Surely I'm not the only one to be disappointed that there isn't a very large and ancient feline sneaking around among the lines eating mice and other small animals.
I'm not saying I believe any of the crazy conspiracies related to the Nazca lines, but I really do wonder what they actually are.
The mysteries behind a lot of these ancient megalithic structures make me wonder about how sophisticated these presumed primitive civilizations actually we're.
>The mysteries behind a lot of these ancient megalithic structures make me wonder about how sophisticated these presumed primitive civilizations actually we're.
Consider that while the invention of writing systems allowed us to store knowledge and grow our technology base, human intellect and capacity hasn't changed in any real sense over at least the past 50,000 years.
The human ability to reason, imagine and create has existed for tens of millenia. As such, such sophistication isn't all that surprising.
I know this response is a little tongue in cheek, but you make a good point regarding entertainment. It seems like passive entertainment is a sort of sponge of energy and attention in a society. At a certain size, that probably helps keep things organized, but if that option is not available, the group has to come up with elaborate ways to expend that excess energy.
Once all the survival tasks are done, you really don’t want a bunch of military-age males standing around listless without direction. I think this was part of the pressure that gave way to elaborate rituals, construction projects, exploration, etc.
Based on the answer to the question, who could have appreciated the images (i.e. where does the optimal observer reside - the sky), perhaps the images were made in homage, or to appease/appeal to god(s)?
This is mostly a myth. Modern archeologists generally don't use writing as a criterion for 'advancement' anymore specifically because certain areas like the Andes never really used it. It also raises difficulties with other groups like the Aztecs that didn't have 'full' writing, but were nonetheless quite sophisticated.
The qualifier 'full' is important here. The article even makes note of this:
> ...some scholars have understood the system to not be considered a complete writing system...
In particular, the written and spoken forms aren't precisely equivalent. Some archaeologists consider this a bigger deal than others (I'm more on the "not a big deal" side), but it's worth noting.
The photo you see is of the cleaned up terrain, where the cat's existence is obvious. Most likely that's the reason.
> The figure was barely visible and was about to disappear due to its location —on a fairly steep slope— and the effects of natural erosion. The cleaning and conservation of the geoglyph was carried out last week. [1]
The ratio of the dimensions of the base of the Egyptian pyramids to their height includes pi as a factor. I once saw a TV show that concluded that since there's no evidence the Egyptians knew what pi was, space aliens must have been involved in their construction.
Later, some wag pointed out that if one uses a measuring wheel one cubit in diameter to lay out the base as a number of revolutions, then made the height as an integral number of cubits, you unwittingly wind up with pi in the ratio.
