Nazca Lines, Peru

From Stonehenge to the Egyptian Pyramids, we are always fascinated by how prehistoric people, without technology, machines or even wheels, managed to create such astonishing temples and artworks. While the Nazca and Paracas cultures may not have required the stone-shifting skills of other ancient civilisations, their geoglyphs’ immense size and impressively straight lines, combined with the impossibility of viewing them from ground level, have inspired many questions about their creation. Despite the ‘ancient astronauts’ theory, however, in the 1980s an American scientist gathered a small team to create a geoglyph in the United States, using only the technology that would have been available to the Nazca people. Using a scaled down sketch of a hummingbird as a guide, he demonstrated how a remarkably accurate 130m-long version of the bird could be etched into the landscape by plotting coordinates and scaling up the measurements. The remains of wooden stakes left pegged into the lines seem to further support this theory. It has also been shown that all of the lines can in fact be seen by ascending the surrounding hills, so the Nazca would have been able to admire their impressive artworks even without a full aerial view.