guns, Germs, and Steel. ep. 2

Hello reader, my name is Lane Miller and this is my second blog post. today in human geography we got a new key topic, How Do Geographers Describe Where Things Are Located? Well, geographers use two different terms to describe where places are the absolute and relative location.  An absolute location would be its longitude and latitude, or where it is exactly on the planet's surface. For instance, the Washington monument is at 38.889467, -77.035247, this is its absolute location. Relative location is describing a place by its surroundings. like if I relatively described where Maryland is I would say south of Pennsylvania, west of the Atlantic, east of West Virginia, and north of Virginia. we also had to define cartography and maps. cartography is the science of maps. and maps are tools geographers use to describe where places are.  Also, we had to explain the two ways geographers use maps. They are to identify objects absolute and relative location. And as a communication tool to convey the distribution of human activities or physical features. Finally, we had to describe the progression of map-making. It started with Eratosthenes in 195 BC when he made the first map of the world. This map was horrendously different than the ones of today. He was mainly focused on the Meditteranean because that is where he lived thus knew more about it. As you go farther away from greece it gets vaguer because of the distance from him. After Eratosthenes, many people took up the profession of cartography.  Their job was to document the most recent and best way to show the earth. so as more and more people traveled the world more information made its way back to cartographers. This led to the incorporation of Antartica and the new world.