Carvings on the shore rocks of Lake Onega, cut five or six thousand years ago. The best-known figure is the Bes — a humanoid nearly two and a half metres tall, split down the middle by a natural fissure. Monks of the Murom monastery cut a Christian cross over it in the fifteenth century to neutralise it, and both marks remain side by side on the stone, which makes this rock a rare document of one faith writing over another.

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The Waitomo Caves

Limestone caves on New Zealand's North Island whose ceilings glow with the larvae of Arachnocampa luminosa, a species found nowhere else. Thousands of blue points above an underground river look like a night sky; they are in fact lures for prey the larvae catch on sticky threads. Māori knew the caves long before Europeans, and the chief Tāne Tinorau led the first survey into them in 1887.