Certainly God doesn't like the idea that people once upon a time were sharing knowledge:
11:6 Yahweh said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is what they begin to do. Now nothing will be withheld from them, which they intend to do.
11:7 Come, let's go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech."
11:8 So Yahweh scattered them abroad from there on the surface of all the earth. They stopped building the city.
11:9 Therefore the name of it was called Babel, because Yahweh confused the language of all the earth, there. From there, Yahweh scattered them abroad on the surface of all the earth.
http://www.awitness.org/biblehtm/ge/ge11.htm
These are old pre-flood/post-flood myths, seen through the eyes of the Torah; I prefer myths that involve some happy humans somewhere communicating and getting along. The stars...seem a useful, because obvious, point , which might be the same myth seen a different way (except for the God confusing everyone part.) Certainly we have myths of before/after and the only cataclysmic before/after we have is the ending of the last ice age, which would confound all old social relationships...unless one were free from the effects--isolated. Yet it seems that all communities have flood myths; which would make sense if there were a global connection network pre-melt...
...contact between disparate groups. You mentioned that to understand the concept of longitude (or maybe I misunderstood!), one would have to have an almanac and then travel with it.
I don't know how far you'd have to travel west-east/east-west before the naked eye and memory pointed out that things had changed. Maybe never? See how little I know! In my imagination I see a person far from home, staring up at the sky as the moon goes past and thinking, "Hold on. That shouldn't be there, it should be over there." His friend from the other faf-flung tribe pats his knee. "Happened to me first time I came to where you live. Here, have one of these. It'll help," he adds, handing him a large mushroom...
*:R Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
