[es0m]

Fixed link to Uni Utrecht press release: http://www.uu.nl/en/news/origin-of-medieval-sea-charts-dispr...

Open access version of one of the student's recent articles: http://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/327279/Nic...

The thesis is not public as he's written a book on this: http://www.brill.com/products/book/enigma-origin-portolan-ch...

[jacobolus]

Thanks for the link. I find most of the analysis logically dubious (in particular, there’s no mention of astronomy, the author seems to me to have limited imagination about possible methods for constructing charts over the course of decades or centuries of work in a field considered an important economic advantage, and the statistical analysis begs the question more than a little bit), and the conclusion “13th century Italians weren’t sophisticated enough to do this, and I don’t know any prior group who was sophisticated enough, but it must have been the Byzantines or Ancient Greeks or something, who knows” is entirely unconvincing. Calling this paper a “proof” of anything is a rhetorical stretch.

But at least we’re now dealing with something more concrete than a press release.