While Europe was under ice, someone in Ratnagiri carved a 14-metre map of India.
It's an elephant. Head west to the Konkan, tail east.
Inside it: a tiger in the east, a langur in the north, a boar in Madhya Pradesh, a pangolin in the south. Each animal where it actually lives.
Seven mountains. The Mahabharata also names seven. It was carved 10,000 years before the Mahabharata.
Now the part that should end the argument.
The map's width-to-height ratio is 1.167. Modern India is 1.04. Doesn't match.
Because they weren't mapping modern India.
Reverse-solve 1.167 against the coastline of 12,000 BCE — when the sea was 120m lower and the Sunda Shelf was dry land — and the eastern edge lands at ~100.9°E.
The eastern shore of the Malay Peninsula. The exact limit of the world you could walk to from India at the time.
A decorative outline doesn't do that. A map does.
The oldest known map is supposed to be Çatalhöyük, ~6,200 BCE. This predates it by 6,000 years.
It's on an open plateau. People play cricket near these carvings. The monsoon is erasing it.
Full paper, free, permanent:
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20516459
#Ratnagiri #Archaeology #History