Humans were nomadic species for tens of thousands of years, ever since our ancestors left Africa’s caves and decided to colonize every single continent except Antarctica.

Human tribes traveled through many lands in search of new hunting grounds and new food sources but then we discovered agriculture and decided to create permanent settlements, leading to the explosion of human knowledge and birth of the first civilizations. But that ancestral call of the wild, that subconscious desire to travel through the unknown and discover new lands hasn’t abandoned us leading many to continue the never-ending journey of our species. But this time those fearless explorers had somewhere to return, a place they called home, leading them to construct ways to map their journeys and to navigate back to their home.

And even when they traveled into the unknown in search for new lands to colonize, they had to learn how to navigate the seas and how to keep their course once the coast, which was the most common way of keeping course for prehistoric navigators, goes out of sight.

This is the story of navigation techniques utilized by different civilizations, from thousands of years ago until today.

Today you or I or anyone can book a flight to virtually any city on the Earth and once we arrive at that city, a city we never visited before, we can find our way through it without problems. All we need is a smartphone, Google Maps, and an open Wi-Fi hotspot.

By downloading the map of the city on Google Maps we can travel through it like we lived our whole life in it, simply by looking at the screen and utilizing the power of GPS, one of the most important technologies of the entire human history. But thousands of years ago all these beautiful technologies were unknown and humans had a hard time finding their way around.

Navigation techniques in ancient times

Nomadic tribes followed cycles of nature; they would follow their prey as it moved around the land and it could be said they didn’t need any navigation. But once agriculture and animal husbandry were invented and settlements became permanent, humans needed a way to navigate around their home.

The earliest navigation technique was the usage of known landmarks. Earliest maps are believed to be cave drawings containing nearby landmarks that would allow hunters and other travelers to return to their home.

Modern Tuareg tribes still use this primitive technique during their travels, even though it is believed that their ancestors (as well as Bedouin tribes) used stars for navigating the immense expanse filled with shifting sand dunes that is Sahara. But the desert is filled with hills and mountains that can serve as landmarks for travelers making landmark navigation possible even in a place that looks like a single immense world of sand where you can get lost without the knowledge of stars and constellations that would allow for precise navigation across the desert landscape.

Once the humanity discovered how to travel via water, navigation techniques had to adapt for this new way of exploration. The earliest way of navigating for ancient seafarers was simply by following the coast.

This allowed travelers to always have a way to return to their starting point, to have the safety of the nearby coast in case of storms, and to map their journey for others to follow by marking landmarks they saw during their journeys. But as humanity became more advanced and first empires were born explorers started tackling open sea.

Phoenicians were masters of sea travel and they traveled all across the Mediterranean. That meant leaving the cost behind and sailing to open sea, which meant that new navigation techniques had to be invented. So, they turned to winds and heavens.

The wind rose mapped known winds (which were used to travel from port to port across the open sea) and gave seafarers a tool that helped them sailing through the open water. Trade winds bear that name because they were used for trading routes since they always had the same general direction during the whole year and were a pretty reliable form of navigation. Arabs used those to sail to India and back as well as to reach East Africa and Madagascar, and even China.

Then you have basic stellar navigation. During the day the position of the sun gave them a general sense of direction. They could determine a general direction along with the quarter. Instead of calling quarters east and west like us Phoenicians called them Asu (sunrise) and Ereb (sunset).

If you look closer you will notice that the two names have been kept in names of the two continents of the classical world, Europe and Asia. By night, known stars and constellations were used as permanent markers for navigating the sea. Small Bear, The Northern Star, Pleiades, and the Orion constellation were regular markings used by navigators in ancient times.

The Norsemen, who were also masterful seafarers, couldn’t use stars for navigation because during the summer the sun would always be part of the sky above so they had to utilize other forms of sea navigation.

