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

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.

Connected by triangles: Some of the sites created by Stone Age man (below)



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

'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.'

On the question of 'external guidance', he does not rule out extraterrestrial help.