Europeans drew incomplete maps

I recently posted about how it’s generally a bad idea to pretend you know everything about any given subject, because you probably don’t. I came across an excellent example of this while reading the book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

Throughout history, most civilizations drew a complete world map. While they only knew of a portion of the world, they’d fill in the rest of the map with creative ideas about other imaginary continents and islands.