Why was antarctica discovered so late?

Sailing long distances is hard. Sailing long distances is even harder in shitty weather.

>>2463657

DEFINE "SO LATE".

File: 1468164286532.png (1MB, 1105x619px) Image search: [Google]

1MB, 1105x619px

The earth is flat. Look up Eric Dubay's channel on youtube.

>>2463657
>Hey Jan van Hooektrejk, wanna sail southwards to unchartered waters, or eastwards to the Spice Islands like the VoC told us to do.
>East pls.

Because it's too isolated from the rest of the world and there's nothing of value there.

>>2463961
/thread

>>2463657
Far away from Europe and China
Did you really expect abos or nignogs to discover it?

>>2463710
It literally says that nowhere in the Bible. Flat earthing is not the same as evolution denying. The former are tards.

>>2463990
the maori discovered it, or atleast sailed south enough to get to an ice sheet

>>2463698
http://www.strawpoll.me/12213586/r

http://www.strawpoll.me/12213586/r

http://www.strawpoll.me/12213586/r

>>2463657
It was discovered the year 1603

>>2464488
No it wasn't, you goddamn idiot. It was discovered as early as the 9th century by Muslim explorers and merchants.

>>2464017
And then they went and published some accounts on that voyage.

>>2463698
Can somebody perma ban this tripfag?

>>2464010
As are the latter

>>2464502
WE

>>2463657
its remote, hard to sail to in old tech ships, nothing worth there anyway

>>2463698
why do you shit up every thread

>>2465099
How would they know that there's nothing of worth there?

>>2463657
Ninety percent of the world's human population today lives in the northern hemisphere. You have wiggle room to argue over exactly where, why and how human civilization got going past hunter-gathering-tier complexity (agriculture, writing, etc), but no matter where you go for this discussion (Egypt, fertile crescent, and so on), you're either in the Northern Hemisphere, or as close to it as makes no difference, on the African side.

Now, there are two relevant sorts of advanced seafaring people of which I am aware: vikings, and polynesians. Both of these were active circa one thousand years ago, and it was the polynesians who were in the process of discovering the last HABITABLE places on earth - NZ, Hawaii, and Easter Island, which commonly denote the endpoints of Polynesia itself. Finding Easter Island is of itself a stupendous feat. Not knowing much about the polynesians, my guess is that they simply didn't want to sail anywhere that was too cold, thus avoiding the harsher parts of the South Pacific. The vikings, meanwhile, were finding much more closely-tied-togetehr landmasses like Iceland and Greenland (or so I am given to understand).

Let me come to my point: it's all about geography, the history of human migration, and technical capability/desire. Take a good look at the OP pic. The only spot from which a meaningful voyage might have taken place, to just /stumble/ upon Antarctica, is Tierra del Fuego.

Only ten percent of humans alive today live on OP's side of the earth, and the part closest to Antarctica is the part furthest away from where human civilization began (Africa/Middle East). There's a sort of lazy "anthropic" principle at work here: it took so long to find antarctica, exactly because of where humans started.

Had there been a long-term meaningful land bridge to a polar region like this, (imagine an alien planet with seas, but still having such bridges to its analogous colder polar regions), it would have been discovered much sooner.