Three images keep turning up in posts about "impossible" ancient knowledge: a row of Egyptian hieroglyphs that seems to show a helicopter, a carving in a Cambodian temple that looks like a stegosaurus, and engraved stones from Peru showing people living alongside dinosaurs. Each looks startling at first glance. Each also has a well-documented, down-to-earth explanation.
In brief: the Abydos "helicopter" is two overlapping royal inscriptions, the Ta Prohm "stegosaurus" is an ambiguous animal carving against a leafy background, and the Ica stones are modern carvings sold to collectors and tourists. None of them shows that ancient people saw aircraft or living dinosaurs. What they do show is something just as interesting: how easily our brains find familiar shapes, and how a good story outruns the facts.
The Abydos "helicopter": two pharaohs on one wall
The famous panel is carved on a beam in the Temple of Seti I at Abydos, in Upper Egypt. Photographs of it spread widely online, often with the claim that a crumbling top layer had revealed an older carving of a helicopter, a submarine and a glider.
The real story is a palimpsest, a surface carved twice. Seti I, who reigned around 1294 to 1279 BC, had his titles cut into the stone, ending with his throne name, Menmaatra. His son Ramesses II, who ruled from about 1279 to 1213 BC, then had the carving filled with plaster and recut with his own titles, ending in his throne name Usermaatra-Setepenre. Over three thousand years the plaster fell away. Today both texts are partly visible at once, and a bow sign from Seti's version overlaps two arm signs from Ramesses's version. The result happens to resemble the outline of a helicopter.
Egyptologists can read both layers sign by sign. Seti's text presents him as the king who subdues the "nine bows", the traditional enemies of Egypt; Ramesses's text calls him the protector of Egypt who repels foreign lands. Nothing in either version refers to machines, and the same titles appear elsewhere in the temple in their ordinary form.
(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)
A tip worth remembering: some online photos of the panel are digitally retouched to sharpen the "aircraft" shapes and remove the surrounding signs. Viewed in context, as part of a long royal inscription, the effect is much weaker.
The Ta Prohm "stegosaurus"
Ta Prohm, near Angkor in Cambodia, was founded in 1186 by King Jayavarman VII as a Mahayana Buddhist monastery called Rajavihara, the "royal monastery". It is famous today for the giant trees growing through its ruins, and for a small round carving on a doorframe that some visitors identify as a stegosaurus.
Look closely and the case falls apart. The "plates" along the back look much more like the leaves or petals that fill the background of many neighbouring medallions. The head is large, with what may be ears and a horn, which fits a rhinoceros, a wild boar or a chameleon better than a dinosaur. Writing for Smithsonian magazine in 2009, palaeontology writer Riley Black noted that the figure resembles a boar or rhino set against foliage rather than any real stegosaur.
There is also a question of age. The temple holds thousands of carvings, and nobody has documented when this particular one was made. Some writers have suggested it could be a later addition, perhaps even a modern prank; that remains unconfirmed, but it means the carving cannot be treated as firm evidence of anything.
The Ica stones of Peru
The Ica stones are andesite pebbles and boulders engraved with scenes of surgery, star maps, and people riding or fighting dinosaurs. They became famous in the 1960s through the Peruvian physician Javier Cabrera, who received his first stone as a birthday gift in 1966 and went on to collect thousands, opening a museum for them in Ica in 1996. Erich von Däniken's best-selling Chariots of the Gods? (1968) helped make them part of ancient-astronaut lore.
The trail leads to a local farmer, Basilio Uschuya. After a 1970s BBC documentary questioned the stones, Peruvian authorities investigated, and Uschuya admitted that he and his wife carved them,. History.com reports that forgers could engrave a stone quickly and then age it with animal dung and baking. He later changed his story several times, possibly because selling genuine antiquities is a serious crime in Peru, which made a confession of forgery the safer option.
Claims of early Spanish records are often repeated as proof of age. A Jesuit chronicler is said to have mentioned carved stones in the 16th century, and some stones were reportedly sent to Spain in 1562, but there is no evidence those stones showed dinosaurs. Laboratory work points the other way: a 1977 BBC test found modern grooves on an old stone surface, tests in Barcelona in the 1990s found marks of modern tools and sandpaper, and in 2006 investigators writing for Skeptical Inquirer found no ancient weathering inside the engraved lines.
