The Nazca Lines Mystery Solved – With Proof

The Nazca Lines Mystery Solved – With Proof A pilot flying over southern Peru in the late twenties looked down and saw a hummingbird the size of a stadium, and for the next hundred years everybody, myself included until I actually dug into this, assumed the obvious thing, that these figures were meant to be seen from above. That assumption is the reason the mystery lasted as long as it did, because the Nazca never once saw their own drawings whole. There is no hill, no tower, no vantage point in that desert that shows you a monkey with a spiral tail. So in this one I go through how the answer came apart and got rebuilt. Paul Kosok standing at the end of a line on the solstice watching the sun set right down the middle of it, and the statisticians who later worked out that with hundreds of lines running every direction, a few hitting the sun is exactly what chance predicts. Maria Reiche sweeping that desert by hand for forty years with an ordinary broom, which is the part of this story I find genuinely moving whether or not her theory held up. The animals turning out to be a vocabulary, the spider meaning rain, the monkey meaning water in abundance. And the Japanese drone teams who have now mapped three hundred and fifty eight figures, a hundred and sixty eight of them in one year alone, and found they cluster along the old paths, facing the roads, exactly where people walked. A Spanish chronicler wrote down the answer in the sixteenth century. He asked the locals and they told him. Trail markers. Nobody listened for four hundred years.