Across 200 square miles of Peruvian desert, ancient people scraped hummingbirds, spiders, and 1,200-foot lines into the earth — figures so vast you can only truly see them from the air, centuries before flight. Now an AI has quietly found 300 more, and the oldest question is back: who were they drawing for?
A grounded archaeology documentary that sets the scene: who the Nazca people were and how they turned a desert into a canvas.
The technical baseline: how removing the dark surface stones to expose pale sand created lines that survive 2,000 years in one of Earth's driest places.
Walks through the leading theories — water rituals, astronomical calendars, ceremonial pathways — and why none of them fully closes the case.
The 2024 breakthrough: a Yamagata University and IBM team trained AI on aerial imagery and found geoglyphs the naked eye had missed for a century.
The strange new bestiary: a 72-foot killer whale clutching a blade, parades of humanoid figures, and scenes that hint at what the lines were *for*.
How the smaller 'relief-type' figures cluster along ancient footpaths — evidence they were meant to be walked past, not viewed from above.
BBC Science Focus on how machine learning is turning a century-old mystery into a solvable dataset — and what it might finally reveal.
A visual closer that flies you over the glyphs, so you can feel the scale that makes the 'why' so haunting.