Spain

Fascinating find – thanks (though I see other experts disagree with the map interpretation) - "Jill Cook, head of the prehistory division at the British Museum said it was a 'brave' theory but it was unlikely hunters would need maps during this period."

"Jill Cook, head of the prehistory division at the British Museum said it was a 'brave' theory but it was unlikely hunters would need maps during this period." I suppose our ancient forebears didn't "need" to carve bits of ivory and bone or daub on cave walls, peck out cups, rings and weird geometric shapes either.

Fair point HD. I’m sitting on the fence with this one - though there’re more ways to get from A to B without the aid of maps (eg: the Songlines, or Dreaming tracks by indigenous Australians, "... within the animist indigenous belief system [which] are paths across the land (or, sometimes the sky). The paths of the songlines are recorded in traditional songs, stories, dance, and painting...” (Wiki). Also the Micronesian people’s knowledge of wave formations to guide them across vast oceans without the Polestar. 'Rock art' might have included maps - why not? Then again it might have fallen within a completely different mindset.

What are maps used for now? Politics and directions? My father worked for the now defunct Strathclyde Regional Council (in the latter years of his working life) as a rating engineer. It was very important to know where every piece of rateable land was, who owned it & who was paying what-for-what on whatever building was built on the land. In his retirement he collapsed a Tory Govt policy in Scotland by questioning an interpretation of mapping and development in housing policy. My father Auld Andrew (long since retired) could still take you to a point in Ayr Bay where you can catch BIG lobsters by lining up your boat with Greenan Point and the top of Brown Carrick. It still works. Our modern conceptions of what maps are and what possible landscape representations (or interpretations of possible rock art representations) might have been used for or that they might even exist are (as Flann O'Brien might have said) are based questionable premises.

And don't forget, as someone once said, the map is not the territory it represents. It's not only what maps show that's interesting, it's the way that they selectively don't show other things too.