There are many jobs in the world that you can choose from when you become an adult. These kinds of jobs are called careers. Every career field started somewhere. The human mind is an amazing thing, and the human imagination has no bounds. Some careers, like being a software engineer, are relatively new. Other careers, like being a scientist or politician, have been around for a very long time. One ancient career that is still around today, and very important, is cartography. 

As far as historians can tell cartography, or map making, has been an official job since 600 B.C. However there were maps drawn even before that. Maps that were carved into stone, wood and bone. As a matter of fact the oldest map found was carved into a Mammoth tusk and may be more than 10,000 years old. That is way before any written language and alphabet system existed. 

How is a career that is more than a thousand years old still important today? First, a map can teach you about the world we live in. It can teach you about your own region and about other places in the world. Second, a map can help you navigate, or guide you from one place to another. It can also tell you about landforms, countries borders and tell you the distance from one place to another. Weather forecasters use maps to show how weather will affect us and how storms travel. New maps are being made daily as borders change, new areas are explored and mistakes on old maps are discovered. Also included on the new maps are newly explored regions of the rainforests of Central and South America, and other places that humans are curious about. The unexplored and unmapped areas that curiosity has us looking to are outer space and the ocean floors. 

 

The very first maps showed small local areas. As people domesticated animals and invented ways to travel further, maps began to show more land and more details. The early maps, from one to two thousand years ago, showed land surrounded by water on a flat surface. It was with these maps that Columbus navigated, thinking he could sail west from Europe and find Asia. 

 

Most unexplored areas on Earth, the jungles and oceans, are now being mapped with the help of new technology. Modern mapping software on computers works together with satellites, global positioning systems (GPS), lidar and sonar. Mapping that used to take years to do can now be done in days and months.