Ancient Monkey Art
By Mark Steer
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| It's not very easy to make out, but then this Nazca depiction of a monkey is around 2000 years old. |
The second amazing thing about them is that they are massive, up to three hundred metres in length. This makes the third amazing thing about the drawings even more amazing - the Nazca would have had no way of viewing the drawings in their entirety since it is only from the air that they make any sense.
For a long time people puzzled how the Nazca created their drawings, which are assumed to be offerings to gods. In the 1970s, astro-crackpot Erich von Däniken used them as evidence of ancient alien contact claiming that it would have been impossible for the ancients to create the images on their own. It was down to professional skeptic Joe Nickell to prove Däniken wrong and show that the pictures could have been drawn using the materials available to the Nazca all those years ago.
You can find this on Google Earth, or probably any other of those satellity sites, at the following grid reference: 14o 46' 22.10'' S; 75o 21' 43.90'' W. You might want to have a scout around as well, we also found the parrot, but there are plenty of other drawings out there in the desert.
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Images: Google
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