Over 300 mysterious Nazca glyph patterns have been discovered in Peru, including cats, camels, and a figure that looks just like popular Disney character ‘Wall-E’.
The famous geoglyphs are found in the soil of the Nazca desert in southern Peru, and have baffled scientists for nearly a century.
However, thanks to AI, scientists have uncovered more than 300 patterns, and some of them are rather peculiar.
The new discoveries have been likened to aliens, killer whales brandishing knives, cats, camels and a figure that looks just like Wall-E.
To see the glyphs, scientists used the new technology to add lines on to the original lines, which have faded due to erosion.
The mysterious glyphs were uncovered by researchers at Yamagata University in Japan and IBM Thomas J Watson Research Center in New York in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
‘It took nearly a century to discover a total of 430 figurative Nazca geoglyphs, which offer significant insights into the ancient cultures at the Nazca Pampa,’ say the team in their paper.
‘Here, we report the deployment of an AI system to the entire Nazca region, a UNESCO World Heritage site, leading to the discovery of 303 new figurative geoglyphs within only six months of field survey.’
The team used AI to identify markings in the landscape that would have been missed by just the human eye, with 178 suggested by the technology.
‘AI may be at the brink of ushering in a revolution in archaeological discoveries like the revolution aerial imaging has had on the field,’ the researchers said.
Peru’s famous Nazca lines were first ‘discovered’ by archeologists almost a century ago, in 1927.
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The purpose of the lines remain a mystery, but some researchers believe they were used in ritual ceremonies and may have served as messages to the gods.
The impressive drawings are thought to have been made by the removal of rocky black topsoil to reveal light-coloured sand underneath.
The Nazca site is one of Peru’s top tourist attractions, with dozens of planes flying visitors across the UNESCO World Heritage site every day.
In February 2022, seven people died after a tourist plane crashed on a trip to view them, five tourists and two crew members.
The tourists were two Chileans and three people from the Netherlands, the civil defence office in Nazca said.
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