Posted on 09/15/2009 1:13:16 PM PDT by BGHater
It's considered to be one of the more recent innovations to help the hapless traveller.
But the satnav system may not be as modern as we think.
According to a new theory, prehistoric man navigated his way across England using a similar system based on stone circles and other markers.
The complex network of stones, hill forts and earthworks allowed travellers to trek hundreds of miles with 'pinpoint accuracy' more than 5,000 years ago, amateur historian Tom Brooks says. The grid covered much of southern England and Wales and included landmarks such as Stonehenge and Silbury Hill, claims Mr Brooks, a retired marketing executive of Honiton, Devon.
He analysed 1,500 prehistoric sites in England and Wales and was able to connect all of them to at least two other sites using isosceles triangles - these are triangles with two sides the same length.
This, he says, is proof that the landmarks were deliberately created as navigational aides. Many were built within sight of each other and provided a simple way to get from A to B.
For more complex journeys, they would have broken up the route into a series of easy to navigate steps.
Anyone starting at Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, for instance, could have used the grid to get to Lanyon Quoit in Cornwall without a map.
Mr Brooks added: 'The sides of some of the triangles are over 100 miles across, yet the distances are accurate to within 100 metres. You cannot do that by chance.
One of the monuments was on Silbury Hill, Wiltshire. It was part of a giant geometric grid used for navigating
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
GPS ping
I think my TomTom maps ARE 5,000 years old.
Nothing new in this....ley lines have been mentioned for many years. They were in use thousands of years ago and will still be reliable in the future
navigation ping
Nope - I think they were smelling haggis from different camps.
Are we there yet,are we there yet-Shut-up Grog and keep walking!
People have been very smart for a very long time. Treating our progenitors as anything less is simply wrong IMO.
We recognize that man's limits extend waaaaaaaay beyond any ape.
We recognize that an ape does not progress beyond the nature around him...unless one is systematically taught.
Even so, an ape cannot achieve man's intelligence.
Since so called "evolution" cannot stand still, it would seem that some ape, somewhere, here on earth would be still evolving toward being a man.
We`kilt em. Real good like.
The way to verify if this was a system or not should be relatively easy. If the purpose of ‘A’ and ‘B’ is navigation, then check out the path between ‘A’ and ‘B’. If you consider the immense labor involved in building such points, then either there was a great deal of traffic, or the points had a significance other than navigation.
I suspect there was another reason, because ordinary road markers are a much easier way of doing this, and were pretty common in the ancient world.
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Thanks BGHater. "Old Straight Track" ping. :') |
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I always wonder how many times human civilizations rose and fell before our latest burst of growth and advancement during the climatological stability of the last 3,000 years.
People think I’m a bit crazy when I suggest that much of humanity’s history is probably buried under tons of water on the continental shelves.
You shoulda bought a Garmin.
I’m pretty sure there are things on my Nuvi 500’s TOPO map that don’t even exist yet...;-D
That reminds me of a fibonacci spiral.
It’s been discussed on FR on these types of threads before, but the ancient Veda texts from India describe things that sound very much like nuclear war. I’ve also read there are places over there where there is glass under the sand and it has residual radioactivity higher than the ambient terrain.
I don’t know about “advanced” although I think writing was probably discovered and lost multiple times.
Human ingenuity seems to follow a fairly regular pattern with the transition from hunter gatherer to agriculture, and then the formation of larger and larger settlements, the development of math and then the application of both written language and math to try and predict seasons more accurately, and not always in that order.
The Veda, go into depth about UFO’s and other things.
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