London, September 15 (ANI): 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.
These covered much of southern England and Wales and included now famous landmarks such as Stonehenge and The Mount.
New research suggests that they were built on a connecting grid of isosceles triangles that ‘point’ to the next site.
Many are 100 miles or more away, but GPS co-ordinates show all are accurate to within 100 metres.
This provided a simple way for ancient Britons to navigate successfully from point A to B without the need for maps.
“To create these triangles with such accuracy would have required a complex understanding of geometry,” said Brooks.
“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.
“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,” he further added.
Brooks analyzed 1,500 sites stretching from Norfolk to north Wales. These included standing stones, hilltop forts, stone circles and hill camps.
Each was built within eyeshot of the next.
Using GPS co-ordinates, he plotted a course between the monuments and noted their positions to each other.
He found that they all lie on a vast geometric grid made up of isosceles ‘triangles’. Each triangle has two sides of the same length and ‘point’ to the next settlement.
Thus, anyone standing on the site of Stonehenge in Wiltshire could have navigated their way to Lanyon Quoit in Cornwall without a map.
According to Brooks, many of the Stone Age sites were created 5,000 years ago by an expanding population recovering from the trauma of the Ice Age.
“The triangle navigation system may have been used for trading routes among the expanding population and also been used by workers to create social paths back to their families while they were working on these new sites,” he said. (ANI)
Here’s how Zimbabwe’s blind cricket commentator Dean du Plessis bowls audiences
London, September 12 (ANI): He was born blind and has never seen a single match in his life, but has proved that all one requires to become a great cricket commentator is a mix of erudite descriptions of action, comprehensive knowledge of great players, faultless recall of statistics, and needle-sharp sense of timing and judgment.
Needless to say, Zimbabwean-born Dean du Plessis, 32, possesses all these attributes, and has been delivering commentaries on matches for nine years.
He has shared the commentary box in Tests, one-day, and Twenty20 tournaments involving all the Test-playing nations in worldwide radio broadcasts.
The commentators he has worked with include Tony Cozier, Geoffrey Boycott, Ravi Shastri, and Australia’s former spin bowler Bruce Yardley, who himself lost an eye.
In 2004, du Plessis and Yardley made the first ever team to deliver a commentary with a single eye between them.
It is du Plessis’s accentuated sense of hearing that makes up for being sightless.
He relies upon sounds heard via the stump microphones to tell who is bowling from the footfalls and grunts, a medium or fast delivery by the length of time between the bowler’s foot coming down, and the impact of the ball on the pitch.
He can tell whether a delivery was a yorker from the sound of the bat ramming down on the ball, whether a ball is on the off or on-side, and when it’s hit a pad rather than bat.
When the wicketkeeper’s voice goes flat, du Plessis tells him a draw is in the offing.
Though he can’t play the role in the commentary box of the anchor, du Plessis can tell from the crowd noise whether a ball has been gathered in a fielder’s hands or spilled.
“I have to work with the anchor. I am the guy who supplies, well, the colour,” Times Online quoted him as saying.
Andy Pycroft, the Zimbabwean opening batsman from 1979 to 2001, said: “The thing about Dean is the intuition. The public love to listen to him. If he has the right person at anchor to support him he is brilliant.”
Du Plessis hated the “blind cricket” he was taught to play with a plastic-wrapped volleyball at the blind school he attended.
At 14, while feeling bored one day, du Plessis tuned the radio in to a station devoted to ball-by-ball commentaries, and that was what was to change his life.
“There was a phenomenal noise in the background, 80,000 people in a stadium in India, people roaring. I realised it was cricket. I was fascinated,” du Plessis said.
He pushed his way into the commentary box at Harare Sports Club in 2001, and was allowed to try out with the microphone.
He never looked back. (ANI)