Tigers don't leave scent marks because they don't know where their going. Tigers mark their territory to keep other tigers out, my cat marks inside my house. Do you think my cat needs scent marks to navigate?
-_- house cats have an ability called homing, which is an uncommon ability also seen in dung beetles, tortoises, and seafaring birds. An ability tigers do not have, why would you assume that tiger navigation is precisely the same as that of your housecat? Regardless, a tiger is not going to notice that it has left its territory without smell based cues. They don't mentally keep track of where they are internally, and they aren't instinctively tied to the territory. Plus, do you seriously think your cat EXCLUSIVELY navigates by instinct? Cats don't instinctively know if they can fit in a given space, which is what the whiskers are for. All animals more easily walk the path they have walked before over a new one, including us.
Animals in nature have a phenomenal ability to navigate, and navigate enormous distances. My stupid cat could find it's way home, if I dropped it two hundred miles from home.
Again, homing. Try doing the same with a dog and see how that goes, because most of them can't find their way back. My bearded dragons recognize their territory by smell, so much so that they don't realize I am putting them back in the same tank after I wash them and they cautiously walk around licking every few steps for the rest of the day because they aren't sure of the layout of this "new" place.
Birds most definitely are great navigators, no doubt, and it is crucial to their survival. Those that don't have homing have measurably extraordinary memories, and instinctual travel is contingent upon seasons. The brains of birds are truly fascinating.
How do I know that a house cat can navigate those distances, because our cat did that when we moved. It ran away from our new house and we waited a few days, sure enough we found it at the old residence.
Homing. You need to go beyond housecats as your basis of how great ALL animals are at navigation, because housecats are extreme outliers even when compared to other mammals. A freaking polar bear wouldn't be able to do the same. A group of meerkats defend a territory between 1-3 kilometers; how much navigation do they really have to do when they never stray far enough from their territory to be out of view? Wolves and many other predators move when the prey moves; they don't instinctively know where to go in order to find prey, they actually have to track it, and they feel no drive to leave any area in which prey is plentiful and the environment isn't too hot or cold.
The ability to navigate is a genetic trait that cannot be erased, it is never just lost.
Lol, mutations on genes can always result in a trait being lost. After all, it was those genes that resulted in that trait to begin with, so if those genes experience a mutation that leaves them perpetually turned off, that trait will not be expressed.
You might think that any individual that lost this ability would be doomed to die, but remember, humans are a communal species that can make maps. Plus, I think you vastly underestimate how good people generally are at navigating; flipping vikings were so good at it that they were able to sail to North America repeatedly after finding it once. You personally may not be good at navigating, and I can relate. However, the majority of people are perfectly capable of doing it and only suck at it because they never had to try, and as we get older, our brain actually removes pathways for expanding on certain areas we never bothered to invest in, because saving the energy is more beneficial than leaving us open to easily expanding on a skill we never used much before the age of 20. That's why kids have such an easier time learning second languages than adults do.
As an example of a trait most people have that absolutely can be absent, consider the ability to recognize people by their faces. To most people, human faces are very distinct compared to other animals, but in reality human faces are remarkably similar to the point that the only reason we can recognize people by facial structure is due to a structure in the brain dedicated to distinguishing faces by the minute differences between them. If a mutation results in this structure not developing properly (hereditary congenital prosopagnosia), a person may range from having notable difficultly in recognizing faces, to being so inept at recognizing faces that they can't recognize themselves in a mirror. Obviously, not being able to distinguish people in a communal species is an extreme detriment, and yet, most people with the condition never recognize that they even have this disorder. That is because people compensate for their weaknesses, utilizing other information by which to recognize people, with only the most severe sufferers experiencing enough problems as to make it obvious.
For some unknown reason, humans have never been able to navigate by instinct. We walk in circles if we cannot spot something to navigate by.
We don't have designated nesting areas or times of year, and our early on nomadic nature made it pointless to instinctively be driven to return to places we had already been just 'cause. Only organisms with the homing ability or with designated breeding grounds actually navigate by instinct alone at any point. That homing ability is also very limited and only works with a small number of spots; even if your cat was left at someone else's house for a week, and you kept doing this with different houses, that cat wouldn't be able to find its way back to all of them. Yet, I could without being to any of these places if given the address.
You seem to be acting as if any ape has instinctual navigation. Chimps find fruit trees by memory, not by instinct.
BBC - Earth News - Chimps mentally map fruit trees