other things that would be impossible to achieve using analog, and they were correct to a large extent. But as electronics manufacturing got cheaper, partly thanks to surface-mount technology and automation, and partly thanks to manufacturing in China, it became cost-effective to start making analog synthesizers and modules again. A few niche manufacturers did, then a few more, and a few more, and eventually (most of) the major synthesizer manufacturers caved and started reproducing their old analog designs and making new ones. It's not that digital was deficient, but people just prefer the sound of analog, perhaps for the same reason people often prefer to receive a hand-written letter to a printed one that elaborately reproduces the characteristics of handwritten text.
It was full of such things. If you were about to set sail on a 1562 craft, tell me the fundimental difference between a huricane and a sea dragon. Both smashed your ship leaving none to tell the tale. As for giants, take a look at the average european bear. Then look at a grizzly. This map expresses real problems and gives rather practical advice for the time.
Remember too the language issues. This map was for a variety of audiances. A drawing of a monster is more universal than "ship reported lost here".
I was left with the impression that the main point of those drawings were aesthetics - fill the empty white space for which we do not have data. (As opposed to claiming that people in the 1500s believed in any of those creatures)
The article's title, if it's intended to be taken literally, is mostly off. It seems that people at the time fell into superstitious, uneducated camps and educated, skeptical camps -- Then as now it seems. The illustrations would then work to serve up both imaginary dangers to the superstitious and knowledgeable best guesses to the skeptical.*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_be_dragons
*This second paragraph comes from my interest in charts and nautical history, but is mostly my own speculation. IANAH.