The stones of Ica, beautiful handcrafted creations
During my third trip to Peru I stopped for a few days in Ica, a city located south of Lima, on the edge of a desert area, where the Paracas and Nazca civilizations once flourished.
The first museum I visited was the Ancient History Museum, located a few minutes from the main square. In it you can admire interesting finds from the Paracas era, fabrics, ceramics and human remains. In particular, the deformed skulls are very interesting. This practice was normal in ancient American cultures, for example it is also found in the Guane culture of Colombia.
Passionate as I am about history and mysteries of the past, I couldn't help but visit the stone museum, located right in the plaza de armas, the main square of Ica.
The very kind lady Emma opened the doors of the museum to me that the late Dr. Javier Cabrera managed until his death a few years ago.
Entering the museum you immerse yourself in a magical, unreal atmosphere. We observe stones with engravings describing incredible scenes: short, stocky men intent on performing strange surgical operations, scanning the sky with telescopes and traveling in flying ships; some of them fighting dinosaurs and some riding them; strange terrestrial maps showing the surface of the planet as it was when the continents were close together in the so-called Pangea (it is scientifically proven that Pangea remained united until about 90 million years ago).
All this is very interesting, and I confess that for a few moments I too flew with my imagination thinking that it was possible. I imagined a mythical era, where men coexisted with dinosaurs and dominated them, and where surgical and space technologies were widespread and within everyone's reach.
After taking some photos and some short filming, I said goodbye to Mrs. Emma and found myself outside again, in the plaza de armas, in the reality of Ica.
According to Cabrera, his stones were real, that is, they had been engraved 60 million years ago by humans belonging to the so-called "gliptolithic era". According to him, this ancient ethnic group had coexisted with the dinosaurs and, after the catastrophe that destroyed the great reptiles, it had reorganized itself and although it had lost the ancient knowledge of the past, it brought back the history of their ancestors, engraving it in the stones.
In my opinion Javier Cabrera was in good faith, and he never realized that he had collected stones engraved by some skilled craftsmen and traders. In 1966 he received, from a certain Basilio Uchuya of Ocucaje, a village located about 30 minutes from Ica, a stone where the figure of a fish had been carved.
When Cabrera realized that the fish was similar to a prehistoric one, he asked Basilio Uchuya where the stone had been found. Mr. Uchuya probably sensed the possibility of earning money, because he realized Cabrera's strong interest in that stone. Over the following years, Basilio Uchuya delivered hundreds of stones to Cabrera who, as time passed, was creating in his mind the history of gliptolithic humanity, of which he was firmly convinced. There was probably a third character, a friend of Uchuya, who, having intuited the interesting subjects for Cabrera, gave the skilled craftsman some drawings on which to base his engraving of the stones.
Unfortunately, the story of the Ica stones and their supposed veracity was supported as true by two types of people: on the one hand, groups of pseudo-scholars, often foreigners, not at all interested in scientific truth, who vigorously supported the story of gliptolithic humanity, to gain publicity, but also because they themselves convinced themselves that the true history of man is completely different from what science teaches us; on the other, people who do not have the slightest knowledge of archeology or paleontology, but who defended Cabrera, as if he were the custodian of the secrets of man's true ancestors, the gliptolithics, in fact.
Already various foreign televisions exposed the farce in the 70s of the last century (BBC and Skeptical Dictionary), but despite all this, there were still various pseudo-scholars who continued to maintain that Cabrera was right and that the gliptolithic era had been a reality.
These people, completely ignoring the foundations of paleo-anthropology, claimed that the carvings were made 60 million years ago, dating back the origin of man to the Mesozoic era.
Not only does all this disappear since the real evidence of the origin of man demonstrates his existence only starting from around 2 million years ago (Homo Habilis), while the dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago, but also other counter-evidence demonstrates the hoax.
First of all, no one has ever found the stones in question in situ, that is, in a geological layer that could have been dated with the stratigraphic method, but all the stones showing "imaginative" scenes were delivered to Dr. Cabrera by the craftsman Basilio Uchuya, and the majority of them are visible today in the museum of the plaza de armas, in Ica.
Furthermore, if the incisions had been made in the remote past they would have been smoothed by the erosion of wind and rainwater, whereas instead they are well delineated, precisely because they were made a few years ago.
