Numlock Sunday: Aylin Woodward on an archeological breakthrough

Photo by Lucas George Wendt on Unsplash

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.

This week, I spoke to Aylin Woodward, who wrote “AI Revealed a New Trove of Massive Ancient Symbols” for The Wall Street Journal. Here's what I wrote about it:

Over the past several decades, anthropologists have documented 430 geoglyph symbols etched into the deserts of Peru, the most famous of which are the Nazca lines, which can be as large as a football field. The geoglyphs are found in the Nazca Pampa, a 150-square-mile area, and are made up of large, figurative geoglyphs 300 feet in length on average (the Nazca Lines) as well as smaller ones that average 30 feet. A new study fed aerial photography into artificial intelligence software, which flagged 1,300 areas that could have been a geoglyph heretofore undiscovered. A field survey in 2022 confirmed 303 of them are indeed new geoglyphs, while many of the rest remain under investigation.

She also wrote “Neanderthals and Humans Mated More Rec…