Artificial intelligence is putting on its Indiana
Jones hat.

An AI trained to recognize Nazca Lines, ancient
designs in the desert plains of Peru, has discovered a
new geoglyph etched into the earth: a faint humanoid figure a few
meters across.

The figure joins a collection of more than 2,000 previously
known Nazca Lines, depicting animals, plants, fantastical beings and geometric
patterns. These glyphs can be difficult to spot, though, as they often are obscured
by other markings on the landscape, such as roads. Commissioning AI to scour
large sets of aerial photos, maps and other data on the Peruvian landscape
could help uncover more glyphs that archaeologists have overlooked. 

Researchers at IBM and Yamagata University in Japan taught an AI
to recognize Nazca Lines by showing it drone and satellite images of known
glyphs. The AI identified over 500 possible new geoglyphs, including the
humanoid figure, while searching a five-kilometer stretch of terrain. Aerial
images and in-person visits to the site confirmed the presence of the humanoid
figure, which is near a well-known hummingbird-like
Nazca design (SN: 6/26/19).

The newly uncovered glyph is the latest discovered by
the Yamagata University research team, which has identified over 100 other
Nazca Lines through aerial images and fieldwork, the team reported November 15
in a news release.

Next, the researchers plan to run a more powerful AI
system that will leverage aerial images, as well as other information like laser mapping
data, to identify Nazca Lines more quickly and accurately (SN: 9/27/18). Creating a more
comprehensive map of the Nazca Lines may offer new insight into why people
created these markings thousands of years ago, and how to best preserve them
(SN: 12/7/12).