Whether it was children in Greenland learning rope tricks for sea kayaking or Kalahari hunters tracking animals, navigation was evidence of an incredibly sophisticated body of science in cultures that were widely dismissed as primitive and without scientific traditions. “These cultures created a taxonomy in which they practice these arts,” he told me. “Navigation was a way of thinking or organizing one’s environment in a scientific way. It’s an example of scientific thought that people were engaging in way before the Scientific Revolution.”
