At the same time as humankind started to depict the layout of the heavens, they also started to do the same for their more immediate surroundings. There are some cave paintings and rock carvings that show landscape elements such as mountains and rivers – for instance, an image showing the main features of the landscape around Pavlov in the Czech Republic has been dated to 25,000 BC, and a similar type of proto-map has been found on a 16,000-year-old chunk of sandstone in Navarre in Spain. A fragment of mammoth tusk found in the Ukraine shows the plan of a stream with a row of houses next to a river.
By the time of the Babylonian civilization, mapmaking had advanced to the point where advanced surveying techniques were being used to create accurate maps which recorded, amongst other details, the ownership of plots of land. The first known map of the world, from about 600 BC, is also Babylonian – it shows the world as a giant circle surrounded by water, which was the religious model they believed in at the time.