My kids love Moana, and I have to say, every time I watch it I am low-key impressed with how ancient people managed to find their way all over this planet without modern technology guiding the way.

I mean, I can barely get around my own town without using GPS.

But could people still use those ancient techniques with the same results today?

Based on the results achieved by a traditional Polynesian canoe called Hōkūleʻa in 1976, the answer is yes.

They left Honolua Bay in Hawai’i on May 1st, setting out on a 2,400-mile journey to Tahiti without compasses, maps, satellite navigation, or any other modern wayfinding tools.

Instead, they completed the journey in just over a month using traditional knowledge of the stars, swells, and signs and nothing else. They returned to Hawai’i the same way, finishing the impressive round-trip feat by the end of July.

Since then, others have taken inspiration from the members of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and brushed up on the not-lost art of wayfinding, too.

Multiple long-distance voyages, including one that took the wayfinders all the way around the world, have been completed with no modern apparatus on board.

The stars have been all the navigation that humans have ever needed, but the art of wayfinding can take a lifetime to properly learn. The first mention we have in writing is in Homer’s Odyssey, which was written around the eight century BCE.

A millennium before that, the Minoans used the stars to establish a trade empire that was flourishing and lucrative.

The Hawaiian star compass provides the crux of Polynesian navigation, dividing the sky into families of stars that reside in 32 separate houses. The different houses plot the course of these stars as they emerge from the horizon, rise to their full height, then descend.

To plot an accurate route, wayfinders needed to memorize a specific sequence of stars as they rose and set at different times of the night.

Lehua Kamalu, a one of the Hōkūleʻa crew, explained more to IFLScience.

“You don’t need to know 5 billion stars in the sky, but you need to know important ones that are going to help direct you to particular directions around this compass that’s in your mind. The easiest example is the North Star…although another would be the first star on the Belt of Orion, which rises due east consistently.”

He says that a navigator needs around 200 stars in their mental compass, and begins the task of memorizing their pathways for a year or so before they set sail.

Bad weather and full moons, among other things, can render the stars unusable a good amount of the time, though, so what then?

Kamalu says that the storms and clouds themselves can provide clues. Clouds on the horizon can often indicate a coastline, for example, since air heats up faster over land.

Birds signal land as well, since most of them will need to be close enough to return to a roost at some point, for one reason or another.

“Very traditional navigators know a lot about the birds that live on their islands – about what their patterns of feeding are, how far out to sea they go. And if you know how to read the signals that surround you at sea, you start to see signs of land long before you can actually see an island itself on your horizon. We call it expanded landfall.”

The air itself will give clues as well, by which way it’s blowing and how the currents you’re riding are drifting by.

“In  Hawai’i we have a dominant east-northeast wind, I would say. And as you get closer to the equator, it’s more of an east wind. And then as you go down to Tahiti, it’s more of a southeast wind.”

The wind and the waves have a lot to say, it turns out.

“And so one of the features that is pretty consistent throughout is that we have east winds, and we have east waves created by these east winds. If you talk to the most experienced navigators…they would say the wave is the most critical thing.”

“Wave piloting” is the art of deciphering what the water says via swells, currents, and other elements of ocean dynamics. Micronesian navigators would use a “stick chart,” which was made of coconut husks and cowrie shells to model wave patterns and currents.

Other wayfinders preferred physically feeling the rhythm of the ocean with a hand in the water, but Kamalu says that this skill is not easy to develop, and in the ancient world, would be learned as a young toddler so it would be more natural as the wayfinder grew.

“In the traditions, they would train at two years old, three years old, four years old, and you just kind of develop this natural instinct.”

Which is to say that even if the old ways of navigating can still work today, it’s not that easy to find people who are adept enough to regularly put it into practice.

If you think that’s impressive, check out this story about a “goldmine” of lithium that was found in the U.S. that could completely change the EV battery game.