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A tourist trap or genuine pre-Columbian artistry?
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- The Ica Stones, featuring carvings that depict ancient civilizations and humans living alongside dinosaurs, have long been a subject of controversy regarding their authenticity. The stones were first presented to Dr. Javier Cabrera Darquea by a Peruvian farmer.
- Despite the farmer's claims, the scientific world predominantly views the stones as a hoax, partly because he confessed to creating some of them himself.
- The mix of confirmed forgeries, the absence of scientific support, and elements that may be authentic pre-Columbian art point to the Ica Stones being a fusion of both fraudulent creations and legitimate regional artistry.
Imagine I call you out of the blue and tell you to come over immediately. 'I've been digging in my backyard,' I say, 'and I’ve discovered something that will change our understanding of human history forever.' When you arrive, I reveal some ancient-looking pots — still covered in dirt — with intricate designs. One pot shows scenes of what appears to be ancient people performing open-heart surgeries. Another depicts humans riding dinosaurs.
Would your reaction be (A) 'Why did you waste so much time on such a silly joke?' or (B) 'Oh my, alert the authorities! Human civilization was far more advanced than I ever realized, and they coexisted with dinosaurs. Call all the archaeologists!'
If you were Dr. Javier Cabrera Darquea, you'd definitely choose option (B). That was pretty much his response when a Peruvian farmer handed him a stone tablet, one of the first Ica stones. Cabrera believed that the stone depicted a fish species that had gone extinct long before humans appeared on Earth. To him, this suggested that either aliens had shared knowledge about these extinct fish with humans or that the timeline of extinction and human history was completely wrong [source: Carroll].
It’s worth mentioning that Dr. Cabrera was a medical doctor, not an archaeologist, paleontologist, naturalist, or scientist. No one ever figured out what made him think the highly stylized (and thus unrealistic) fish image somehow indicated it was 'extinct.' But let’s move on.
Undeterred, Cabrera went on to claim he had found caves in the area filled with hundreds of thousands of engraved stones—100,000 to be exact. However, he never disclosed the location of these caves, so no one could verify or date the stones. Once again, the images carved on them depicted things from modern times: surgery, astronomical inventions, flying machines, and humans interacting with dinosaurs [source: Fitzpatrick-Matthews].
It’s important to note that the farmer who first gave Cabrera the original stone confessed to carving some of them. While it's true that there are a large number of these stones, which could seem convincing, others suggest that local people may have used them to attract tourists. Some of the stones might actually be partially authentic pre-Columbian art from the region [source: Fitzpatrick-Matthews].
In the end, the farmer's and Cabrera's claims (who passed away in 2001) simply don't hold up under scientific scrutiny. Unfortunately, the Ica stones—most likely the result of a well-crafted hoax with a dash of genuine pre-Columbian artistry mixed in—will likely never be recognized as legitimate by any scientific or academic authority.
