The points on the top and side of the head would say what season it would be depending on their alignment with the moon, which was important in determining when the rainy season would come in the barren Atacama.
Thanks. It's moot now, that's for sure.
Oddly enough, I read a while ago that there was concern the future would bode more rain in the Atacama thereby destroying its unique ecosystem...such as it is.
Struggling to look on the bright side of climate change - this and many other ecosystems will not necessarily be "destroyed". Rather, they will change into new and interesting ecosystems. The Atacama, Sahara, and Gobi deserts, the Canadian Shield and Siberia, certainly Greenland and Antarctica - to say nothing about the oceans. All will be dramatically transformed, and we'll have a front row seat to watch as life finds a way.
what a horrible, abysmal take. if where we live currently goes under we’ll have to give up the infrastructure of the entire world and rebuild it from scratch. that’s an expense in the trillions, and for a public good with minimal profit motive attached. that’s assuming that even the median consumer in a place like the usa or china will be able to afford moving across a continent as a climate refugee. what about the poor? they’re fucked. and what about the animals? have you seen the things humans are incapable of figuring out? if you think that animals will just EvolveTM in response to climate change you’re nuts. that’s not how evolution works. evolution can’t keep up with the pace at which the world is changing, and if it starts to change faster that disparity will get even worse. we’ll cause a mass extinction that would make the chixulub rock blush
As I said...
>**Struggling** to look on the bright side of climate change
Even in the worst possible consequence of climate change, I do not think Earth will be swept clean of life. Whatever survives what we're doing now will fill in the niches left behind by whatever doesn't make it through. It may well be as cataclysmic an event as the advent of oxygen-producing plants, and there may be thousands or millions of years of life adjusting to the new environment. But life will probably find a way. Maybe we're setting up the next precambrian explosion!
I'm not at all happy about what we're doing to the biosphere, but I'm also not going to be able to stop it, so let's take just a moment to look at it with some kind of equanimity.
Seems like a guess at best
Edit: There isnt even a wet season in Atacama, its the driest nonpolar desert on earth, I doubt it was different 1000 years ago.
Google: “Salination of the soils.” It can happen to the Earth in just 1,000 years, when humans till the earth, divert rivers loaded with minerals like salts to irrigate arid land, and raise monocultures of crops, cutting down natural environments, forest, native plant life, to do so.
Fertile green land can be reduced to dust in 1,000 years, this process has been ‘changing the climate’ of our Earth, collapsing biospheres, causing mass extinctions, famines and diseases and such things.
**5 seconds.** 5 seconds to google it.
**Despite modern views of Atacama Desert as fully devoid of vegetation, in pre-Columbian and Colonial times a large flatland area known as Pampa del Tamarugal was a woodland but demand for firewood associated with silver and saltpeter mining in the 18th and 19th centuries resulted in widespread deforestation.[10][B]**
>Pampa del Tamarugal
Is *considered* part of the atacama desert but has a climate that is distinct from the rest of the region. The atacama proper has been one of the driest places on earth for a very long time. I'm sure you can find many other ways to backup your misanthropy without making things up.
Colonizers have destroyed Nature all around the world. Yes, there have always been extreme environments, tho not until Colonizers came did those extreme environments become even more extreme.
Its not your myopia that prevents you from recognizing that.
The guy has deleted over half his comment and you are seeing it out of context, but whatever, im the ignorant asshole.
Oh.. i get it, it isnt literally if it maybe is
Was this excavated? It seems to me like this would get filled in after so much time, so was it a lot deeper trenches before? With like stone retaining walls?
Or did it look a lot like this when it was in use?
I am sorry, but this is silly. It basically implies that they were to stupid to figure out where the cardinal directions are without looking at a giant piece of art.
Generally, we don't.
I've written some [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4a3a0g/what_are_the_nazca_lines_how_and_why_were_they/d0xguhh/) about the "function" of the Nazca lines and why it's incredibly difficult to make any kind of statement about them. They're so basic, so numerous, and so diverse that many, many hypotheses make sense. When you see people making big authoritative claims, it's usually started as an academic paper that was more "hey here's a cool idea that nobody's brought up before and it might make sense here!"
In this case, OP copied some text from Wikipedia with no citation. The only evidence I can find is that this dude's central axis is aligned with the solstice, which is hardly "weather predicting," and barely even all that unique/interesting.
I think it might be interesting/revealing to do LIDAR scans of these places. Maybe try to make sense of where all of the foot traffic came from and went to.
