I heard a recent program on the ability of ancient Polynesians to navigate the Pacific Ocean w/o clocks/longitude or GPS. Supposedly, the Polynesian navigators use information about waves/swells/etc. to detect the presence & direction of islands over the horizon. I'm a bit skeptical about this, because unless these skills are relatively easily acquired, anyone with less than a certain critical mass of skills will die, and even partial skills won't be transferred to the next generation. (This is semi-analogous to the spread of a communicable disease, only in this case we _want_ the navigational information/techniques to propagate.) On the other hand, if this information is available in the wave/swell patterns, then presumably an "AI" computer program could learn these techniques by sending out lots of little buoys with GPS, sky-facing camera (for sun & star info) & wave-sensing capabilities, and eventually learn how to correlate these wave/swell patterns with positions relative to known islands. http://web.archive.org/web/20090917235953/http://pvs.kcc.hawaii.edu/navigate...