They would follow the shore if sailing near to their home but during their heroic journeys to Iceland, Greenland, and modern-day Newfoundland they had to rely on subtler and more advanced navigation techniques. Smelling the scent of land, fresh water mixing with seawater, recognizing sea currents by observing whales’ feeding spots were some of the less known techniques employed by the Vikings.

They also watched seabirds and could know whether a bird was on its way to the sea (its beak would be empty) or whether it returned to its nest on land (if its beak was full).

Early navigation tools

When it comes to tools used for navigation, there weren’t many. We already mentioned the wind rose, which was utilized in places such as Mediterranean and Persian Gulf, two areas that were fully known and mapped, thus allowing sailors to use trade winds to reach their destinations.

The Vikings, as well as the Chinese, used basic compasses such as lodestones placed on pieces of wood floating on water that shown magnetic North and sun compasses that were used for rough latitude calculation.

And then Han Chinese invented the magnetic compass and navigation entered a new era. With the magnetic compass sailors wouldn’t need the sun or stars. And the sunstone, often disregarded because everyone thought was part of the Viking legends, could indeed be used in ancient times by the Norsemen to find the sun when it was hidden behind clouds by pointing the sunstone to the skies and then finding polarized rings cast by the sun via the phenomenon called polarization.

Lead line or a sounding line was a primitive tool made from a weight and line with markers on it and it was used to measure sea depth and thus for navigation. Lead line was used by many different ancient cultures and was practically a universal navigation tool among different civilizations.

It is used even today, as an analog replacement in case digital sonars break or become unreliable. Wood kamal was used to determine latitude during medieval times.

But the most important navigational instrument was discovered by the Ancient Greeks and later perfected by the Arabians. Astrolabe was used to calculate latitude based on local time. A sailor would measure an included position in the sky of a specific celestial body (The Northern Star was used in most cases). But Astrolabe was much more. It could be used for telling time, used for measuring heights of almost every object, was excellent for telling the times of sunrise and sunset, darkness and dawn, etc.

The astrolabe was the most important piece of every Greek or Arabian seafarer (and later of Europeans, after Arabians introduced it to Spaniards during the 13th century) until the magnetic compass. And when we talk about navigation tools used before modern times we have to say a word or two about dead reckoning. This was a navigational technique used to estimate a current position based on a past position. It includes speed, time, and the bearing of travel for calculating the current position on the map, and it was used by most sailors up until we started using GPS-based navigation.

The miracle of navigating the Pacific Ocean

While European, Arabian, and Chinese navigators traveled in large ships and were commanding crews of hundreds of people, seafarers of Polynesia managed to tackle the biggest ocean in the world in small vessels that definitely weren’t suited for long journeys. They did that by being incredibly courageous and by using simple yet effective navigation techniques and tools.

Ancient Polynesians managed to travel between more than a thousand of islands scattered across the Pacific by using the combination of navigation techniques based on experience and classical navigation techniques.

The first included knowledge that was passed from their ancestors that included knowledge about different plants and species populating specific islands (so they would know where they were by recognizing driftwood and birds), weather and wind patterns that allowed them to traverse thousands of miles on the open sea, wave patterns that were useful for traveling across different archipelagos, and useful tips like whether birds’ beaks were full or empty (thus knowing were the land was simply by observing the direction of birds carrying food in their beaks).

Advanced navigation techniques employed by Polynesians included celestial navigation by recognizing major constellations on both the Northern and Western hemisphere, using the star compass (using the horizon and the stars as a natural form of compass) to get their bearings, learning about the celestial sphere that allowed them to travel by using just a few reference points on the night sky, and contracting and using stick charts, simple (only by appearance) constructions made from coconut strips and small shells that shown location of islands, sea currents around different islands, and wave patterns.

And of course, like all other civilizations Polynesians also used tried and true technique called dead reckoning.

This combination of navigation techniques and simplistic navigation instruments allowed Polynesians to travel across the Pacific in small boats many of which could take just a dozen or fewer persons at a time!

