The last place on earth to be discovered (2024)

YOUR name won’t go down in history alongside Columbus or Vasco da Gama, but there is still undiscovered land to be found – if you know where to look.

Ever since modern humans evolved in east Africa 160,000 years ago, our species has been gripped by wanderlust. It took us only a few thousand years to discover and colonise Eurasia, and Australia and the Americas soon followed.

The last true pioneers were the Polynesians, who led the final wave of human migration across the South Pacific starting around 2000 years ago. The Polynesians’ final landfall is difficult to work out, says Atholl Anderson, an archaeologist at the Australian National University in Canberra. Radiocarbon dating suggests that their most recent settlements were established between 600 and 700 years ago, but is not precise enough to decide which was the last. Anderson reckons the Auckland Islands, south-east of New Zealand in the coldest and most dangerous seas of southern Polynesia, are a strong candidate (Antiquity, vol 79, p 791).

However, these islands were by no means the last land on which humans set foot. The last continent to be discovered was Antarctica in the early 1800s. Stepping down a level, the last unknown major land mass was Severnaya Zemlya, a harsh archipelago of polar desert off the coast of Siberia, discovered in 1913 and not fully explored until 1930.

Closer to the present day, staking a claim for undiscovered land has obviously become trickier, especially because satellite imagery now covers every inch of the globe. But that hasn’t stopped explorers from trying. In 1978, a Danish survey team reckoned they had…