How close to Impossible can Navigation be on a Jungle Planet (for a Stone Age Civilization)?

Premise

I would like to create a world that is rendered nearly impossible to navigate by natural circumstances. In my particular world, a thick jungle covers the whole planet from pole to pole; this gives the planet an eerie monotonous vibe. I'm trying to account for as many variables as I can. I'm not sure how optimistic I should be about making the planet 100% impossible to navigate, maybe it's going to be a bit of a stretch to account for everything. Nonetheless, I want to make sure there are no glaring loopholes in this regard.

The following are brief notes on my progress thinking through barriers to navigation on my planet as they stand:

Strengths

• Visibility: The immense understory level of the jungle has no sunlight whatsoever. This also means navigation by the stars or other celestial bodies will be not be feasible.
• Landmarks: Due to the monotonous landscape of the planet, it will be likely that there are few if not no distinguishing geological features. This will make it more likely for potential navigators to walk in circles as they are biased by their lead/dominant leg over time.

Weaknesses

• Tools: Primitive civilizations will not have GPS or compasses for that matter, so advanced navigation tools are clearly out of scope. However, I am not certain whether a primitive navigation tool could be brought to bear in my jungle world.

• Forest Felling: Moreover, tools used to chop the trees down would certainly simplify things. I would like to make my world robust to this somehow.

• Climbing: Even deprived of tools, the primitive civilization could climb trees and thereby extend their vision.

The above are simply the strengths and weaknesses as I perceive them. You may have your own set of strengths and weaknesses to making navigation as impossible as possible (pun not intended, but oh well). I'm allowing the latitude to approach this question with my particular logic weaknesses in mind, or your those imposed by the answer-er him/herself.

Question: How close to impossible can navigation be on the aforementioned Jungle Planet? Pardon the superlative nature of the question's phrasing, I don't mean for it to get too subjective. If the collocation "how close to impossible" doesn't sit well with you, you may replace it with "how difficult".

Further Clarification

• Technology Level: Stone Age
• Flora/Fauna: Existent, hostility is up to you
• Planet Size: Roughly 1.5x the size of Earth
• Seasonality: I'm not stipulating anything, but ideally it would be perpetually summer

posted almost 7 years ago

Arash Howaida‭

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