Hoping to learn more about the ancient history of his country, a business manager named Dmitriy Dey began studying satellite imagery of Kazakhstan via Google Earth to find clues of structures created by his ancestors. What started as a hobby quickly turned into a large project that has inspired archeologists all over the world to study the sites he found by examining imagery and has lead to numerous theories on their origins as research has not caught up to say how old these earthworks are let alone which peoples used them or for what.
The image above and the project generally is controversial because Dey has discovered 260 features that he claims are upwards to 8,000 years old and part of a Neolithic sun cult, but experts warn the images can be misinterpreted without investigation on the ground. Geidre Motuzaite Matuzeviciute, an archeologist from the Lithuanian Institute of History in Vilnius, believes that only 55 of these features are ancient earthworks with the remaining created later by Turkish tribes. While these 55 still require ground teams to investigate, it's still very exciting that the patterns that identified these could only be seen with remote sensing and these particular features were only discovered because a 'layperson' had access to free data to research his personal interests. Whether or not these images are historically significant will be verified by later research and peer review.
Source: These Satellite Views of Ancient Earthworks Are Stirring Debate (nationalgeographic.com)
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