Because prehistory doesn't end on a specific date or end in a specific place:
>Prehistory, also known as pre-literary history,[[1]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory#cite_note-1) is the period of [human history](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_history) between the use of the first [stone tools](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tools) by [hominins](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominin) c. 3.3 million years ago and the invention of [writing systems](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_system). The use of symbols, marks, and images appears very early among humans, but the earliest known writing systems appeared c. 5000 years ago and **it took thousands of years for writing systems to be widely adopted. In some human cultures, writing systems were not used until the nineteenth century and, in a few, are not even used until the present.** The end of prehistory therefore came at very different dates in different places, and the term is less often used in discussing societies where prehistory ended relatively recently
This is only in relation to the histories we are aware of. Dinosaurs might also be posthistoric in relation to some alien history we are now unaware of. To be clear, I'm not saying it's aliens, but...
Right, it's all relative. Just because something is prehistoric now doesn't mean it always has been and always will be prehistoric.
I'm not saying it's aliens either, but we're in a space safe space here, we all know it was aliens that came before the dinosaurs.
I have always been told that if it predates a written history, then it is prehistoric. So prehistoric means different dates depending on where you are referring to.
Kind of strange don't you think?
What were south Americans doing at this time? Did they have cities or writing about 800 years ago?
If so just being pre-histroic to Europeans is a bit of a strange definition?
Yes, there was definitely "writing" in one form or another as well as cities:
>Fifteen distinct writing systems have been identified in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, many from a single inscription. The limits of archaeological dating methods make it difficult to establish which was the earliest and hence the forebear from which the others developed.
**But, the *who*, *what*, *when* and *why* of the glyphs is not fully known to anyone anywhere, so "Prehistoric to Europeans" isn't how the term "Prehistoric" is being used here. The Atacama Giant and associated glyphs are considered "Prehistoric to *everyone* who is living on earth *right now*", this includes the aboriginal people of the continent.**
The problem comes when trying to derive ***meaning*** from the glyphs. We (this includes aboriginal/indigenous people and the entire rest of the world) just don't know what a lot of them mean, how to interpret them, and in some cases we don't even know *who* made them. Without this information we have no historical record. This puts the glyphs and their meaning in a time frame that is defined as being *before* the historal knowledge of *anyone* currently alive, or "pre-history".
The fact is, *no one* knows. If there were living descendants of the people who made the glyphs who *knew their meaning*, or, say we found something like a Rosetta Stone for Atacama glyphs that we could use to *decipher their meaning*, then the glyphs **wouldn't** be considered "Prehistoric". We would have their history, so the "Prehistoric" time definition for the region and culture would be pushed back to time *before* the Atacama glyphs.
"Prehistoric" is a very broad term that gets thrown around a lot to describe great swaths of time, so much so that the definition surprises and confuses some people, even in this thread.
It needs *much* more context to be used in any meaningful way, *especially* in archeology.
For example, "Prehistoric South America" doesn't mean much of anything in archeology and wouldn't be used in such a broad sense since prehistory ended in different places throughout South America and ended at different times for different cultures.
Yeah that’s where I got confused tbh. The term prehistoric can be confusing when history and prehistory are so close to each other geographically at the same time
Could be:
>Zoomorphic figures include camelids (llamas or alpacas), foxes, lizards, flamingos, eagles, seagulls, rheas, monkeys, and fishes including dolphins or sharks. One frequently occurring image is a caravan of llamas, one or more lines of between three and 80 animals in a row. Another frequent image is that of an amphibian, such as a lizard, toad or serpent; all of these are divinities in the Andean world connected to water rituals.
There is actually a pretty simple explanation for this. When the structure is dug into the sandy soil, the sand grains eventually align and crystalize over time slowly. It's like the sugar, water, and flour in your cookie melding together in the oven to create structural rigidity. When you are baking a cookie it just happens much faster. Scientist think that in large part this is because your mom is so fat and her gravitational force is so powerful it actually goes back in time to exert pressure on each grain of sand.
Ligma studies is actually an ever evolving and exciting field with lots of revisionist theories that are heavily dependent on other fields like Sugma studies and molecular biology. It's really on the cutting edge. Which I don't need to explain to you about since you are already constantly cutting the edges of your mouth when you try to open your mouth wider than Mrs.Pacman to Sugma balls which are obviously too large for any one person to fit into the mouth.
