Mysterious Paracas Culture Rock Lines Found - Older Than Nazca

Sometimes new archaeological discoveries bring more mystery than answers. I love it.

Archaeologists say they have found new rock lines in southern Peru that predate the famous and mysterious Nazca Lines, according to a report on the Live Science website.

Here is some more juice, from the other source mentioned :

The lines were created by people of the Paracas, a civilization that arose around 800 B.C. in what is now Peru. The Paracas culture predated the Nazca culture, which came onto the scene around 100 B.C. The Nazca people are famous for their fantastic geoglyphs, or rock lines, built in the shapes of monkeys, birds and other animals.

The new lines date to around 300 B.C., making them at least 300 years older than the oldest Nazca lines, said Charles Stanish, the director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, who reported the new find today (May 5) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

www.peruviantimes.com...
www.livescience.com...

a reply to: Trueman

Way cool stuff.
I bookmarked the links to read later.

as an aside I've always thought that if they look hard enough they will find proof of a more advance culture here in the new world that predates anything found in the old world.

It's just a gut feeling --- but I believe it

I don't know how they can date these things. It doesn't make sense. A previous culture could have made these things many thousands of years ago and some people may have just moved in twentyfive hundred years ago and left the evidence they are finding. Same with the Pyramids, just because they find bones from three thousand years ago in the caverns, doesn't mean they were created three thousand years ago. It just means that someone's bones are there. Bones that could be from a more modern resident, or bones from someone very ancient that were hauled there.

It's like finding someone's bones in an old mineshaft, was that person actually the miner or did he die in a very ancient mine.

a reply to: rickymouse I use lots of salt when it comes to dating .There doesn't seem to be any reliable way of doing it other then documents .Even that can be a bit ambiguous today because you can by vintage paper to create fraudulent documents .Carbon 14 can have many dates from samples that more then likely got contaminated .

a reply to: the2ofusr1

Another thing about documents. They could have been created three thousand years ago but the material being discussed could have been passed down orally for thousands of years. Shamans and regular people made songs to memorize and also prayers or even theatrical preformances to keep track of the past. Traditional customs were created.

originally posted by: rickymouse
I don't know how they can date these things. It doesn't make sense. A previous culture could have made these things many thousands of years ago and some people may have just moved in twentyfive hundred years ago and left the evidence they are finding. Same with the Pyramids, just because they find bones from three thousand years ago in the caverns, doesn't mean they were created three thousand years ago. It just means that someone's bones are there. Bones that could be from a more modern resident, or bones from someone very ancient that were hauled there.

It's like finding someone's bones in an old mineshaft, was that person actually the miner or did he die in a very ancient mine.

Yeah, I gave up on all "dating" nonsense long ago during a high school exercise involving how old dinosaurs were. By the end of the paper I concluded there was no way any scientist can reasonably know anything about the ages of anything on Earth by any means than actually being there and knowing the time it happened. EVERYTHING else is just speculation, granted some of the speculation is based on somewhat reasonable thinking, but it's all just speculation. No one knows how old anything really is.

Don't get me started on Weathering.

That too .There are people that are well versed in knowing what to look for .Even rock art carries some interesting clues . I think it's the thunderbolt theory as being recorded in the sky and most of the artwork facing in the same direction and having plasma discharge .Interesting theory .I was reading a article on past climate that was gathered by looking at works of art and showing the sky's and snow in places that don't normally get snow . a reply to: rickymouse

Regarding the "dating" of this discovery in particular, I believe they just assumed it belongs to Paracas based in the location of the rock lines. After that, knowing how old is the Paracas culture is, they made that conclusion.

a reply to: Trueman

Here is some information on the dating of the Paracas

Dating

PDF

a reply to: Hanslune

I was wondering when will you show up, good to see you man and thanks for your post.

a reply to: Trueman

Didn't have time to place the primary chart

originally posted by: rickymouse
I don't know how they can date these things. It doesn't make sense. A previous culture could have made these things many thousands of years ago and some people may have just moved in twentyfive hundred years ago and left the evidence they are finding. Same with the Pyramids, just because they find bones from three thousand years ago in the caverns, doesn't mean they were created three thousand years ago. It just means that someone's bones are there. Bones that could be from a more modern resident, or bones from someone very ancient that were hauled there.

It's like finding someone's bones in an old mineshaft, was that person actually the miner or did he die in a very ancient mine.

I would bet that in this case they are dating these "rock lines" based on the structure themselves. There is probably some way to estimate their age by looking at the general weathering of the landscape as a whole. The depth of the rocks in the soil, whatever strata or soil that the rocks rest on compared to the soil thats surrounding them and so forth.

At th esame time, whatever methods they use to date these sights, who knows if they are accurate or not.

a reply to: Quauhtli

The PDF I linked to explains what and how the dating was done for the Paracas culture