“They ended up messing up the area, which had been pristine for 5,000 years,” Malville says. Fuck people! But great article - it's funny how reading it reminded me of the one I posted about the Polynesians recently, and then they mention them a few paragraphs later. This was news to me, I had to google that because the thought of "important" stars changing significantly seemed so unlikely to me, in the small scale we have experienced humanity. Looks like something changed in earth's alignment so that the North Star now appears brighter? After their study was published in 1998, tourists located the stone circle by plucking the latitude and longitude from the research paper. Soon, visitors were defacing the megaliths and standing up nearby stones that changed the site’s alignment.
There was no north star at the time, so the people navigated using bright stars and the circular motion of the heavens.