Stone Age satnav: Did ancient man use 5,000-year-old travel chart to navigate across Britain

The Daily Mail ^ | 15 Sep 2009 | David Derbyshire

[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

[LiteKeeper]

that’s what I was thinking!

[zot]

Thanks for the navigation ping. This is as good an explanation as any I’ve heard.

[wildbill]

The implication is that the huge Stone Age “monuments” were built for navigational purposes so early Englishmen could find their way about the countryside.

If there was enough foot and horse traffic to warrant the immense effort needed to build all those Stone Age “monuments” wouldn’t the traffic have beaten down a path through the woods that the canny English could follow without building a ‘monument’???

I mean, come on, follow the yellow mud road, guys and ye’ll get to Scotland afore me.

[GreyFriar]

Don’t you know that we are all partly descended from the survivors of the 12 colonies that were led here by the Battlestar Galactica! The technology was what survived from them and secretly passed down through the ages via the Masons, Knights Templar, and (remainder classified).

[Sawdring]

My TomTom still thinks the 35W bridge is still down. It has been rebuilt for a year now.