The map you learned was wrong about size.
Your genome has always known where home is.

🗺️ 01 — THE MAP LIED

Drag the line. This is the real coastline data, morphing between projections.

In 1569, Gerardus Mercator built a map for sailors: straight lines, true angles, ideal for a compass. It was never meant to teach the world what's actually big. Every shape below is real country geometry — watch what four centuries of that trade-off did to Africa.

Real land area on screen: Greenland is 7.1% of Africa's size — no matter which projection you're looking at. Only the shape changes.

🧊 Greenland's true area (2.17M km²) is actually smaller than the Democratic Republic of Congo's (2.34M km²). But Greenland sits near 74°N and Congo sits almost on the equator — so Mercator inflates Greenland's apparent size roughly 13× more than Congo's. That's enough to flip which one looks bigger.

Africa vs. the world's largest countries, by real land area

Land-area figures: CIA World Factbook / UN Statistics Division, as compiled by Visual Capitalist. Africa is a continent of 54 countries; the rest are single nations — shown together only to make the scale legible.

Vote detail: Reuters / UN News, "UN tells the world: Stop making Africa look small," Sept. 4, 2026.

🧩 02 — FIT THE WORLD INSIDE AFRICA

Every shape below is a real country outline, cut from the same map. Drag them in.

This recreates Kai Krause's famous 2010 infographic, but with real coastline data and a live counter. Each shape's on-screen area is mathematically accurate — an equal-area projection guarantees it. Drag them, one at a time, into Africa's outline.

Shapes are real 110m-resolution coastline data (Natural Earth, via world-atlas), projected with an equal-area projection so relative sizes are accurate; each country's principal landmass is shown, with the very largest, most distant exclaves omitted for legibility (noted per-country in the table below).

Area data and the original juxtaposition idea: Kai Krause, "The True Size of Africa" (2010), as tabulated by Visual Capitalist.

📐 03 — BEND THE LIGHT

This is the actual math Mercator used against the equator.

Move north. The dashed circle is a shape's true size, everywhere on Earth. The filled circle is how Mercator draws that same shape, the further you get from the equator — scaled by 1⁄cos(latitude).

At 0° north, Mercator draws this shape 1.0× larger than it truly is.

🧬 04 — THE TREE WE ALL COME FROM

Every branch on this diagram is still you, several thousand generations back.

Drag the timeline forward from the origin. Then click any lit point — it traces the single unbroken line connecting that place back to where it started, and shows what population genetics can actually measure about that distance.

300,000 years ago

Move the timeline, then click a lit point to trace it home.

Migration dates are widely-cited archaeological/genetic estimates; researchers continue to debate exact timing. The diversity figures use the actual published regression H = 0.7682 − 6.52×10⁻⁶ × (distance from Addis Ababa, km) from Ramachandran et al., PNAS 102:15942–15947 (2005), applied to straight-line distances to representative cities — the original study used landmass-constrained migratory routes, so treat these as illustrative of the real trend rather than the paper's exact per-population values.

SO —

The continent was never small. The distance was never far.

Every person who voted on that map, in every country, carries the same origin point. Correcting the map and knowing your own ancestry turn out to be the same act of honesty, pointed at the same place.

↓ Download a card with the numbers

Built on the Togo / African Union "Correct the Map" campaign and the population-genetics consensus on human origins in Africa. Map data © Natural Earth (public domain).