The discovery of marine chronometer and the birth of modern navigation

While Europe suffered through Medieval times Arabians and the Chinese developed magnetic compass while at the same time Arabians took the astrolabe and improved upon the original design by constructing the quadrant, which was more precise and smaller than the astrolabe. Jacob’s Staff was a tool designed in Europe, and it had pretty much the same purpose as the quadrant. All those instruments were used for calculating latitude.

That was simple – all you had to do is calculate the angle between the Sun (or a Northern Star on the night sky) and the horizon, compare it with readings they took at their home port, and they would know how far south, or north are they from their home port. Combined with the compass, dead reckoning, and instruments for calculating the speed of a vessel, these made for relatively accurate sea navigation. But there was one problem that wasn’t solved until the 18th century.

Calculating longitude (the position east or west from the prime meridian located at Greenwich) was practically impossible. It’s because that for calculating latitude, a sea explorer would have to know both time at their current position (which was simple as calculating latitude) and their home port time. And since no clock at the time was able to accurately keep time on sea (because they used mechanisms that didn’t work on unstable surfaces like the sea) sailors had to track how far they traveled east of west from their starting point, which was susceptible to errors. This led to many ships going off course and many naval disasters.

So, in 1714, the British government founded a Board of Longitude that placed the prime meridian in Greenwich and along with it, the government also offered a massive prize (20,000 pounds of Sterling) for anyone who finds a way to calculate longitude while at sea. The prize eventually went to John Harrison who invented the marine chronometer in 1761, which was able to keep track of the local Greenwich Time while at sea. But the instrument was too expensive and too complex to build, preventing the majority of sailors from using it. Instead, they used the sextant, which was invented a few years before (1759) and was able to calculate longitude by measuring the relative distance of the moon and then comparing it with lunar distance tables, which were issued annually.

This wasn’t perfect and it wasn’t as accurate, but it was accurate enough to be used during the next century. It wasn’t until the development of factories that the marine chronometer became a regular piece of equipment found on each ship. Combined with detailed sea charts, other instruments and newly developed mathematical procedures chronometers helped navigators to calculate their position extremely accurately.

Navigation in the 20th century and the rise of GPS

There weren’t any major breakthroughs when it comes to navigation until the early 1900’s when radio waves were discovered and when a new form of vessels (airplanes) required new techniques and instruments to be made. This led to the invention of the gyroscope, capable of pointing true north relative to the rotation of the earth. It also worked without problems on steel ships and airplanes, unlike the magnetic compass which wasn’t precise because of the interferences caused by steel. Accelerometers, that were invented in the 20th century, offered extremely precise speed and acceleration.

All these instruments combined provided an extremely accurate way for calculating dead reckoning, this time being extremely resistant to errors. Adding radio navigation techniques (calculating the distance of radio sources) and early computers, sailors and aviators could plot their course with extreme precision. Soon after computers got introduced in airplanes and ships, most navigation maps and charts went digital and a new era of navigation was born.

The pinnacle of the digital dead reckoning technique probably was a small device called the Etak Navigator, a portable navigation device based on the electronic compass and accelerometer that was capable of calculating location within 50-foot and all that in 1985, 15 years before the US government lifted their restriction on GPS accuracy!

The Navigator used special cassettes to store its maps and those supported only US metro regions. Also, the device sported a price of about $1,400 (more than $3,000 when adjusted for inflation). Nevertheless, the Navigator was truly ahead of its time and while the device flopped with regular consumers, Etak continued to provide its map data and its devices for large trucking and delivery companies.

And in 2000, the US government lifted the ban that limited the accuracy of the GPS system and the GPS era of navigation started. Today, every single person has a near perfect navigation device in their pocket, the smartphone. With it, we can find out way no matter where we are; all we need is a navigation app with loaded maps. That was unimaginable for the whole human history but now anyone, literally anyone, can be a perfect navigator.