I started looking at an online copy of this map today and I’m kind of perplexed exactly why this is being held up as “evidence” ancient knowledge of the antartic. I can barely recognize it as South America due to the way it’s made and even then probably would have been pressed to figure it out if I didn’t know that(It would probably help if I had any idea what the text on the map said).
So where exactly does antartica come into this? As I said, If South America on the map only somewhat looks like the real thing, where is the “Antartic” in this case?
The standard bonkers argument is that the bottom stretch of South America, which is twisted round to fit onto the parchment, is actually Antartica.
This entirely derives from Charles Hapgood and his Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966), which argues that there was a prehistoric global civilisation, some of whose knowledge of geography filtered down to Early Modern times before being forgotten.
What’s been entirely obscured in subsequent (silly) discussion of Hapgood is how thin his actual case was. The premier bit of authentication, prominently trotted out by the likes of Graham Hancock, is the endorsement of Hapgood’s identification of the bottom of the map with Queen Maud Land in Antartica by Lt. Colonel Ohlmeyer of the USAF. Except that, if you actually read Ohlmeyer’s letter (reproduced as Note 22 by Hapgood) and look at the data it’s based on, this conclusion is idiotic. Basically, Ohlmeyer and his staff looked at the results of the Norwegian-British-Swedish Seismic Survey of 1949, which Hapgood reprints as Figures 46-8. The Survey mapped out the sub-surface profile beneath the ice along a single line across the area. They discovered that several parts are below the current sea level. Ohlmeyer seems to have assumed that if you remove the ice, this means that there are islands. Meanwhile, Piri Re’is shows several islands off the coast of “Antartica”. Match.
Except that a single survey line establishes nothing of the sort. These could be fiords or something, rather than channels between islands. The survey just isn’t extensive enough for Ohlmeyer or Hapgood to sensibly read what they want into it.
You’re right not to read too much into the map.
And, while we’re about the matter, the rest of Hapgood’s analysis is crappy.