The human race has been around a lot longer than you think, John Kelly(human remains have been reliably dated to 160,000 years ago)

Well, hominid and hominin remains, perhaps, but the palaeoanthropologists are currently debating the evidence concerning whether truly "human" hominins were around before about 50kya.

and had maps, signalling devices which were analogous to the SatNav and cell phones, using the technology of the day

Like voices, petroglyphs (much harder to carry around but more durable) and the occasional message stick?

in an ontogyny recapitulates philogeny kind of way, cell phones and SatNavs use the basic ideas that the oldest and most primitive mapping and signalling technologies used

By the same token, knives, forks and spoons are, in an ontogeny recapitulates philogeny kind of way, the same basic ideas as teeth, fingers and hands, which are the ulimate in primitiveness.

Humour aside, and without consulting him on it, I suspect that part of John's beef is that so much of the technology we use today encourages us to take a 'black box' view of it, whereby we assume that whatever comes out of the black box is correct. After all, it's "technology" so it must be correct, musn't it? Without some connection to the basic competencies we end up deskilled and "totally" (and "obligatively rather than "facultatively") reliant on said technology and incompetent if it doesn't work.

Think of all the checkout attendants who rely on the electronic till to do their totalling; even though I was brought up to perform reasonably extensive arithmetic 'in my head', I wouldn't want to have to add up all the items in a fully loaded shopping cart. But when I stop being at a checkout I can use mental arithmetic for most of my domestic needs; most school leavers nowadays can't do the same because all of their experience is with "black box" calculators. Even some uni students run foul when trying to correctly keep track of 'orders of magnitude', whereas us old farts know the traps and (mostly) manage to avoid them because we were forced required to do mental arithmetic.

I don't have any particularly negative attitude towards GPS instruments; I teach student how to use them. But I'm more comfortable in most tricky situations if I have a map and compass, unless I'm trying to pinpoint a location on a featureless plain. Technology is part of what makes us human; so is second guessing.

But then, I also instinctively use the sun and my sense of time as a direction finder; pretty good until I found myself seriously north of the equator for the first time - very awkward.

Cheers, Rowan