Orcas hunted off the Peruvian coast 1,640 feet (500 meters) away until recently when industrial fishing removed their prey. This orca-shaped mound dated to approximately 5,000 years ago.
Posted on 03/30/2012 1:02:21 AM PDT by Theoria
Manmade mounds shaped like orcas, condors and even a duck may be the oldest evidence of animal mounds outside of North America, according to former University of Missouri anthropologist.
Writing in the magazine Antiquity, Robert Benfer, a professor emeritus, describes a series of mounds, some more than 1,300 feet (400 meters) across, in coastal valleys in Peru. Archaeological evidence at the sites pegs some at more than 4,000 years old.
"It's going to shake everybody's views," Benfer told LiveScience. "The previous oldest animal figures were at Nazca and they're 2,000 years old."
The Nazca Lines are simple stone outlines of animals decorating the Nazca Desert in Peru. Like the newly discovered mounds, they may have had ritual significance. In addition, the shapes likely coincided with the constellations these ancient people saw in the Milky Way.
Strange shapes
Benfer discovered the mounds while looking at satellite photos of a site about which he'd long held suspicions. The feature seemed shaped like a condor, he said, but archaeological wisdom suggested that animal effigy mounds were a North-America-only phenomenon, with few exceptions, such as one at a Central America site in Mexico.
The satellite photos revealed furrows that looked like teeth as well as a burned charcoal area perfectly positioned in the spot where the eye of the bird would be. Global positional system (GPS) information and an archaeological investigation of the site convinced Benfer that he was, in fact, looking at a condor-shaped mound, with the eye likely being a site where offerings were burned. The condor is oriented according to astronomical rules: It lines up with the most extreme orientation of the Milky Way as seen from the Chillón Valley where the mound is found.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
Google earth...shamu...peru...ping.
Looks like a cloud formation.
Note: this topic was posted 3/30/2012. Thanks Theoria, sorry I missed your ping!
Are you cirrus?
Prolly feeling a little nimbostratus at the time.
It’s more fun if they find shapes in rocks and pop tarts..
I’m sure that’s just a cumulus effect.
I am the queen of “matrixing”.
I drive people batty, trying to get them to ‘see’ stuff, too.
:)
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