In 1609, the island of Manhattan was part of a landscape of rolling hills, marshes, woodlands, lakes, and rivers. The interactive map, available online at, is a fantastic snapshot of a different New York. The Welikia project has produced a detailed ecological map of the landscape in New York City at the time of the arrival of Europeans. To see what Times Square looked like before a city was there, we turn to a remarkable project called Welikia, which grew out of a smaller project called Mannahatta. They were as far removed from the Lenape of the 1600s as the Lenape of the 1600s are from the modern day. The Lenape were a loose confederation of tribes who lived in what is now Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware.Ī thousand years ago, the area was probably inhabited by a similar collection of tribes, but those inhabitants lived half a millennium before European contact. In the 1600s, when Europeans arrived, the area was inhabited by the Lenape people.

Manhattan has been continuously inhabited for the past 3,000 years, and was first settled by humans perhaps 9,000 years ago. If so, what would it be like if you traveled back in time, starting in Times Square, New York, 1,000 years? 10,000 years? 100,000 years? 1,000,000 years? 1,000,000,000 years? What about forward in time 1,000,000 years? At least, that’s how it worked in the Back to the Future movies. I assume when you travel back in time you end up at the same spot on the Earth’s surface. The following is an excerpt from Randall Munroe’s new book, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, out September 2.

Xkcd new book