Welcome to Spotlight Advanced. I'm Gillian Woodward.
And I'm Roger Basek. Spotlight Advanced uses a special English method of broadcasting. It is easier for people to understand no matter where in the world they live.
You are flying over the Nasca Desert in Peru. The same flat, red earth stretches out in all directions until it is broken by lines. These white marks in the earth begin to connect into lines, making shapes, birds, insects, and strange men with knives. Each of these shapes is many kilometers long.
These are the Nazca lines. The mystery of these huge shapes in the desert floor has long puzzled experts. Who or what made them? What purpose do they serve? Why would an ancient people make something that can only be seen best from the air. Today's Spotlight Advanced is on the mystery left behind by these desert shapes.
There are many theories about who created the Nasca lines. Some even say that these lines are evidence of foreign beings visiting our planet floating in the sky. These beings must have cut the lines in the desert floor.
With modern technology, the reality is at once much more common and much more unbelievable. Experts believe that the Nasca people created these lines between five hundred BC and five hundred AD. Though we know little about the Nasca people, the imagery in the lines is simil to those found in Nasca art. These cultured desert dwellers often painted animals such as killer whales, hummingbirds, and monkeys on their pottery. They wove similar shapes on their blankets and clothing.
Archaeologists, those scientists who study ancient cultures, have an important question. How the Nascar could cut the lines. Some of the lines run on for many kilometers without bending. This would be a grand achievement today, but many of the shapes in the Nazca desert are nearly two thousand years old. There are no mountains nearby to see the shapes from above.
Some experts believe that the Nazca may have used early hot air balloons to help them. Julian Knott was a British balloonist. He once made a small balloon using a fire and cloth like the Nasca made. After a short flight, he said, I.
Do not see any evidence that the Nazca culture did fly, but they could have, and so could the ancient Egyptians, the Romans the vikings. Any culture with just a device to make cloth, and with fire you can fly.
Theories like knots are interesting, but the truth may be much simpler. The NASCAR people could have made a straight line by tying a piece of rope between two posts. Cutting the lines in the earth was not difficult. The Nascar Desert's red soil is only a few centimeters deep. Beneath it is white colored rock. The Nazca would only have needed to remove a little earth to expose the differently colored earth below. With little to no wind in this desert, these shapes remained untouched.
Whilst some experts believe they know how the Nascar made these lines, they do not know why. It is one mystery for which we may never know the answer. Why make such large shapes if you will never see them fully? Why start such a project with no immediate visible purpose.
There have been many theories since people first rediscovered the lines in nineteen twenty seven. Some think that the lines held some religious purpose. Maybe the shapes were praised these people offered to their gods. Early discoverers thought they could have been a way to mark the stars. Maybe these shapes were ways of judging the years maybe they helped people find water in a land with very little.
Recent discoveries have made these theories more complex. Masato Sakai is a researcher at Yamagata University. In twenty two twenty four, he and his team scanned images of the Nasca Desert using artificial intelligence, or AI. They designed this special program to find shapes like the Nasca Lines. Before this study, it took experts one hundred years to find four hundred and thirty shapes. The AI program found three hundred and
three more in just six months. Sakai said the traditional method of study was identifying these shapes from high resolution images of this huge area.
This was slow it risked missing some of them.
Many of these new lines were much smaller than other shapes in the Nascar Desert. They showed strange pictures like fish holding knives. Several show the heads of dead enemies. Before this find, the best theory that the lines were places where the Nascar people performed ceremonies. They performed these religious services to ask their gods for rain.
The new shapes do not disprove this theory, but they do invite more mystery into the story of these ancient shapes in the desert. Experts have identified many of the new animals drawn in the desert. Some come from the Amazon rainforest, many hundreds of kilometers away. These animals were somehow significant to the Nascar people. These may have symbolized growth or farming, but it is difficult to know why the Nascar drew animals from so far away.
Some lines may have been for directions to water. Some lines may have been for watching the stars, but others may have been markers of important events. The larger shapes would have required many people to make, but smaller ones would not. Maybe these lines were training for larger shapes. Maybe some were made by a single person trying to make a permanent mark on the world.
Looking to other cultures may help us understand the Parakas. People lived in the same area as the Nazca. These people also drew lines, but they lived several hundreds of years earlier. The Parakas also drew lines in the earth, but these lines were usually on hillsides a person could see them from the ground from villages where they lived.
These smaller shapes had less precise lines. It was probably important that these shapes be seen by the people who drew them, but the Nazca people did not seem to care if they could see what they made. Instead, these lines were for the sky.
Whatever these were for, the NASCAR lines represent an important part of human art and history. What they meant to the people that made them remains mysterious, but today we recognize them as important markers of what humans are able to do. In nineteen ninety four, UNESCO marked the lines as a World Heritage Site. This makes sure these sites are protected. It directs more care because of the site's importance for everyone in the world.
Why do you think the NASCAR dru their lines? Do you have a favorite theory? You can leave a comment on our website at www dot Spotlight English dot com. You can also find us on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Blue Sky, and x. You can also get our programs delivered directly to your Android or Apple device through our free official Spotlight English app.
The writer of this program was Dan Christman. The producer was mitchyo Osaki. The voices you heard were from the United Kingdom and the United States. All quotes were adapted for this program and voiced by Spotlight. This program is called the New Nazca Lines.
We hope you can join us again for the next partlet program. Goodbye,