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)