The Bermuda Triangle’s cousin: the Nazca of Kazakhstan

Real geoglyphs found by satellite in 2007, purpose unknown

In 2007 a Kazakh named Dmitriy Dey was looking at the Turgai steppe on Google Earth and found shapes in it. Not one shape. Since then something like two hundred and sixty have been identified, and they had been sitting in open country in northern Kazakhstan, unremarked, for thousands of years.

They are built of earth: mounds, trenches and ramparts arranged into geometry, hundreds of metres across. Crosses, rings, a square, and one figure that reads as a swastika, which in this context is a very old solar or sky motif and has nothing to do with the twentieth century. The biggest is the Ushtogaysky Square, roughly four hundred metres on a side with a diagonal cross joining opposite corners.

The comparison to Nazca is unavoidable and slightly misleading. Nazca lines are surface markings scraped into desert pavement. These are constructed earthworks, and they are almost certainly older. In 2007 Dey and archaeologists opened one of the Ushtogaysky mounds and found nothing inside it. Nearby, though, they found a Neolithic settlement, and the current best attribution puts the geoglyphs with the Mahandzhar culture of roughly 7000 to 5000 BC. If that holds, some are eight thousand years old.

NASA photographed several of them from orbit, which is what pushed the story into the world's newspapers in 2015 and brought funding and attention back to Kazakh archaeologists who have been working the sites since.

Nobody knows what they were for. Boundary marks, ritual, sky observation and territorial signalling have all been proposed and none is settled. What is worth holding onto is the plain fact of it: enormous deliberate structures, on open ground, that nobody had catalogued until somebody scrolled across them on a laptop.