Anaximander
A map of the world, a cosmos held up by nothing, and animals descended from fish.
- When
- Known to
- ± 20 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
Anaximander proposes that the Earth floats freely in space, held in place by nothing because it has no reason to move in any direction — an argument of startling abstraction. He posits an indefinite substance underlying everything, draws one of the first maps of the inhabited world, and suggests that humans must have developed from creatures of another kind, since a human infant could not survive unaided.