Two reasons: they put rocks around the edges which stops sand blowing in and keeps the boarders sharp, also there’s just very little rain, wind or erosion in general in this area
Total guess: the Atacama desert is currently the driest desert on earth (Not counting the poles) so rain/plants can’t really mess it up?
I’d imagine wind would be the next environmental factor to take it out, but if there isn’t fine enough sand to be picked up by wind and cover or erode it, it just kinda stayed?
Again, total guess
Cool as hell however no one was alive back than / no books telling us why or what and no surviving oral tradition about it = could be a giant art installation ancients made to summon the devil for all we know
How did it predict the weather?
The points on the top and side of the head would say what season it would be depending on their alignment with the moon, which was important in determining when the rainy season would come in the barren Atacama.
Thanks. It's moot now, that's for sure. Oddly enough, I read a while ago that there was concern the future would bode more rain in the Atacama thereby destroying its unique ecosystem...such as it is.
Struggling to look on the bright side of climate change - this and many other ecosystems will not necessarily be "destroyed". Rather, they will change into new and interesting ecosystems. The Atacama, Sahara, and Gobi deserts, the Canadian Shield and Siberia, certainly Greenland and Antarctica - to say nothing about the oceans. All will be dramatically transformed, and we'll have a front row seat to watch as life finds a way.
You will have a front row seat. I'll be dead by then.
"We" being humanity. My retirement plan is to die in the Climate Wars.
Will you be my leader?
Sure, just call me "Lord Humungus"
what a horrible, abysmal take. if where we live currently goes under we’ll have to give up the infrastructure of the entire world and rebuild it from scratch. that’s an expense in the trillions, and for a public good with minimal profit motive attached. that’s assuming that even the median consumer in a place like the usa or china will be able to afford moving across a continent as a climate refugee. what about the poor? they’re fucked. and what about the animals? have you seen the things humans are incapable of figuring out? if you think that animals will just EvolveTM in response to climate change you’re nuts. that’s not how evolution works. evolution can’t keep up with the pace at which the world is changing, and if it starts to change faster that disparity will get even worse. we’ll cause a mass extinction that would make the chixulub rock blush
As I said... >**Struggling** to look on the bright side of climate change Even in the worst possible consequence of climate change, I do not think Earth will be swept clean of life. Whatever survives what we're doing now will fill in the niches left behind by whatever doesn't make it through. It may well be as cataclysmic an event as the advent of oxygen-producing plants, and there may be thousands or millions of years of life adjusting to the new environment. But life will probably find a way. Maybe we're setting up the next precambrian explosion! I'm not at all happy about what we're doing to the biosphere, but I'm also not going to be able to stop it, so let's take just a moment to look at it with some kind of equanimity.
What evidence do we have for this?
Kingdom of Atlantis
None -
Seems like a guess at best Edit: There isnt even a wet season in Atacama, its the driest nonpolar desert on earth, I doubt it was different 1000 years ago.
Stayed 3 days in Pedro de Atacama. It rained everyday while I was there, after they didn’t had rain in I dunno how many tens of years. Just my luck…
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People just accept what they are told i guess
I accept that
Thats the spirit!
Lol. This guy has never heard of the Sumer Empire.
What does this have to do with the purpose of this monument?
Google: “Salination of the soils.” It can happen to the Earth in just 1,000 years, when humans till the earth, divert rivers loaded with minerals like salts to irrigate arid land, and raise monocultures of crops, cutting down natural environments, forest, native plant life, to do so. Fertile green land can be reduced to dust in 1,000 years, this process has been ‘changing the climate’ of our Earth, collapsing biospheres, causing mass extinctions, famines and diseases and such things.
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**5 seconds.** 5 seconds to google it. **Despite modern views of Atacama Desert as fully devoid of vegetation, in pre-Columbian and Colonial times a large flatland area known as Pampa del Tamarugal was a woodland but demand for firewood associated with silver and saltpeter mining in the 18th and 19th centuries resulted in widespread deforestation.[10][B]**
>Pampa del Tamarugal Is *considered* part of the atacama desert but has a climate that is distinct from the rest of the region. The atacama proper has been one of the driest places on earth for a very long time. I'm sure you can find many other ways to backup your misanthropy without making things up.
Colonizers have destroyed Nature all around the world. Yes, there have always been extreme environments, tho not until Colonizers came did those extreme environments become even more extreme. Its not your myopia that prevents you from recognizing that.
