Re: Migratory birds 1. Birds tend to fly a heck of a lot faster (& cheaper) than humans in boats, so the cost of any error is at least an order of magnitude lower. 2. Birds have been at this for tens of millions of years. Modern humans (i.e., Homo Sapiens) have been doing this for only 30k-40k years, max, and may have been doing this only since the last ice age ~20k years ago. So it is a lot more likely that birds have evolved additional capabilities not available to humans. 3. European navigators, for all of their "sophistication", never developed the navigational capabilities supposedly available to Polynesians, and hence did _mostly_ "festoon"-type sailing within a day or so of land. Of course, the ancient Romans lived mostlu within the Mediterranean Sea & the Black Sea, and didn't have to develop the capabilities to master the Pacific Ocean. At 09:44 AM 3/25/2015, Fred Lunnon wrote:

<< even partial skills won't be transferred to the next generation >>

An elegant argument which embarrassingly fails to conform to observation. For instance, how did migratory birds manage to acquire the same capability?

WFL

On 3/25/15, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:

...

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...