Earth may not have seven continents after all. From the earliest of grades, schoolchildren around the world have memorized ...

But some of the first known world maps put south at the top as a matter of course. For example, in 1154 Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi drew a south-up map of Europe, Asia and northern Africa ...

Common projections shrink the size of Africa, but experts have long debated whether creating a precise map is possible.

concluding that he had see a "fourth part" of the world, equivalent to Europe, Asia and Africa. From a painting by Gaston Save / Wikipedia Commons The map Ringmann and Waldseemüller (in a 1878-79 ...

Whereas Asia leads the statistics with 2,301 languages, Africa follows closely ... which we visualized in the map above, about half of the world's spoken languages will disappear by the end ...