最近好像不怎麼熱鬧啊，我來幾個新聞 一張價值100萬美元的世界地圖

A 500-year-old world map that was the first to name a newfound continent west of Europe "America" was sold for one million dollars at an auction in London.

Charles Frodshan, a London book and manuscript dealer, bought the map for 545,600 pounds during bidding at Christie's.

Christies said the map was also the first printed portrayal of the Earth as a globe, the first that distinguishes North and South America individually, and the first depiction of a Pacific Ocean, it said.

Printed in 1507 by the German geographer Martin Waldseemuller, the map is just one of four in existence and had been expected to fetch between 500,000 and 800,000 pounds.

The document, which is the centrepiece of a sale of maps, atlases and globes by Christie's, was discovered in February 2003 after a European collector realised that it was one of the maps in his collection.

"This is one of the most exciting discoveries of my career, and represents the pinnacle in the history of map making," said Tom Lamb, director of the auction house's book and manuscript department, in a statement.

"This simple sheet of paper holds so many new and anticipated discoveries, all created with an enormous leap of faith by a venerable geographer in a small town in Lorraine (eastern France)," he said.

Most history documents credit the Genoa-born explorer, Christopher Columbus, with being the first European to discover the so-called New World of North and South America in 1492, but he was convinced it was part of Asia.

A second Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, actually argued that the landmass to the west of Europe was a whole new continent.

Until the map's publication, the layout of the world had been based on the knowledge of the ancient Greeks. But in 1505, Rene II, the Duke of Lorraine ordered a group of scholars led by Waldseemuller to draft a new world map.

He gave them a French translation of Vespucci's travels and as a result, the scholars decided to name the new landmass "America" after the traveller's first name.

The first example of Waldseemuller's original map was discovered in 1871 and is kept at the University of Minnesota in the United States. The other two are in Germany.

A fifth, much larger version, printed eight years later, was purchased by the Library of Congress in Washington for 10 million dollars in 2003.