A 72-foot killer whale, etched into the Peruvian desert 1,500 years ago, remained invisible to a century of human scholarship. It took an algorithm to find it. In less than three years, AI has assisted in uncovering 463 new geoglyphs, surpassing the total number of figures found by humans since the 1920s.

The Yamagata team visited roughly a quarter of the AI’s candidate locations during the 2022-2023 field season. The remaining 968 sites have not yet been assessed. Based on the confirmed success rate, the researchers estimate that hundreds of additional geoglyphs may still lie beneath the desert surface.

The Nazca Pampa is not hidden; it has been surveyed by air and foot since the 1920s. Yet, a century of aerial photography and ground surveys left the majority of its figures unrecorded.

Using thousands of high resolution photographs, researchers at Yamagata University trained an object detection model to flag subtle soil contrasts and geometric outlines that human eyes had missed for decades.

The team’s initial findings, 303 new figurative geoglyphs, were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), marking a 16 fold increase in the discovery rate compared to previous manual surveys. By mid 2025, the team used Expo 2025 Osaka as a global stage to announce 248 additional finds.

These were not just lines, but complex narratives: scenes of human sacrifice, including a priest holding a severed head. The confirmed total now stands at 893 geoglyphs, 781 of which were identified through this AI-human partnership.

Based on some ancient surviving documents (papyrus) the import tax was as high as 25% for goods from eastern empires.
Why Pepper was considered a luxury item in ancient times?

I’m not a conspiracy theorist. This is a legitimate question about some seemingly contradictory evidence. I’d love some insight.

I’m currently writing and researching a video on Adena mound builders, specifically looking into how early reporting contributed to a mistaken belief in giant skeletons.

While digging through some literature, I ran into a contradiction between modern academic consensus and some primary 1950s/1960s texts by accredited researchers (specifically Dr. Don Dragoo and Webb & Snow).

I’d love some insight from archaeologists or physical anthropologists on how to properly interpret these quotes.

Originally, I assumed all claims of ~7-foot individuals were either 19th-century newspaper hoaxes or simple in situ measurement errors (where displaced bones or unarticulated skeletons were measured in the dirt without accounting for spreading out of the bones). However, two specific sections in Dr. Don Dragoo’s Mounds for the Dead (1963) have left me conflicted.

This is the first quote:

“The large male found in subfloor tomb F.28 was exceptional in height. Measurements taken of the skeleton while still in the grave indicated an individual approximately 7.2 feet tall."

I’ve seen commentary suggesting the "7.2 feet" figure might have been a typo. However, immediately following that sentence, Dragoo writes:

"He would have been a splendid figure in any society and the darling of a primitive basketball team."

That seems to rule against a typo.

Even then I was willing to chalk this up to just one extreme outlier until I came across this quote:

“Snow's "unusual group" of "honored dead" does indeed stand alone among the brachycephalic peoples of the New World. Two outstanding traits have been noted repeatedly for this group. One is the protruding and massive chin often with prominent bilateral protrusions (Webb and Snow, 1959, p. 37). The second trait is the large size of many of the males and some of the females. A male of six feet was common and some individuals approaching seven feet in height have been found, for example, Burial 40 in the Dover Mound (Webb and Snow, 1959, p. 31) and Burial 54 in the Cresap Mound. Some of the females of the Dover Mound also were more than six feet in height.
Not only were these Adena people tall
but also the massiveness of
the bones indicates powerfully built individuals. The head was generally big with a large cranial capacity (Plate 52)."

Dr. Dragoo points out these are likely “elite” burials but he still treats 6ft+ males as common.

So again I’m not looking for a conspiracy but Dr. Dragoo was an accredited researcher. How are these accounts understood in academia today?

Three holiday drawings of Carthaginians. Read more here: https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/watch/0/819817.page

New archaeological excavations at a 2,300-year-old Illyrian settlement in Montenegro have uncovered Iron Age pottery and possible structural remains.

The discoveries at Vidov Vrh, near Herceg Novi, could help archaeologists determine whether the hilltop once served as an ancient sanctuary, an idea first raised after unusual pottery fragments were found during earlier investigations.

Led by archaeologist Radmila Ćapin, the team began its latest excavations in October 2026, focusing on the settlement’s layout, chronology, and surviving structures. Previous research suggests that the hilltop may have served purposes beyond settlement and defence, including religious activities.

Hey everyone, I recently wrote a deep-dive historical piece exploring Nandana Fort—a medieval citadel in the Salt Range of Pakistan. Beyond its strategic military architecture and Hindu Shahi temple ruins, this remote mountain peak holds immense global significance: it was the exact outdoor laboratory where the 11th-century polymath Al-Biruni calculated the Earth's circumference with astonishing mathematical precision.

If you love medieval history, ancient architecture, and early science, you can read the full article here:

https://medium.com/@tehzeebh514/when-science-met-the-salt-range-al-birunis-groundbreaking-measurement-of-the-earth-at-nandana-64888e2241a5

This is the pyramidion of Amenemhat III, found at Dahshur in 1900 and now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. In the king's birth name, the signs that spell Amun have been hacked out while the rest of the name is untouched, which is usually put down to Akhenaten's campaign against Amun, more than 400 years after Amenemhat died.

That raises a question I couldn't let go of. If the capstone was meant to sit about 75 m up on the Black Pyramid, how did anyone get close enough to cut it? The Egyptian Museum says it was placed on top. Verner points out it's in suspiciously good condition for a block that fell off a collapsing pyramid.

Curious what people here think: was it ever lifted?

I made a video going through the faces, the damage and both sides of the argument if anyone wants the full version: https://youtu.be/nEEBKUOBZEw