Artificial Intelligence Spots 303 New Nazca Geoglyphs [Video]

The Peruvian desert has massive geoglyphs that aren’t visible from the ground. These 2,000-year-old drawings, called the Nazca Lines, were only discovered after the airplane was developed, and we still don’t know their purpose. But we now have a lot more of them. Around 430 of them were discovered by flying overhead over the last hundred years, but a new study by scientists from Yamagata University in Japan using artificial intelligence software has revealed 303 more. The computer programs can detect older, more blurry lines than human eyesight can, and much faster, too. Some of the new images were investigated, and slowly they were confirmed by scientists who spent 2,600 hours studying the sites on the ground.

The new images show llamas, orcas, fantasy creatures, and humans, including a beheading. It will take years to investigate them all, but we have a preview in images posted at Smithsonian.

(Image credit: Masato Sakai et al./PNAS, 2024)