According to the conventional view of history, humans have only walked the Earth in our present form for some 200,000 years. Advanced civilizations appeared several thousand years ago, but much of the mechanical ingenuity we know in modern times began to develop only around the Industrial Revolution
On a chilly winter day in 1929, Halil Edhem, the Director of Turkey's National Museum, was hunched over his solitary task of classifying documents. He pulled towards him a map drawn on Roe deer skin. As Halil opened the chart to its full dimensions (two feet by three feet wide or 60 X 90 cm) he was surprised by how much of the New World was depicted on a map which dated from 1513.