A massive 275m-wide geoglyph found in the Ural Mountains predates the famous Nazca Lines by thousands of years, archaeologists have found. The giant moose-shaped structure was ‘accidentally’ discovered just three years ago by local researcher Alexander Shestakov while looking at satellite images of the area in Google Earth.
Initial fieldwork found simple techniques were used to create the moose, with turf and earth 10-metres-wide dug out to make its shape before being filled with stones. ‘The figure would initially have looked white and slightly shiny against the green grass background,’ he said.
Different methods were deloyed to make the various parts of the geoglyph; for instance, a mix of clay and crushed stone was used to make the hooves. When part of the hind leg was excavated, archaeologists found the largest stones were on the edges, with the smaller ones inside. While there are similarities to the world famous Nazca Lines, in Peru, and to geoglyphs in England – such as the White Horse in Oxfordshire or the Dorset Giant – the experts believe there are no links.
…Yet archeologists still cannot fathom the identity of their sophisticated social group who worked in the massive operation of constructing structure visible from space.
‘Facts say that on this territory in the Neolithic and Eneolithic Ages lived hunters and fishermen. We conducted archaeological works on the site of a settlement nearby, on the lake shore, on the assumption that the builders of the geoglyph might live there. People have lived here since the Neolithic era but there was no sign of large social structures, nor that they did anything other than hunting and fishing’, Stanislav Grigoryev said.
‘It puzzles me a lot, I keep thinking about the people that built the geoglyph, and their purpose’.
Link: Children from lost civilisation ‘helped build’ geoglyph some 6,000 years ago