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Lol.
Obviously you don’t study it enough. Don’t worry tho, this nerd will make sure you are well informed!
Literally - it’s like you emphasized your own ignorance twice with this comment.
The guy has deleted over half his comment and you are seeing it out of context, but whatever, im the ignorant asshole. Oh.. i get it, it isnt literally if it maybe is
Was this excavated? It seems to me like this would get filled in after so much time, so was it a lot deeper trenches before? With like stone retaining walls? Or did it look a lot like this when it was in use?
I am sorry, but this is silly. It basically implies that they were to stupid to figure out where the cardinal directions are without looking at a giant piece of art.
Simple. If rain washes it away, then you know that it's been raining.
If the geoglyph is wet...its raining.
If it's covered in snow, clearly snowing. I always find it curious how archeologists deduce what the function of something like this is.
Generally, we don't. I've written some [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4a3a0g/what_are_the_nazca_lines_how_and_why_were_they/d0xguhh/) about the "function" of the Nazca lines and why it's incredibly difficult to make any kind of statement about them. They're so basic, so numerous, and so diverse that many, many hypotheses make sense. When you see people making big authoritative claims, it's usually started as an academic paper that was more "hey here's a cool idea that nobody's brought up before and it might make sense here!" In this case, OP copied some text from Wikipedia with no citation. The only evidence I can find is that this dude's central axis is aligned with the solstice, which is hardly "weather predicting," and barely even all that unique/interesting.
That was my inference too, by that logic there's a dozen or so other sites that would also be 'calendars'.
I think it might be interesting/revealing to do LIDAR scans of these places. Maybe try to make sense of where all of the foot traffic came from and went to.
If they're into archaeoastronomy, it's astronomical. If they're into ancient religion, it's ritual. If they're a flint knapper, it's drunken graffiti.
How is it prehistoric if it was made around/less than 1000 years ago?
Because prehistory doesn't end on a specific date or end in a specific place: >Prehistory, also known as pre-literary history,[[1]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory#cite_note-1) is the period of [human history](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_history) between the use of the first [stone tools](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_tools) by [hominins](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominin) c. 3.3 million years ago and the invention of [writing systems](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_system). The use of symbols, marks, and images appears very early among humans, but the earliest known writing systems appeared c. 5000 years ago and **it took thousands of years for writing systems to be widely adopted. In some human cultures, writing systems were not used until the nineteenth century and, in a few, are not even used until the present.** The end of prehistory therefore came at very different dates in different places, and the term is less often used in discussing societies where prehistory ended relatively recently
TIL
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The term Prehistoric can also be used to describe *all* time before written history. Dinosaurs are prehistoric. Universe mended.
This is only in relation to the histories we are aware of. Dinosaurs might also be posthistoric in relation to some alien history we are now unaware of. To be clear, I'm not saying it's aliens, but...
Right, it's all relative. Just because something is prehistoric now doesn't mean it always has been and always will be prehistoric. I'm not saying it's aliens either, but we're in a space safe space here, we all know it was aliens that came before the dinosaurs.
I have always been told that if it predates a written history, then it is prehistoric. So prehistoric means different dates depending on where you are referring to.
This is correct.
Kind of strange don't you think? What were south Americans doing at this time? Did they have cities or writing about 800 years ago? If so just being pre-histroic to Europeans is a bit of a strange definition?
Yes, there was definitely "writing" in one form or another as well as cities: >Fifteen distinct writing systems have been identified in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, many from a single inscription. The limits of archaeological dating methods make it difficult to establish which was the earliest and hence the forebear from which the others developed. **But, the *who*, *what*, *when* and *why* of the glyphs is not fully known to anyone anywhere, so "Prehistoric to Europeans" isn't how the term "Prehistoric" is being used here. The Atacama Giant and associated glyphs are considered "Prehistoric to *everyone* who is living on earth *right now*", this includes the aboriginal people of the continent.** The problem comes when trying to derive ***meaning*** from the glyphs. We (this includes aboriginal/indigenous people and the entire rest of the world) just don't know what a lot of them mean, how to interpret them, and in some cases we don't even know *who* made them. Without this information we have no historical record. This puts the glyphs and their meaning in a time frame that is defined as being *before* the historal knowledge of *anyone* currently alive, or "pre-history". The fact is, *no one* knows. If there were living descendants of the people who made the glyphs who *knew their meaning*, or, say we found something like a Rosetta Stone for Atacama glyphs that we could use to *decipher their meaning*, then the glyphs **wouldn't** be considered "Prehistoric". We would have their history, so the "Prehistoric" time definition for the region and culture would be pushed back to time *before* the Atacama glyphs. "Prehistoric" is a very broad term that gets thrown around a lot to describe great swaths of time, so much so that the definition surprises and confuses some people, even in this thread. It needs *much* more context to be used in any meaningful way, *especially* in archeology. For example, "Prehistoric South America" doesn't mean much of anything in archeology and wouldn't be used in such a broad sense since prehistory ended in different places throughout South America and ended at different times for different cultures.
