# Prehistoric man and 'sat nav'



## Rosemary (Oct 22, 2009)

Early man used crude version of ’sat nav’ system to navigate across England

In a new research, a scientist has found that prehistoric man navigated his way across England using a crude version of a satellite navigation system, which was based on stone circle markers.

According to a report in the Telegraph, the research, by historian and writer Tom Brooks, shows that Britain’s Stone Age ancestors were “’sophisticated engineers” and far from a barbaric race. 

Brooks studied all known prehistoric sites as part of his research.
He found that the prehistoric man was able to travel between settlements in England with pinpoint accuracy, thanks to a complex network of hilltop monuments.

Early man used crude version of ’sat nav’ system to navigate across England | sci-tech


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## Drachir (Oct 23, 2009)

Rosemary said:


> Early man used crude version of ’sat nav’ system to navigate across England
> 
> In a new research, a scientist has found that prehistoric man navigated his way across England using a crude version of a satellite navigation system, which was based on stone circle markers.
> 
> ...



An interesting discovery if it holds up.  I wonder what the response will be from the pre-history community.


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## Parson (Oct 23, 2009)

Hmm, this sentence by the "discoverer," Tom Brooks makes me look at this very doubtfully:

 “So advanced, sophisticated and accurate is the geometrical surveying now discovered, that we must review fundamentally the perception of our Stone Age forebears as primitive, or conclude that they received some form of external guidance,” 

Close Encounters of the Third Kind anyone?


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## Ursa major (Oct 23, 2009)

Rosemary said:


> He found that the prehistoric man was able to travel between settlements in England with pinpoint accuracy, thanks to a complex network of hilltop monuments.


 
Not only a "sat-nav", but a form of head-up display. 




> “The sides of some of the triangles are over 100 miles across on each side and yet the distances are accurate to within 100 metres. You cannot do that by chance,” he added.


Without seeing the grid it's hard to tell if this is correct. For myself, I suspect it may be an artefact of his study.

Look at it this way. He has two markers pointing in a direction. He looks on the map he's created and he finds the line passes close (within 100 metres) to _one_ known location, which happens to be 100 miles away. (Nice mixing of measurement systems, by the way.)

Is that the correct location? Might it be that the correct location is much closer but less accurately pointed at? And how useful are markers that point at a place many days travel away? A journey of that length might require detours for river crossings and passes throught the hills. What use is 100m accuracy bearing rolleyes this in mind?

So for me, the 100m at 100 miles merely points out the inaccuracy of the ancient grid (the lines passes much more than 100m away from it, even though it may only be a few miles away) and Brooks's own need to believe that it was very (perhaps impossibly) accurate.


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## Nik (Oct 24, 2009)

Um, IIRC, 'ridge-ways' often had markers to provide route-signs. They evolved into the engraved road-side stones which preceded sign-posts.

Against that, why make a song'n'dance over a junction ? Why build fancy stone circles on routes ? D'uh, to show power, I suppose. What better place to flaunt your stuff than on a nice hill that can be seen for miles, and is passed by lots of folk who will carry the tale the length and breadth of the land....

One gotcha: Does the underlying geology enforce such alignments ? If there's a big, long fault, or a vast, eroded syncline or such, it is likely to have lots of outcrops in a join-the-dots configuration...


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## dustinzgirl (Oct 24, 2009)

Hey! I saw the last episode of the new BSG! And you know, that kind of fits........


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## Ursa major (Oct 24, 2009)

BSG?


*B*rooks: *S*omewhat** *G*ullible?


(While looking for info about him, I found items that described Mr Brooks as a writer and historian; sometimes the word, amateaur, appears before the word, historian. Oh, and he has a book out, in which case could BSG = *B*rooks *S*eeks *G*ullible?)




** - Or S = : Specially, Seriously, Sadly....


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## Quokka (Oct 26, 2009)

The terms Prehistoric and Stone Age covers a whole lot of ground. When you talk about stone age forebears isn't that a few million years of ancestors? and is 5000 yrs ago still stone age in England? If it is it has to be only just but even if it did turn out to be true I'm not sure that people would have to _"review fundamentally the perception of our Stone Age forebearers_ _as primitive, or conclude they had some form of guidance"_.   

New Grange in Ireland is about the same time, Pyramids of Giza ~ 4,500 yrs old and Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth (among other things) using two sticks and their shadows about 2000 yrs ago. All massively impressive achievements from a mathematical and engineering point of view and of course there's plenty of others all over the world. In my opinion even though there was a difference in the level of technology and knowledge in previous ages it's a mistake to believe there must also have been a simliar reduction in intellegence, there's been intelligent people and outright geniuses all through history and particuarly in mathematics some amazing insights going back thousands of years.


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## Ursa major (Oct 26, 2009)

Ignoring the wilder reaches of the Bell curve (simply because, at the beginning, there were not many of us), I would think that for the last 200,000 or so years during which modern humans have existed, raw intelligence has not changed much if at all. (If you were able to bring a baby from 200,000 years ago and bring it up in the modern world, I doubt you'd notice much difference.)


Based on this (assumption/assertion), I'd say two things:
if a solution relies primarily on logical deduction (rather than technology or specific knowledge), it has been possible at any point in human history;
if someone can show** that something was beyond the capability of even a genius, and then goes on to talk about outside agencies, there's a pretty good chance that the "something" is not what it seems (and is more likely to be a construct of today's thinking***).
** - And think how difficult this really is; you can't just do what I'm doing: asserting something; you need rock solid proof.

