Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the researcher's steps between the food and “home.” It will actually invent efficient new
routestocirclethroughnearbyfoodcacheswithouteverhavingtorevisitthestartingpoint.
“Every species is good in its own niche” when it comes to navigation, says David Uttal.
“We'renotatthetopofsomeevolutionaryladder.”Thisprobablygoeswithoutsaying,giv-
en that a Chinook salmon can swim a thousand miles upstream to the place it was born just
by following its nose, whereas a human often struggles to find a car in a parking lot after
ten minutes in a grocery store. “But what we have that no other species has is culture. We
can share information, and that gives us an amazing flexibility.”
That's where mapmaking comes in. When humans take information from mental maps
andputitdownonpaper(oracavewallorclaytablet),thegameisfundamentallychanged.
Sure, a honeybee can share geographic information with his hive by doing a little dance,
but according to Karl von Frisch, who won a Nobel Prize for translating the bee dance,
it has only three components: the direction of the food source relative to the sun, its dis-
tance, and its quality. The maps we make for other humans are much more versatile. The
same map of southern Africa that I used as a kid to imagine Tarzan-style adventures could
be used by an environmentalist to study land use, a tourist to plan a safari, or a military
strategist to plan a coup or invasion. It has thousands of potential routes on it, not just one.
There are plenty of possible ways you could express to others the geographical inform-
ation in your mental map: a written description, gestures, song lyrics, puppet theater. But
mapsturnouttobeanenormouslyintuitive,compact,andcompellingwaytocommunicate
that information. To emphasize that they're not “innate” seems to stop just short of saying
that maps are an accident, the product of dozens of arbitrary cultural decisions. I think that
misses the point. Just because maps aren't innate doesn't mean that they're not optimal, or
even inevitable.
Cast your mind back, for a moment, to the middle of the last century. Today, orbital im-
agery is everywhere and we take it for granted, but before the space race began, no Earth-
linghadeverseenourhomeplanetfromhighabove—thatis,fromtheviewpointofalarge-
area map. If you look at science-fiction movies and comics from that era, you'll see that
the Earth is almost always depicted like the Universal logo or a schoolroom globe: without
any cloud cover at all . We had no idea what we looked like from outside ourselves! As a
species, we were the equivalent of Dave Chappelle's famous comedy sketch character: the
blind Klansman who doesn't know he's black.
But when John Glenn became the first man to orbit the earth in 1962, he looked down
in surprise and told the Bermuda tracking station, “I can see the whole state of Florida just
laid out like a map .” * Think about what that says about the fidelity of maps: seeing the real
thing for the first time, the first thing that occurred to Glenn was to compare it to its map
representation. In that one sentence, he validated that maps had been getting something
fundamentally right about Florida for centuries. That makes me think that we shortchange
 
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