Ica stones
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[edit] Definition
The Ica stones are stones from Peru, claimed to be ancient, and engraved with unhistorical scenes of flying machines, dinosaurs, brain surgery, the use of telescopes, and other such anachronisms. They have a special appeal to those who wish to rewrite prehistory.
[edit] Provenance
There are reports of engraved stones from the area going back as early as the sixteenth century; however, the particular stones in question were "discovered" in the 1960s, when one Dr Cabrera brought them to public notice after he had bought thousands of the engraved stones from a farmer called Basilo Uschuya.
Arrested for selling antiquities, Uschuya confessed to faking the stones. On the one hand, it may be argued that if he had maintained that they were genuine, he'd have gone to prison. On the other hand, he must have done something to persuade the police that the artifacts were not genuine: it would be interesting to know what. Nor would fear of arrest explain why he should give an interview to a newspaper (Mundial, No. 6, January 17) in which he and his wife tell how they faked the stones using comic books, school books, and magazines as sources for their pictures, and aged them by leaving them in a chicken coop.
The stones have no archaeological provenance at all. They are supposed to have been found in a cave, but the location of the cave remains a secret. Offers by archaeologists to be taken there blindfolded have been rejected.
It is not possible to date the stones directly; nor is it possible to date them by studying the site where they were supposedly found, because, as noted, this is a secret. It is, however, possible to put a date on the clay figurines which have been produced along with the stones. Erich von Daniken sent one to the University of Zurich for dating and they reported that the figurine was modern. His colleague Johannes Fiebag sent two other samples to the University of Weimar who reported that the samples were “relatively young” and still contained water.
[edit] Discussion
[edit] Advanced technology on the Ica stones
The stones depict advanced technology including organ transplants, flying machines, and the use of telescopes. There are two problems with accepting these depictions as genuine. The first is that we have no trace of any such civilization besides these doubtful stones.
The second is that the stones themselves hardly suggest an advanced level of civilization. It is difficult to believe in a culture which can develop powered flight but which has no more sophisticated medium of communication than scratching pictures on rocks.
[edit] Dinosaurs on the Ica stones
The scenes showing humans fighting with dinosaurs have wild problems of scale, representing the humans as too big or the dinosaurs as way too small, confirming the idea that these are imaginary scenes. Perhaps the most ludicrous of the stones depicts a human brandishing some sort of weapon and riding aloft on the back of a pterosaur[4]. You will note that the legs of the man make it impossible for the pterosaur to flap its wings: you may also note that a creature of the size and proportions shown would be unable to lift its own weight, let alone that of a passenger.
[edit] Creationists and the Ica stones
A number of creationists endorse the Ica stones, and other "evidence" of the survival of ancient reptiles, such as the Loch Ness Monster. This may seem puzzling at first, since evidence of living dinosaurs would not contradict common descent, the old Earth, the theory of evolution, or any of the other things that make them so upset. It seems that their need for living dinosaurs is based on a profound misconception: they have been challenged again and again to produce anything in the fossil record that disproves evolution, and the example most frequently given is a human in the ancient fossil layers containing dinosaurs. Since creationists are not the clearest thinkers, they have come to believe that they would do just as well to produce dinosaurs living in the modern era. Of course, such creatures exist. We call them "birds".
The more reputable creationist groups repudiate the Ica Stones: Answers in Genesis, for example, write:
- The controversial ‘Ica stones’—allegedly genuine pre-Inca engravings of dinosaurs from Peru—have since been shown to be a fraud... The Institute of Geological Sciences in London has since examined one of the stones and confirmed its modern origin.
Unfortunately, persistent inaccuracy has more appeal to most creationists. Kent Hovind, for example, still believes in the genuineness of the Ica stones [5].
- Every known dinosaur found carved on the Ica stones. Sometimes the people are killing the dinosaurs, sometimes they’re riding them, sometimes they are making them work. Pretty strange. That’s my friend that was down there for eight months studying the carvings all over the desert out there. I read the book by a guy that has 11,000 of them in his museum, Dr. Cabaro, I think that’s how you pronounce his name. He has studied this very intensively, and he says "There’s no question that man and dinosaurs lived together." Then he says, "This proves that man was here two hundred million years ago." Man, you got great research and the wrong conclusions. No, this proves that our whole dating history for the world is wrong. Man and dinosaurs lived at the same time. Here’s an Indian chief cutting a head off a dinosaur, this one shows a man riding a dinosaur. Ica stones found all over there.
He does not give any reason why we should decide that "our whole dating history for the world is wrong", and not that the stones show pictures of scenes that didn't take place. Perhaps he can't think of one. Nor can we.
There is a further problem for creationists who accept the genuineness of the Ica stones, and other supposed pictorial evidence for anachronistic knowledge of dinosaurs, which is that there are at least two ways to know what dinosaurs look like: one is actually seeing a dinosaur; the other is to work out what it looked like from its fossils. Nineteenth century pictures of dinosaurs are not evidence that dinosaurs were alive and well in the nineteenth century, but that someone had taken a look at dinosaur fossils, something which requires no particular technological sophistication.
This applies particularly to the Ica stones, which depict a civilisation scientifically in advance of the Victorian era. If they are taken to be genuine, then there is no particular difficulty in supposing that a society which had mastered flight and organ transplants might also have gained some knowledge of paleontology, which merely requires a pair of eyes and a pickaxe. And, in the case of Stegosaurus, a field trip to North America. Perhaps they flew there in their aeroplanes.
[edit] The double anachronism
Creationists and pseudohistorians are both attracted to the Ica stones, but for different reasons. Each has a problem: for a creationist to believe the Ica stones genuine, he must believe, not just in the dinosaurs for which he wants proof, but also in a high-tech culture in South America that disappeared without trace, which does nothing to support his creationist fantasies, and which can only be an embarrassment to him; meanwhile the enthusiast for lost ancient civilisations with high technology must explain why this technologically sophisticated culture was using primitive weapons to fight animals which never lived in South America and which died out more than a hundred million years ago, and recorded this struggle in the medium of pictures crudely scratched onto rocks.
![[4]](http://paranormal.about.com/library/graphics/ica_1.jpg){kind=link}