Japanese Researchers Discover 143 “New” 2,000-Year-Old Earth Drawings in Peru

By Rain Noe From Core77

Here’s our suggestions for what they should be named

Geoglyphs are the rocky cousins of crop circles. Ancient civilizations drew large pictures–some of them a half-mile wide–on the ground by stacking rocks, or removing them to expose lighter-colored soil beneath, in order to create lines.

The best-known geoglyphs in the world are probably those at Nazca, Peru. Hundreds have been discovered to date, and the number recently received a boost. Archaeologists from Japan’s Yamagata University, who have been studying Nazca since 2004, have just announced that they’ve discovered 143 previously unseen geoglyphs–all thought to be about 2,000 years old–through a combination of fieldwork and the analysis of 3D geographic data.

Below are the images, both unprocessed and processed. As these new finds have not yet been named, I’ll offer my suggestions for what each should be called:

Picasso Crab With Lance

Unprocessed

Processed

Enthusiastic Dog-Faced Court Jester With Pac-Man Ghost Trapped in Stomach

Unprocessed

Processed

Some Kind of Mirror-Image Bird or Fish, Maybe Drawn by Two Separate Teams Who Both Thought They Were Supposed to Draw the Top Half and Never Double-Checked

Unprocessed

Processed

Cannot Decide if This is a Trippy Two-Headed Googly-Eyed Snake Eating Two Humans, or a One-Headed Googly-Eyed Snake Eating One Human While Pooping Another Human Out

Unprocessed

Processed

Interestingly enough, the research team would have only discovered 142 new geoglyphs, if they hadn’t had some help from IBM’s Watson Machine Learning AI. The AI pitched in to analyze the data and found this image:

Three-Eared, One-Armed TiVo Man With Long Remote Control

If you’d like to read the technical details of how the work was performed, Yamagata U.’s press release is here.

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