According to a research by the historian Tom Brooks, the ancient Britain used a crude form of satellite navigation system to travel from point A to point B. Unlike the current individual GPS units, the prehistoric men used the markings in the landscapes to find the way. They used the science of GPS co-ordinates among these markings for navigation.
To elaborate, most of the pre-historic sites or the landmarks in Britain are built on an intersecting network of isosceles triangles, which are able to point, to at least two other sites. These triangles have two sides of equal length and it points to a third site, providing a simple and easy method for the Britons to travel from one point to the other without any maps.
Most of the networks of hilltop monuments were built within the eye shot of the next. To say, a person standing on a location of Stonehenge in Wiltshire can travel accurately to Lanyon Quoit in Cornwall without any maps. For longer routes, they would’ve broken up the routes into a series of smaller ones.
Tom Brooks studied nearly 1000 well-known pre-historic locations in Britain for this purpose. The sites include the stone circles, hilltop forts and camps. Brooks plotted a channel between these sites, using the GPS co-ordinates, which showed that all the monuments stand on a vast network made up of isosceles triangles.
He says that the creation of such kind of triangular geometry between landmarks require a thorough mathematical knowledge, especially a complex understanding of geometry. He describes the Stone Age ancestors as “sophisticated engineers”. Of more interest, the sides of some triangles are more than 100 miles across, but the GPS co-ordinates among them reveal the distance between them as accurate as 100 metres.
His research raises the probability of the usage of this triangle navigation system for the development of trading routes. This could help the workers and expanding population to create paths back to their houses. The stone age monuments were created 5000 years ago, after the destructions during the Ice Age, by the population who recovered from its agony. They would’ve chosen higher grounds for the sites, since the lower grounds had reduced to marshes.
The new study may inspire the future researches and the possibility of an external force to help in the ancient navigation system cannot be totally ignored. Tom Brook’s findings are available in the book or the DVD, titled as “Prehistoric Geometry in Britain: the Discoveries of Tom Brooks”. These has been priced at £15.90 including the postage and packing in UK.
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