*** - As with the 100 metre accuracy in determining the location of a spot 100 miles away, which is not only unlikely, but seems, to me, rather pointless, given that the UK is not an uninhabited flat plain.


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## dustinzgirl (Oct 26, 2009)

Erm..............battle star galactica?


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## The Judge (Oct 26, 2009)

Ursa major said:


> (While looking for info about him, I found items that described Mr Brooks as a writer and historian; sometimes the word, amateaur, appears before the word, historian. Oh, and he has a book out, in which case could BSG = *B*rooks *S*eeks *G*ullible?)



I think this is likely to be it.  Just be thankful he hasn't used the dreaded words 'ley lines' and 'Atlantis' as well...

J


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## Nik (Oct 26, 2009)

FWIW, I've been in NewGrange...

I was only, uh, seven, but it made quite an impression.

( And I didn't bang my head ;-)

===

PS: See the news about an extensive Greek Neolithic settlement found underwater ? I've tried and failed to determine if the area yo-yos due tectonics, or submergence was simply post-glacial sea level rise...


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## Ursa major (Oct 26, 2009)

dustinzgirl said:


> Erm..............battle star galactica?


 
I never knew that.... 





Nik said:


> PS: See the news about an extensive Greek Neolithic settlement found underwater ? I've tried and failed to determine if the area yo-yos due tectonics, or submergence was simply post-glacial sea level rise...


I think it's more likely to be the underlying rock moving than changes in global sea levels. The whole area is geologically active.


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## Peter Graham (Oct 28, 2009)

> Early man used crude version of ’sat nav’ system to navigate across England
> 
> In a new research, a scientist has found that prehistoric man navigated his way across England using a crude version of a satellite navigation system, which was based on stone circle markers.


 
Hmmm. Does he deal with the fact that the Stone Age lasted for about 95,000 years, that we had the odd Ice Age or two to deal with during that time and that most stone circles are probably Bronze Age in date and therefore hadn't even been thought of when Raquel Welsh was prancing around in a fur bikini trying to avoid the attention of hungry tyrannosaurs?

There have been a number of attempts to show that early man had some sort of nationwide road network. Predictably, many of those attempts are the work of crystal-fondling, New Age dipsticks who bang on about ley lines, earth energies and all the rest of that ill-conceived twaddle.

There were undoubtedly some well-used prehistoric routes (the Ridgeway being the most famous example), but to say that Stone Age man could get from more or less any A to mor eor less any B with such pinpoint accuracy is stretching it massively. The place looked very different back then - heavily forested and often wet in the lowland areas. Comprehensive waymarking using hill tops or other natural features, most of which were buried under trees or covered in mist and drizzle, sounds a little unlikely. That said, there clearly was national and even international trade back then - our own Pike O'Stickle axe factory is testament to that.

My guess is that the population was not large enough or organised enough to embark on such ambitious national civil engineering projects. I suspect that upland routes developed along prominent geological features which naturally leant themselves to being used as roads - ridges and so on. 

Alternatively, a race of Gaian savants from beyond the Crab Nebula gifted us with fire and the capacity of conscious thought, before laying out lines of feminine earth energy across our green and pleasant land, which the highly attuned, lentil-weaving Stone Age peoples could follow like slots on a Scalextric track.




> Brooks studied all known prehistoric sites as part of his research.
> He found that the prehistoric man was able to travel between settlements in England with pinpoint accuracy, thanks to a complex network of hilltop monuments.


 
Alfred Watkins did all of this back in the '20's. He was the chap responsible for the concept of ley lines, although he defined them as no more than neolithic trackways linking old sites. Although he may have been on to something, for much of the time it did look as though what he had really discovered was that you could join two fixed points on a map with a straight line....

Regards,

Peter


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## Ursa major (Jan 16, 2010)

In today's Grauniad - in its _Bad science_ column - is a report on someone who has done a similar study about the location of Woolies stores (which must have been a mammoth tusk ... er ... task):



> Matt Parker ... is based in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London. He has applied the same techniques used by Brooks to another mysterious and lost civilisation.
> 
> "We know so little about the ancient Woolworths stores," he explains, "but we do still know their locations. I thought that if we analysed the sites we could learn more about what life was like in 2008 and how these people went about buying cheap kitchen accessories and discount CDs."
> 
> The results revealed an exact and precise geometric placement of the Woolworths locations.


 
Did aliens help to line up Woolworths stores? | Science | The Guardian


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## Boneman (Jan 16, 2010)

Hmm, show me 800 randomly placed dots on a map, and I guarantee I could find three that formed a perfect equilateral triangle, and some that are in perfect straight lines... and the odd one that says 'all you need is love' or Bacon wrote shakespeare. 

And I hate trigonometry


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## Parson (Jan 16, 2010)

Ursa, I loved this. And what a wonderful column "Bad Science!" It should have no lack of material!


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## J-WO (Jan 17, 2010)

If you go through the book of Genesis and select certain letters you get- 'Ernest Borgnine is Cthulu's chiropodist'.  Coincidence? Well, my cash-hungry publisher certainly doesn't think so!


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