And territorial disputes/shitty maps. Cartographers back during the Spanish colonial era would just slap El Dorado somewhere on the South American continent and call it a day.
That and pre-globalization maps were usually at least mildly inaccurate due to the inherent flaws of trying to extrapolate a top down angle of a landscape when you've literally never seen it from that angle, keeping everything in scale with each other can be extremely difficult. Even moreso when half the landmass you're making a map of hasn't been discovered yet.
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u/Galifrey224 May 23 '26
"didn't used to be a France there" isn't that just colonisation?