Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Nazca Lines

added26 August 20261500

Giant geoglyphs etched into the desert of southern Peru more than 1,500 years ago. The animal figures and geometric patterns are only fully legible from the air — their purpose is still unresolved.

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-14.73900, -75.13000

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DebunkedWhite

Nazca and the Three-Fingered Mummies

Since 2017 Jaime Maussan has been exhibiting small pale bodies with elongated skulls and three fingers on each hand, said to come from a cave near Nazca — and in 2023 he exhibited them to the Mexican congress. Peruvian prosecutors seized part of the collection and in 2018 published a forensic report led by Flavio Estrada: dolls assembled from human and animal bones held together with modern adhesive, with animal skulls standing in for human ones. Peru's college of archaeologists and its ministry of culture demanded an investigation. The bodies are still on the conference circuit.

21 km away

DebunkedWhite

The Ica Stones

From 1966 the Peruvian physician Javier Cabrera assembled more than fifteen thousand engraved andesite stones: men riding dinosaurs, heart transplants, telescopes. The collection became a mainstay of the whole literature of forgotten civilisations. They were supplied by a farmer, Basilio Uschuya, and in 1975 he told reporters he was carving them himself — the alternative was answering for trading antiquities. In 1977, for a BBC documentary, he engraved a fresh stone on camera with a dental drill and aged it with shoe polish and stove soot. Not one stone from the collection has ever been recovered from an archaeological layer.

60 km away

FolkloreGreen

Machu Picchu

An Inca city on the saddle between two peaks at eight thousand feet, built around 1450 and abandoned perhaps a century later — probably to smallpox, which arrived ahead of the Spaniards themselves. The conquistadors never reached it and never learned it was there. The stones are fitted without mortar so closely that a knife blade will not go between them, and the Intihuatana, a carved pillar, casts almost no shadow at the solstices.

329 km away

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