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UniSC's Professor Patrick Nunn and Roselyn Kumar didn't set out to rewrite history.They were simply trying to research how India's coastline had changed over the centuries...At some point in the 16th century, the depictions and illustrations of Calicut stopped matching up with the old ones.The river was wrong. So were the boats. Where was the promised great maritime city and the trees heaving with fruit?...It was like Calicut had somehow teleported to a completely different location...The trouble started in 1498 with a man who was no stranger to trouble—Vasco da Gama. Da Gama had been sent by the King of...

Image credit: WMG, University of Warwick Researchers at the University of Warwick have identified what is believed to be the earliest known marine navigation tool ever discovered. The artifact, now determined to be an astrolabe, was excavated in 2014 from the wreck of a Portuguese explorer ship which sank during a storm in the Indian Ocean in 1503. The ship was called the Esmeralda, part of a fleet led by Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, the first person to sail directly from Europe to India. The astrolabe is believed to date from between 1495 and 1500, which would make it...