High in the skies over Kazakhstan, spaceage technology has revealed an ancient mystery on the ground.
Satellite pictures of a remote and treeless northern steppe has revealed colossal earthworks — geometric figures of squares, crosses, lines and rings the size of several football fields, recognizable only from the air and the oldest estimated at 8,000 years old.
The largest, near a Neolithic settlement, is a giant square of 101raised mounds, its opposite corners connected by a diagonal cross, covering more terrain than the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Another is a kind of three-limbed swastika, its arms ending in zigzags bent counterclockwise.
Described last year at a conference in Istanbul as unique and previously unstudied, the earthworks, in the Turgai region of northern Kazakhstan, number at least 260 — mounds, trenches and ramparts — arrayed in five basic shapes. Spotted on Google Earth in 2007 by a Kazakh economist and archaeology enthusiast, Dmitriy Dey, the so-called Steppe Geoglyphs remain deeply puzzling and largely unknown.
"I've never seen anything like this," said Compton J. Tucker, a senior biospheric scientist for Nasa. This week, Nasa put space photography of the region on a task list for astronauts in the International Space Station.
"I don't think they were meant to be seen from the air," Dey, 44, said, dismissing outlandish speculations involving aliens and Nazis. (Long before Hitler, the swastika was an ancient and near-universal design element.) He theorized that the figures built along straight lines on elevations were "horizontal observatories to track the movements of the rising sun."
Persis B. Clarkson, an archaeologist said these figures and similar ones in Peru and Chile were changing views about early nomads.
"The idea that foragers could amass the numbers of people necessary to undertake large-scale projects—like creating the Kazakhstan geoglyphs—has caused archaeologists to deeply rethink the nature and timing of sophisticated largescale human organization as one that predates settled and civilized societies,"Clarkson said.
Satellite pictures of a remote and treeless northern steppe has revealed colossal earthworks — geometric figures of squares, crosses, lines and rings the size of several football fields, recognizable only from the air and the oldest estimated at 8,000 years old.
The largest, near a Neolithic settlement, is a giant square of 101raised mounds, its opposite corners connected by a diagonal cross, covering more terrain than the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Another is a kind of three-limbed swastika, its arms ending in zigzags bent counterclockwise.
Described last year at a conference in Istanbul as unique and previously unstudied, the earthworks, in the Turgai region of northern Kazakhstan, number at least 260 — mounds, trenches and ramparts — arrayed in five basic shapes. Spotted on Google Earth in 2007 by a Kazakh economist and archaeology enthusiast, Dmitriy Dey, the so-called Steppe Geoglyphs remain deeply puzzling and largely unknown.
"I've never seen anything like this," said Compton J. Tucker, a senior biospheric scientist for Nasa. This week, Nasa put space photography of the region on a task list for astronauts in the International Space Station.
"I don't think they were meant to be seen from the air," Dey, 44, said, dismissing outlandish speculations involving aliens and Nazis. (Long before Hitler, the swastika was an ancient and near-universal design element.) He theorized that the figures built along straight lines on elevations were "horizontal observatories to track the movements of the rising sun."
Persis B. Clarkson, an archaeologist said these figures and similar ones in Peru and Chile were changing views about early nomads.
"The idea that foragers could amass the numbers of people necessary to undertake large-scale projects—like creating the Kazakhstan geoglyphs—has caused archaeologists to deeply rethink the nature and timing of sophisticated largescale human organization as one that predates settled and civilized societies,"Clarkson said.
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