The Harvard professor John Huth first offered his course “Science of the Physical Universe 26: Primitive Navigation” in 2007. Since then, he has taught around five hundred undergraduates about the rudiments of analogue way-finding (sun, stars, tides, weather, wind) in a range of cultures (Berber, Norse, Polynesian, early European). Huth is an experimental particle physicist; he was involved in the discovery of both the top quark and the Higgs boson. He is also an avid outdoorsman and, when it comes to navigation, a smartphone and G.P.S. skeptic. “All empiricism has to start with stuff that is immediately palpable to you,” he told me recently. “The march of education, especially in the sciences, has been divorced from that reality, and I think that’s where you have to start.” He began one of his lectures this spring with a question: “Which way is the wind blowing outside? Anyone notice?” The assembled students, about fifty in all, were silent. “Southeast?” one ventured. “Northeast,” Huth said.
As a species, humans lack many of the biological gifts that allow other animals to get around. A loggerhead turtle, for example, begins to take its bearings within a couple of hours of hatching, using magnetite crystals in its brain to sense Earth’s magnetic field. (Spiny lobsters, monarch butterflies, and termites have similar compasses.) Honeybees get from nectar to hive and back in part by judging the position of the sun, which they can sense, even on a cloudy day, from patterns in polarized light. Where biology has failed humans, we have substituted culture. Throughout our evolutionary history, we have created ad-hoc systems of knowledge that organize environmental information and make it transmissible to the next generation. Often, difficult and monotonous landscapes—desert, sea, ice—resulted in more intricate systems. Several thousand years before the magnetic compass was invented, Pacific Islanders had worked out how to navigate by star compasses and read ocean swells for information about nearby land. (Part of Huth’s summer vacation this year will be spent in the Marshall Islands, learning similar techniques from local sailors.)
In some places, navigational traditions became inextricable from spiritual cosmologies. The Europeans who settled Australia considered the Aboriginal peoples to be idle wanderers of the bush, but in fact many of them travelled along songlines—paths with songs attached to them that commemorate the passage of primordial beings who created the world. The words of the songs described the continent and the routes across it. One Aboriginal group, in particular—speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, a traditional language of Far North Queensland—uses an absolute rather than an egocentric perspective to describe space (in other words, not “Move to your left” but “Move southeast”). According to the psycholinguist Stephen Levinson, this has given them an almost superhuman capacity to orient themselves, night or day, using both relatively commonplace cues, such as sun and seasonal winds, and more specialized ones, such as the appearance of sand dunes and termite mounds. Levinson concluded, with admiration, that the Guugu Yimithirr speakers achieve “in software what pigeons apparently achieve in hardware.”
Many of the world’s navigation systems have been lost to time or replaced with technology—or, in the case of the songlines, damaged through cultural oppression. For the British author and self-styled “natural navigator” Tristan Gooley, their disappearance signifies a cultural and philosophical impoverishment. “By using a GPS to find our way instead of clues available in the world itself, we devalue the experience of traveling anywhere,” he told me in an e-mail. And there may be neurological consequences, too. We build cognitive maps in the hippocampus, the same area in which episodic memory and future planning take place. Advanced technologies insure that we use our brains as little as possible. In a series of studies in 2010, a group of researchers at McGill University, in Montreal, reported that exercising spatial memory and way-finding in everyday life increases hippocampal function and gray matter, whereas underuse of these functions in older adults may contribute to cognitive impairment. (One of the researchers, Véronique Bohbot, told the Boston Globe that she no longer uses satellite-navigation devices.)
As part of his course, Huth asks his students to study the night sky. This spring, they learned the coördinates of some twenty-two stars and their celestial paths, then went to the roof of the Harvard University Science Center to identify a handful of them. What he has found over the course of eight years of teaching primitive navigation, Huth told me, is that the more attuned to the environment his students become, the more their awareness seems to expand. “Sometimes they’re engaging in this material and experiencing an epiphany to other aspects of their life,” he said. Louis Baum, a Ph.D. candidate in physics and a teaching fellow for the course, told me that he and his colleagues find the same. “We get philosophical about it—about how knowing where you are helps you know your place in the world,” he said. Whereas the modern stargazer is liable to look up with a sense of existential wonder, if not dread, our ancestors may have seen in that lovely firmament a map of home.
On the roof of the Science Center, Huth named the stars as they flickered into view: Spica, Antares, Altair, Dubhe, Pollux. As he did so, a student approached, brimming with excitement. He had recognized several stars and measured their altitude and azimuth. “Before this, I was looking at the stars online,” he said. “It’s actually a little easier when you are up here and see it in real life.”
