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were born mappers. But new research suggests that this isn’t really true—not everyone maps. Anthropologists are now beginning to understand that a wide variety of artifacts from all over the world—the quipu knots of the Incas, the toa marker pegs of South Australian Aborigines, the lukasa memory boards of the African Luba tribe—did have some geographical import, but they’re far from anything we’d call maps. One favorite curiosity of map lovers is the rebbelib, or stick chart, of the Marshall Islanders. These lattices of coconut fronds and seashells look like something the Professor might use to map Gilligan’s Island, but they’re actually detailed charts of ocean swells that were used by Marshallese canoe navigators for centuries. It’s remarkable that these people could pilot from atoll to atoll on the open sea based solely on wave patterns, but it’s also interesting that we haven’t found a single map of the Pacific made by any of the hundreds of other island cultures. Some people, apparently, get by just fine without written maps.

“Mapmaking might be innate in the same way that reading is innate,” Uttal suggests. “And that’s a very complex thing: reading text is obviously not innate, but the language upon which it is based is.”

So which parts of cartography might actually be as instinctive as language and not (fairly recent) cultural innovations? Well, we all make mental maps, models of our surroundings that we store in our heads. Calling such a construct a “map” might be misleading, though, since our mental maps don’t have much in common with paper ones. They’re not static; they’re not one-to-one replicas of actual topography; they don’t rely on symbols and in some cases may not even involve landmarks. (You also can’t refold them badly and shove them back into your glove compartment.) When I ask my friend Nephi Thompson, who has the best sense of direction of anyone I know, to describe how he sees his mental map in his mind’s eye, he says, “It’s like a first-person shooter game, an over-the-shoulder perspective. It’s not a bird’s-eye view.”

A Micronesian road map: the tiny seashells are islands and the bamboo strands currents

Humans have been making mental maps millions of years longer than they’ve been making written ones, of course. The very first time some hairy hominid ever decided to alter his hunting route to avoid an obstacle or a predator, he was drawing a mental map. In fact, when the term “cognitive map” was first coined in 1940, it wasn’t used to refer to humans at all but to the surprising maze-solving abilities of lab rats.

It’s well known that animals can perform navigational feats that make even the canniest human trackers look, in comparison, like blindfolded four-year-olds swinging cluelessly at a birthday party piñata. Baby loggerhead sea turtles, immediately after hatching in Florida, embark straightaway on an eight-thousand-mile circuit of the North Atlantic, getting as far as the African coast before returning home a decade later. They do it alone, they start when they’re less than two inches long, and they don’t get lost. Scientists have trans-located black bears hundreds of miles from their home in the forests of Minnesota and seen the majority quickly return. In 1953, a British ornithologist named R. M. Lockley heard that a friend, the noted American clarinetist Rosario Mazzeo, was flying home to Boston the following day. Lockley seized the opportunity to give Mazzeo two Manx shearwaters, seabirds whose homing abilities he had been studying. “In the evening, I enplaned for America with the birds under my seat,” Mazzeo later wrote his friend. “Only one survived the flight.” (Note to self: Don’t let a woodwind player watch my pets next time I’m out of town.) He released the surviving bird from the east end of Boston’s Logan International Airport and watched as it flew straight out to sea. Less than two weeks later, the bird reappeared in its British burrow. The shocked scientist, who hadn’t heard from Mazzeo since his departure, assumed that he’d been forced to release the bird somewhere in