Telling Time - by the Stars
This made its way to the top of the pile on the Digg Space Page - but I wondered about the comment at the beginning of the article about Telling Time by the Stars
Telling time by the stars is not really very useful.
Surely - the ability to tell time by the stars would have been very useful indeed for anyone who was involved in any kind of seamanship.
The problem of longitude was a thorny problem for mariners all over the world.
Longitude can't be obtained that easily. The method that is considered the most reliable and practicable is by using a chronometer which keeps the local time at a point of known longitude, say, the home port of the ship. By judging the local time of the ship2, the navigator computes the time difference between home port and ship. Because good old Earth does one full rotation (360°) in 24 hours, one hour corresponds to 360 /24 = 15°. One hour time difference from the home port means 15° longitude difference (east or west).Having determined latitude and longitude in the described ways, the ship's captain knew where he was and in which direction he had to sail.
Now suppose ancient mariners also knew how to "tell the time" from the stars - wouldn't that enable them to predict how far they had sailed across the globe? - while knowledge of latitude from the rising and setting of the sun would enable them to know roughly how far up or down the globe that they had travelled.
The "ancient mariner" theory means that people would have been able to sail a long way with a degree of accuracy.
If they travelled from America from Europe, for example, that would explain a lot of "misplaced" archaeological artefacts found in the "New World" - like the Lake Superior Copper Mines, the Newport Tower, Mystery Hill, the New England Stone Chambers, the San Francisco East Bay walls.
But accepting that ancient man had a degree of sophistication about matters astronomical would undermine the whole accepted history of the world.
Conventional history tells us "it was impossible" to sail across the world because it was necessary to have a reliable chronometer first, and that the first accurate chronomter was not constucted until 1770 (or thereabouts) - and then leaps to the conclusion that because it was "impossible" before this it must have been impossible beforehand.
Subsequently - any evidence or data that suggests anything else becomes - in Charles Fort's words - "Damned Information" - and is subsequently ignored because it doesn't fit in with any theories.
I prefer sensible explanations for archaeological anomalies - and the idea that ancient mariners were able to sail around the globe is much more sensible than any ideas about "Alien Intervention" or "Lost Supercivilisations" - especially when we already know from the evidence that ancient man had a very good grasp of astronomy.
Tags: archaeology, astronomy, navigation, longitude, ancient mariners, forteana