The 8,000-year-old Kazakhstan Puzzle
The mysterious earthworks known as the Steppe Geoglyphs are thousands of years in the making. Scattered throughout remote parts of Kazakhstan and only visible from high above, their patterns vary in shapes — from giant rings to swastikas.
There are nearly 300 of these strange works, the oldest of which was constructed at least 8,000 years ago. And no one, including scores of scientists who have studied them, really knows why they’re there. The theory is that they came from an ancient settlement.
Dmitriy Dey, who first spotted them in 2007 on Google Earth — he was looking for ancient pyramids at the time — thinks they may have been built as “horizontal observatories to track the movements of the rising sun,” according to a New York Times interview last year.
The ancient relics are so puzzling that NASA has been working to unravel the mystery. From 430 miles above the Earth, the space agency captured some of the clearest images, which were released in late 2015.
Amateur archaeologist Dmitriy Dey first discovered the geoglyphs in 2007 using Google Earth. Since then, Dey has already discovered 260 forms of the land design, which look like strange versions of crop circles and coming in a variety of shapes.
Another formation, called Ushtogaysky Square, is 810,000 square feet—with each side as long as an aircraft carrier. To make the shape more complex, there is an X shape that runs through the middle of the square.
These formations, however, would seem normal when placed side by side the Turgai Swastika, which, as the name suggests, resembles the infamous swastika. Of course when one thinks of swastika, they think of Nazi Germany, however the swastika is a far more ancient and sacred Vedic Indian symbol that the Nazis repurposed.
All of these formations can be found at the northern region of Kazakhstan, which offered rich hunting grounds for nomadic Stone Age tribes.
Persis B. Clarkson, an archaeologist at the University of Winnipeg, said these geoglyphs are making him and his colleagues rethink what they know about human civilisation.
“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 large-scale human organisation as one that predates settled and civilised societies,” Clarkson said, as quoted by Gizmodo
Image source and reference: http://www.independent.co.uk/