Re: North again

[Brian Whatcott <inet@INTELLISYS.NET>]

At 11:34 AM 12/8/01, you wrote:
> OK let me ask a more fundamental question:  Where/when did the idea of
> North come about?
>
> Jim Green
> mailto:JMGreen@sisna.com
> http://users.sisna.com/jmgreen


With Autumn's onset, birds having necessarily a weight efficient digestive
system
and high calorie needs compared with their body weight, found it advantageous
(in a survival sense) to fly to the more abundant food sources, and for
comparable
reasons, fly in the opposite direction in Spring.

 For some birds (and other animals) a sensitivity to geomagnetic field
orientation
was a useful sensory aid - one of several.

This is possibly one of the more obvious orientations visible to humans.
In so far as birds have provided a food source since there were humans to
hunt them,
humans have had the opportunity and motivation to  visualize this roughly
north/south
 migration 'for ever', in human terms.






Brian Whatcott
  Altus OK                      Eureka!