Traditionally the pupil of Thales, Anaximander of Miletus is credited with having drawn the first map of the world. One hundred years later, the historian Herodotus (485-428 BCE) found it simplistic and amusing:

It makes me smile to see how many people have made circular pictures of the earth, and how not a single one has done it sensibly! They all make the river Okeanos run around the earth as neatly as if were drawn with a compass, and make Asia and Europe equal in size!

If Anaximander’s map fit this description, its shape owed less to exploration and actual measurement than to a desire—very Greek, very scientific—for order and symmetry.
 

Anaximander’s notions about the origin of animal and human life, though fanciful, bear an uncanny resemblance to modern evolutionary theories. Later writers report his claim that people must have originally been born from non-human creatures, on the ground that human (unlike animal) offspring require a long period of nursing and care in order to survive. If they had originally been born into the world from (and as) human beings, he reasoned, the species would have perished in the first generation. On this assumption, he argued that in the beginning, fish or creatures much like fish first arose from warm water and earth. Human beings grew inside them, enclosed like embryos, and remained within their protective envelopes until they reached the age of puberty. Then "the fish-like creatures burst apart and men and women who were now able to feed and take care of themselves stepped forth" onto dry land.

Fragments:

(1) Anaximander,...the successor and pupil of Thales, said that the principle and element of existing things was the apeiron ["unlimited," "infinite," "indefinite"].... He says that it is neither water nor any of the other so-called elements, but instead some other apeiron nature, from which the heavens and the worlds they contain come into being. And the source of coming-to-be for existing things is also that into which their destruction occurs "according to necessity, for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the arrangement of time," as he says in these rather poetical terms. [Simplicius]

(2) ...there is no beginning to the apeiron...but it seems itself to be the beginning of the other things, and to surround all things and guide them all.... And this is the divine, since it is immortal and indestructible, as Anaximander says. [Aristotle]

(3) [Anaximander says] that the earth stays still thanks to its equilibrium, since whatever is established at the center equidistant from the extremes necessarily cannot move either up or down or to the sides. And further, since it is impossible for it to move simultaneously in opposite directions, it necessarily stays fixed. [ibid.]

(4) The heavenly bodies [according to Anaximander] come into being as a circle of fire separated from the fire that exists in the world, and enclosed by air. There are breathing-holes...through which the heavenly bodies show themselves. Accordingly, eclipses occur whenever these breathing-holes are blocked up. [Hippolytus]

(5) Anaximander said that the first living creatures were born in moisture and enclosed in thorny barks, and that as their age increased they came forth onto dry land. [Aetius]