10 Explorers Who Discovered Lands Virtually Unknown to Any Human

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Christopher Columbus did not discover America. Ferdinand Magellan did not discover the East Indies. James Cook did not discover Australia. Humans were living in all these places long before the Europeans arrived. About 60,000 years ago, Homo sapiens left their African homeland and began the epic migration that would see our species dominant in all corners of the world even before the dawn of recorded history.

Humans entered Europe 45,000-35,000 years ago; at the same time, groups trekking eastward colonized the vast expanses of Asia. Some moved northward and crossed the land bridge that is now the Bering Strait 20,000-15,000 years ago, then southward, reaching the tip of South America some 3,000 years later. Australia was settled even earlier—50,000 years ago—with the Pacific islands being the last to be inhabited, 3,000-2,500 years ago. By the time historical records began to be written, all the continents except Antarctica had been discovered, explored, and settled.

The period beginning in the 15th century was an Age of Discovery only to Europeans, not to humanity at large. But this doesn’t mean Europeans didn’t discover any new land. There were still pockets of isolated locations on the planet shrouded in legend or myth or mentioned only in obscure texts, if not totally unknown. The intrepid explorers who ventured into these terra incognita may not be as famous as Columbus, Magellan, or Cook, but they were nevertheless the real discoverers who opened up new frontiers to human settlement for the first time in history.

Related: 10 Facts About Life in the World’s Tiniest Island Nation

10 Pytheas of Massilia: Iceland

Ancient Greeks in the Arctic – The Voyage of Pytheas DOCUMENTARY

Pytheas was a Greek merchant from Massilia (modern Marseilles) who was known as a skilled navigator, astronomer, and mariner. Around 330 BC, he set sail on a daring voyage that took him to the mysterious lands of the far north, which supplied the Mediterranean with tin, gold, and amber. Pytheas’s book On the Ocean may be the first to describe the British Isles and Europe’s northern regions and their inhabitants.

But Pytheas courageously pushed on further north to the mythic lands believed by the Greeks to be inhabited by the giant Hyperboreans. Pytheas called one of these places Ultima Thule, and scholars have argued over which land he was … Read More