AI helps discover new geoglyph in the Nazca Lines

The geoglyph spotted by AI tools is a human figure about five meters (16 feet) tall. | Image: Yamagata University / IBM Japan

Scientists from Japan have used machine learning for the first time to identify a new figure among the ancient motifs of Peru’s Nazca Lines.
The illustration, known as a geoglyph, is thought to date to between 100 BC and 500 AD, and was made by removing the dark stones of the Nazca Desert to reveal the white sand beneath. It’s small, just five meters in height, and it shows a humanoid figure grasping a cane or club. Like the other drawings in the Nazca Desert, its exact function is unknown, but its discovery next to an ancient path suggests it might have been used as a waypoint.
“It’s a large achievement.”
“It is in an area that we often investigated, but we did not know the geoglyph existed,” Professor Makato Sakai, the leader of a…

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