By Futura Team
Publication Date: 2025-12-29 12:30:00
Artificial intelligence has done what decades of human effort could not: it discovered hundreds of huge, ancient structures hidden beneath the sands of the Peruvian desert. These intricate figures, invisible for centuries, reveal new insights into the mysterious Nazca civilization.
In just six months, researchers from the Nazca Institute at Yamagata University and IBM doubled the number of known Nazca Lines and identified 303 new geoglyphs. Their results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and confirmed by archaeologist Masato Sakai, represent one of the fastest advances in archaeological discoveries ever recorded at a UNESCO World Heritage site.
These huge carvings, made between 200 B.C. Etched into the desert floor between 2000 BC and 650 AD, they depict stylized animals, plants and geometric shapes – some spanning hundreds of metres. Many of these remained invisible simply because of the vastness of the desert and the limitations of traditional mapping.