Anaximander
c. 610 BCE–c. 546 BCE · Miletus
Milesian who posited the apeiron (the Boundless) as the cosmic origin; drew the first world map.
Did you know?
A Greek argued humans came from fish about 2,400 years before Darwin
In the sixth century BCE, Anaximander of Miletus proposed that the first living things arose in water and that human beings originally developed from fish-like creatures — reasoning that a helpless human infant could never have survived on its own at the very beginning. This early notion of descent from other animals predates Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859 CE) by roughly 2,400 years.
How we know
Anaximander c. 610–546 BCE (active c. 560 BCE); the fish-origin view is reported by Censorinus, Plutarch and Aetius; Darwin's Origin of Species 1859 CE. Gap ≈ 560 + 1859 = 2,419 yrs.
Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→
MiletusIonia (Asia Minor)
We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.
About Miletus
The prosperous Ionian port where Greek philosophy was born, as Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes first sought to explain the cosmos through nature rather than myth.
In Miletus at the same time
In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with Anaximander’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Anaximander’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Jewish world
Mesopotamian world
Egyptian world
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.