Above is an image of the Nazca lines referred to in Sirius Explained, Part 2. The
images are huge and immense, often spanning 500ft or more. There are spiders, men, hummingbirds, lizards.. Surrounding
these extravagant shapes, in fact drawn over them, are various geometric forms, such as lines and triangles. This
leads scholars to think that the Nazca lines were made by two separate peoples, and that the original drawings
- the spiders, birds, etc. - are unexpectedly the much older ones.
If any place on Earth is suitable for art on this scale, the Nazca plateau in southern Peru, as Graham Hancock
has shown, is perfect. Rainfall is less than one shower per decade, so nothing washes away. The hot air over the
dry ground means that nothing will be carried away by the winds. A terrible - perhaps impossible - place to live,
but the perfect area to leave such massive art.
So massive are the drawings that only the 'lines' were discovered initially, and the lizards, birds and men had
to wait until the advent of aircraft in the 20th century. Could it be that the second people who drew lines over
the earlier drawings, did so to worship markings that they - without any form of elevation, since there is no vantage
point around - believed simply to be remarkable lines in the sand? This seems to have happened around 350BC - 600AD,
but who made the original drawings? And how could they have visualised such massive images so precisely?
Dr. Pitluga of the Adler Astronomy in Chicago has shown that whilst the secondary lines correspond to constellations
only with the same probability any such lines might, the original Nazca drawings - the 500ft animals - such as
the spider, correlate exactly with the movements of Orion throughout earliest prehistory.
Pitluga, Hancock and co. also point out that the spider depicted is a member of the genus Ricinulei, clearly denoted
by the shape of its body and right down to the detail of the reproductive organ on its right leg. But the problem
is that Ricinulei is one of the rarest spider genera on Earth. To find one, an indigenous people of Nazca would
have had to cross the Andes. Furthermore, they would have needed some form of magnification to view such tiny detail
as the reproductive organ of Ricinulei. And then either depict it or return a specimen to Nazca from which to make
a 400ft representation. The indigenous peoples of the surrounding area were not a particularly primitive people
for the age, but nevertheless they should have been no where near approaching the technology, mobility and grandiosity
of aim to attempt such a project thousands of years ago. So who made them?
Local folklore in Nazca does not attribute the original Nazca lines to the native population. In the late 1500s,
Luis de Monzon, a Spanish magistrate, made a first visit to the Nazca lines. He reported what you can be told in
Nazca even today; "the lines were said to have been made long, long ago by demigods known as the Viracochas.
Bearded men who came from across the seas to save the world in a time of great darkness".