It seems that Australia’s modern highways may have been laid out according to the stars.

Australian Aboriginals, like many ancient cultures, have an elaborate oral history passed down through generations to help them navigate and find food and water in their desert environment.

This knowledge base uses visual memory aids from the land… and the sky.

When ancient aboriginal navigators found a successful path through the desert, they looked for a path in the stars that mimicked it.

They’d use stars to represent water holes and hilltops and gave them the same names.

At night, they could point out the star patterns to others who had never made the trip, describing the path from one waypoint to the next.

To help travelers remember the maps, First Nation clans preserved them in song, which they could sing along their journey to recall place names, orientations, and distances. In the process, they taught these songs—and the star maps they reflected—to younger generations.

This navigation tool, used by First Nation tribes for millennia, was only disclosed to researchers a few years ago. Many of these so-called “songlines” are still used in Aboriginal treks today.

And when researchers laid the songlines over a modern map of Australia, they found that many highways appeared to line up with the star patterns.

These roads were set along cattle trails established by early immigrant ranchers who were probably following songlines shown to them by Aboriginal guides.