Every time I dig into the Nazca mystery I am reminded of crop circles. Certainly in the UK they are not alien landing sites (!) but made by a couple of farm hands with rope and some planks.

I can never prove it, but I hope in some Peruvian heaven there are a couple of generations of jokers looking down and absolutely pissing themselves over this, how their priests were fooled and now us.

Pour a Pisco Sour guys and enjoy :-)

It's not really a mystery. The geoglyphs are visible from surrounding hills and other vantage points on the ground. They're essentially just giant works of art.

The mystery is not "did aliens do it", the mystery is who and why.

I love the idea that it was not the High Priest who used their extensive elite status, wealth and power to create signs to the gods to bolster their own elite status, but that instead it was a bottom up rebellious act of "real" art

Hopefully Greenpeace doesn’t feel the need to go protesting these lines.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3jbk7/drone-footage-shows-e...

Greenpeace is an anti-science group that does harm to what they claim is their cause. This sort of thing doesn't surprise me.

NOVA on PBS just had an episode on the Nazca geoglyphs. If you have an interest in this and have PBS Passport you can watch it on their site or streaming device. For my local station, a monthly donation of $5 is the minimum for Passport.

https://www.pbs.org/video/nazca-desert-mystery-66vtkw/

Unbelievable (to me) that they allowed this highway to be constructed: https://imgur.com/pYdShSA

Yikes.

They needed to beat the travesty at Stonehenge. https://www.highwaysindustry.com/turner-townsend-wins-work-k...

That is a very old picture. That road has been removed.

Not true. I was there less than 2 weeks ago. And it’s the panamerican highway. Not going to be just “removed”

I was referring to the Stonehenge picture that the grandparent linked to . . .

Oops sorry!

Are you able to pinpoint it on google maps or some such? That image looks more like a render to me than a photograph.

Bing maps has a clearer aerial image than Google:

https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=e9251d57-4167-4334-a24d-2f988...

Google maps mirador de las lineas de nazca

Edit: I tried to copy a link but the URL was horrendously long

A link with images of the new glyphs they discovered in 2019. Looks like they aren’t releasing the full set yet for this find.

https://www.asahi.com/sp/ajw/articles/13057833

How do they accurately assess the age of these things?

From the fossils or artifacts of that time, the value will be estimated but even the estimated value shows just how big human history is.

Estimates are around 500BC max - so nothing much in the picture of known human history, and a little too young for fossils.

Still amazing, and a culture it would be fascinating to better understand.

The article explains. They are using drone footage and AI to recognize likely patterns.

These geoglyphs (they think) are older than the classic Nazca lines as some of the designs are similar to people who were around before the Nazca people, around 200BC I believe, and the Nazca are somewhere in the 1000-1500 AD range. They are also on hillsides instead of on the plains, so they are susceptible to natural erosion. That's why they're using the AI to suss out likely designs from the "damaged" areas.

I'm not sure about this specific case but generally commercial wide coverage satellite imagery is not high quality enough to reliably see these kinds of formations. I'd guess they contract some combination of imaging including LIDAR to get better images to work from. That lets you see through vegetation etc. Here's an example from Tikal:

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/lidar-reveals-oldest-big...

They're not new.