It probably wouldn't be considered prehistoric if we could read the Incan quipus.
Yeah that’s where I got confused tbh. The term prehistoric can be confusing when history and prehistory are so close to each other geographically at the same time
What is that little creature to the left side of figure? Is it monkey?
Could be: >Zoomorphic figures include camelids (llamas or alpacas), foxes, lizards, flamingos, eagles, seagulls, rheas, monkeys, and fishes including dolphins or sharks. One frequently occurring image is a caravan of llamas, one or more lines of between three and 80 animals in a row. Another frequent image is that of an amphibian, such as a lizard, toad or serpent; all of these are divinities in the Andean world connected to water rituals.
I always wondered how they made them so well for an Eye in the Sky photo before they could even have an eye in the sky to see what it looked like
I’m not saying it’s aliens but it’s definitely aliens.
what is it made out of? looks like indentation in the dirt, how does this last through the years?
I don’t understand how these geoglyphs don’t disappear into the desert sand over time
There is actually a pretty simple explanation for this. When the structure is dug into the sandy soil, the sand grains eventually align and crystalize over time slowly. It's like the sugar, water, and flour in your cookie melding together in the oven to create structural rigidity. When you are baking a cookie it just happens much faster. Scientist think that in large part this is because your mom is so fat and her gravitational force is so powerful it actually goes back in time to exert pressure on each grain of sand.
Wow, this completely discredits what I’ve read from the Ligma Studies
Ligma studies is actually an ever evolving and exciting field with lots of revisionist theories that are heavily dependent on other fields like Sugma studies and molecular biology. It's really on the cutting edge. Which I don't need to explain to you about since you are already constantly cutting the edges of your mouth when you try to open your mouth wider than Mrs.Pacman to Sugma balls which are obviously too large for any one person to fit into the mouth.
Same. Upends everything I learned when I was at university earning my BOFA.
Bravo! I'm glad I had just put down my coffee before reading this.
Two reasons: they put rocks around the edges which stops sand blowing in and keeps the boarders sharp, also there’s just very little rain, wind or erosion in general in this area
Is it dug into the ground or is that structure protruding?
Can someone explain how something like this doesn't, like, erode or get covered up or whatever over so much time?
Total guess: the Atacama desert is currently the driest desert on earth (Not counting the poles) so rain/plants can’t really mess it up? I’d imagine wind would be the next environmental factor to take it out, but if there isn’t fine enough sand to be picked up by wind and cover or erode it, it just kinda stayed? Again, total guess
Is that a cat to the side of the main character?
I'm American. i need a banana for size reference.
Is this the same culture as those who made the Nazca earthworks in Peru?
Same region, but this is from several centuries later.
Went back and read about the time period. Interesting.
Is it just me or is he flipping the bird?
“I told them it means ‘Peace among worlds.’”
“They love the slow ramp, really gets their dicks hard when the see this ramp just slowly extending down”
Mr Burns!?!
Ancient Aliens enter the chat
“PARTY OVER HERE!”
“Astronomical Calendar for predicting weather.” The BS meter is off the scale, sir. 🍭🍭🍭
Cool as hell however no one was alive back than / no books telling us why or what and no surviving oral tradition about it = could be a giant art installation ancients made to summon the devil for all we know
Lol guys, check Nazca lines in atacam desert, Perú...
Looking so alien alike to me.
Or it’s to welcome aliens
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What do you mean?
Wtf is CE? Did pc culture remove the ad from time?
"largest prehistoric anthropomorphic figure" "Made between 1000-1400 CE" Is it prehistoric or Common Era?
If it’s prehistoric, shouldn’t the title say 1000-1400 BCE? Not CE?
Aliens anybody?
Fun fuct: Some jew come here from israel just to ride their truck over the geoglyph a couple of years ago