The dinosaur details themselves are telling. Several stones show raised tails and upright legs, which supporters call "too accurate" for a 1960s forger. In fact, the stones mix accurate and wildly wrong anatomy, and they mirror the popular dinosaur pictures of the decades they surfaced in. The tail-up posture, often cited as a giveaway, had already entered scientific discussion by the late 1960s and 1970s, so it proves little about age.
Could ancient people have known about dinosaurs at all?
Not as living animals. Non-avian dinosaurs died out around 66 million years ago, and the earliest members of our own species appeared only about 300,000 years ago. Every line of evidence, from rock layers to radiometric dating, agrees on that gap.
Ancient people did, however, find fossils. Bones of mammoths, dinosaurs and other extinct animals erode out of hillsides all over the world, and folklorists and historians have suggested that some legends of giants, dragons and griffins may have been inspired by such finds. That is a fascinating link between myth and science, and it needs no time travel or hidden history.
Ancient people were brilliant, without outside help
Stories about "out of place" artefacts often start from a fair point: ancient societies achieved remarkable things. The Great Pyramid of Giza, built for the pharaoh Khufu around 2600 BC, originally rose about 146 metres and remained the tallest human-made structure for more than 3,700 years. Its base is square to within a few centimetres along sides of over 230 metres.
We also know a good deal about how it was done. Archaeologists have excavated workers' camps near Giza, which point to large teams of organised labourers rather than slaves, and in 2013 papyri were found in which an inspector called Merer logged boat deliveries of limestone from Tura to the building site in the 27th year of Khufu's reign. Egyptian tomb design can be traced step by step, from simple mudbrick mastabas to Djoser's step pyramid and Sneferu's experiments with true pyramids.
This is why many archaeologists push back on the claim that mainstream history treats ancient people as primitive. The real view is the opposite. Crediting lost super-civilisations or visitors from space actually takes achievements away from the Egyptians, Khmer and Peruvians who earned them, which is one of the main criticisms of ancient-astronaut theories.
What about claims that humans are getting "dumber"?
The original version of this story ended by arguing that modern humans are declining and that the human genome is steadily degenerating. That idea comes mainly from the geneticist John C. Sanford, co-inventor of the gene gun at Cornell, who calls it "genetic entropy". Sanford is also an advocate of intelligent design, and mainstream population geneticists reject his conclusion: they point out that natural selection does remove harmful mutations and that beneficial mutations are more common than his model assumes.
Human brains and abilities do change with diet, health and education, and researchers debate trends in test scores. But there is no scientific consensus that people today are less intelligent than the builders of Abydos or Angkor, and nothing in these carvings supports such a claim.
How to check an "impossible artefact" story
- Find the object's name and location. Real artefacts have museum numbers, site names or excavation records. Vague captions like "an ancient temple" are a warning sign.
- Look for the whole context. A cropped photo can hide the other signs, leaves or figures that explain a shape.
- Ask who found it and when. Objects that surfaced through a single collector or dealer, without a recorded excavation, deserve extra caution.
- Read what specialists say. Egyptologists, Khmer art historians and palaeontologists have usually written about famous cases already.
- Remember pareidolia. Our brains are built to see faces and familiar objects in clouds, rocks and carvings. It is a feature of human perception, not proof.
This piece began as an essay by Michael T. Snyder, published on The Truth Wins and republished by Conscious Media News. Snyder is the author of the novel The Beginning Of The End (also on Amazon as an ebook); more about Michael T. Snyder. The photographs show the Abydos panel, the Ta Prohm carving and engraved Ica stones as they circulated with his essay.
Sources: Wikipedia: Helicopter hieroglyphs; Smithsonian, 12 March 2009: Stegosaurus, rhinoceros or hoax?; Wikipedia: Ta Prohm; Wikipedia: Ica stones; History.com: The Ica stones hoax; Wikipedia: Ancient astronauts; Wikipedia: Great Pyramid of Giza; Wikipedia: John C. Sanford; original essay: The Truth Wins via Conscious Media News.
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