2,000-Year-Old Nazca Line Featuring Lounging Cat Found in Peru | Hacker News Reader

2,000-Year-Old Nazca Line Featuring Lounging Cat Found in Peru

smithsonianmag.com

70 pointsdiodorus25 comments

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24820449 for original Peruvian coverage, including TVPE video and map reference.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24819730 for where this was on Hacker News last week.

Compare the BBC's coverage to the original Peruvian coverage and the Smithsonian's. The Smithsonian puts this in context of previous discoveries, that the BBC has no mention of. The BBC claims that the "platform would have provided a vantage point for visitors". In fact, the Mirador Natural has provided such a vantage point for some years, and there are plenty of tourist photographs of it on the WWW. The path mentioned was part of renovations. The access road now comes in from the south, as you can see in the video.

The Mirador Natural is some distance to the south of the Torre Mirador that is marked on on-line maps, which is actually the old observation tower, a new one (which you won't find on on-line maps) having been opened across the road from it in February 2020.

* https://andina.pe/agencia/noticia-lineas-nasca-nueva-torre-m...

It is insane how symmetrical these are, for something so large drawn at such a relatively local/minute scale. Here's the spider: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/42/L%...

I imagine there had to be a feedback loop here, perhaps climbing a neighboring mountain to see the progress and correct deviations? I find the logistics of it all far more interesting than reasoning about why the drawings were made.

The cat one is 120 feet across. It doesn't seem as if it would be that difficult to achieve the result they did with a little practice and winging it. Marching band formations, for example.

People made crop circles with little more than planks of wood, bits of string and rope, and stepladders, remember.

There's no compass for drawing animals with.

Clearly, there is.

* http://cropcircleconnector.com/2016/FigsburyRing/articles.ht...

* https://youtu.be/2VtYyHx77cs

How does something like this just suddenly get discovered?

> Per the statement, the image of the lounging cat was “barely visible” prior to cleaning and conservation. As the Times notes, researchers only found it after spotting signs of “something intriguing” near the Mirador Natural lookout point.

“[It] was about to disappear because it’s situated on quite a steep slope that’s prone to the effects of natural erosion,” the ministry explains.

Having visited Peru, I'd bet this was long known about by the locals and got "discovered" for the tourism boost.

Probably not. I think this discovery was made partly because of a larger study by a Japanese university where they analyzed all the existing nasca lines and tried to find new ones.

I've also visited Peru, not sure how that's relevant though (nor is it relevant that I'm married to a Peruvian)

They are probably referring to how a lot of tour guides in Peru will explain that the locals knew about the locations long before white people showed up. Usually, "discovered" means white people or at least non-aborigenese populations discovered it.

It means becoming known to the scientific community and nothing more.

To put it another way: Scientific knowledge is like wikipedia, and things only count as discovered in this sense once they get an article written for them. That doesn't mean the person who wrote the article was the first person to ever know about something.

It wasn't as clear as others. They discovered smaller sections of it, cleaned it up and now it's as visible as the others.

Some say there are still more of them to be discovered as well. Time will tell.

Notice that the article doesn't say when they actually discovered those smaller sections. It could have a few months or a couple of decades ago.

I love how researchers try to understand why they were created: astrology, navigation, etc. Now we have this cat. Why do people post pictures of cats in the internet? No other reason than that people like cats. I bet they just liked cats too.

Yeah this has always been my take on it as well. From what I remember the earliest lines are just lines and geometric patterns usually seemingly to do with water sources and navigation. Once they mastered the technique for long lasting pictures in the terrain why not start making fun things like cats, condors, and spiders.

The ancient Peruvian version of cat videos.

From rapidly skimming the front page of HN, I read "Featuring Long-Cat" and stumbled over it for a second.

This isn't actually a cat in the sense that we think of a cat. It's more likely an ocelot, or a fox of some sort. There were no cats in America 2000 years ago.

Does anyone know the GPS coordinates of this? Would love to see what it originally looked like in satellite view

I don't know the exact coordinates of the newly found cat but Nazca lines are around here: -14.7192698,-75.1298623

Supposedly the cat was spotted from the nearby outlook/outpost, so look around what you could spot from "Mirador De Las Líneas De Nazca"

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24909094 in this very discussion.

It seems to be here[1], just to the left of the pin. Bing seems to have the only aerial images that have a good resolution of that area. You can faintly see on that side of the hill (the eastern face) some lines that look like the cat.

[1] https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=5199b705-dfdd-4763-a3ed-26e8e...

Looks kinda like a Kangaroo to me.

That's just impossible to fake.

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