(Image: Keith Clarke)

Who were the first cartographers? This Stone Age mural may be the oldest known depiction of a volcanic eruption, according to a newly published study of the drawing. It may also be the world’s oldest map – although at least two older drawings are known that could give the mural a run for its money.

Created 8500 years ago, the mural (pictured above) shows the Stone Age town of Çatalhöyük in Turkey.

New Scientist first reported on the volcano interpretation of the image last year, when volcanologist Axel Schmitt of the University of California, Los Angeles presented the idea at a conference. Yesterday, the work was published in a journal, garnering new attention.


Schmitt thinks the image depicts the nearby Hasan Dağ volcano eruption and has shown that the volcano did indeed erupt around the time the map was made. But there are other interpretations.

Some have suggested that the spotted pattern represents a leopard skin, for example.

Is the mural the oldest map? Early drawings are crude, so it is difficult to tell which truly are maps, but one putative map found in Spain (pictured below) dates to 14,000 years ago – more than 5000 years before the Çatalhöyük map. And another claimed map from the Czech Republic is 25,000 years old (see “Maps through the millennia“).

Keith Clarke, a cartographer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told National Geographic that he is becoming more convinced that the Çatalhöyük image is a map.

“I can’t say with 100 percent certainty,” he said, “but I would believe that the evidence is now in … favor of it actually being a map,” he says.

Journal reference: PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0084711

These 14,000-year-old patterns scratched into a rock found in Spain may be a map (Image: Pilar Utrilla)