There are other theses that demonstrate the untruthfulness of Cabrera's thesis: because, if the engravings really represented scenes of an advanced human civilization, which prospered during the Mesozoic era, these stones were found only in the Ica area and not in other areas of the Earth? Perhaps the "advanced civilization" was limited to the area of present-day southern Peru? Furthermore, it must be considered that in the nearby area of Ocucaje, precisely where the majority of the stones are said to have been found, fossils of whales and other animals from the past abound, but there is no trace of dinosaur fossils (as confirmed by the paleontologist Urbina, of Ocucaje). From a careful scientific analysis it is therefore clear that dinosaurs did not live in this area and therefore this is another piece of evidence that invalidates Cabrera's thesis.
The craftsman Basilio Uchuya was also held in custody by the Ica police on suspicion of trafficking in archaeological material, but he himself declared that he had engraved the stones to sell them to tourists. From being a trafficker of real archaeological remains, Basilio Uchuya was thus released as a normal craftsman, an engraver of imaginative scenes.
Defenders of the veracity of Cabrera's thesis, however, maintained that Basilio Uchuaya declared himself to be a craftsman only to obtain freedom and not be imprisoned, but probably these people never traveled to Ocucaje, to really realize how things went.
Other supporters of the so-called "gliptolithic humanity" stated that a man like Basilio Uchuya would not have been able to engrave thousands of stones in his lifetime and that therefore the engravings "must necessarily be truthful". First of all, the stones are not thousands but probably 700-800, furthermore it must be considered that, as confirmed to me by Mr. Juan Aparcana, who knew Basilio Uchuya until his death a few years ago, the entire Uchuya family dedicated themselves to craftsmanship, for many years.
Furthermore, the kind lady Emma confirmed to me that it was Javier Cabrera himself who painted some of the stones, in the carved areas, precisely to make the drawings stand out better, a practice that certainly cannot be defined as "scientific".
Some stones were taken to the Spanish Geochronology laboratory of the Rocasolano Institute of Chemistry-Physics (CSIC), with the aim of trying to date the engravings.
Some calcium oxide remains have been dated, by the thermoluminescence method, to be 99,240 and 61,196 years old. However, this is not a dating of when the incisions were made, but rather of the layer of calcium oxide that overlyed them. In 1977 Basilio Uchuya showed the BBC just how he was able to carve a stone with a dentist's drill and then add a layer of calcium minerals which he then baked in a kiln to "antique the carving".
The other two datings from the Rocasolano institute, which refer to textile material found in the vicinity of some stones found in the desert, date back to 650 AD. They therefore belong to the Nasca culture, in fact it must be mentioned that, in both the Paracas and Nasca cultures, stones were used to carve, but with normal anthropomorphic figures and scenes of hunting, fishing and war, which have nothing to do with the stones in the Cabrera museum.
Lately the Italian journalist Massimo Giacobbo has considered, in his program "Voyager", that it should not be the origin of man that should be backdated, but the end of the dinosaurs that should be postponed, or at least the possibility that some limited groups of dinosaurs could have lived in the depths of the Amazon jungle until about 90,000 years ago.
Well, first of all there is no scientific evidence that large reptiles lived more recently than 65 million years ago, precisely because all the dinosaur remains found have been dated no younger than 65 million years, in fact.
Apart from the fact that the Italian chronicler's thesis would not explain at all the engravings of scientific instruments such as surgical tools and binoculars, in any case we must consider that, in the light of current scientific knowledge, man was not present in South America 90,000 years ago ( according to the archaeologist Niede Guidon some limited groups of archaic Sapiens arrived from Africa “only” 60,000 years ago).
Giacobbo's conclusions only confused viewers and in any case they referred to 90,000 years ago, a very different era from the thesis supported by Cabrera, according to which gliptolithic humanity lived 60 million years ago.
The Italian journalist added that no traces of metal were found on many stones and therefore it is not possible to understand how they were carved. In this regard, it must be clarified that there are two types of stones: some very hard, made of andesite and other softer ones that can be carved with non-metallic objects, such as other very sharp stones or glass. The harder ones can, of course, be engraved with diamond blades.
Once I finished my visit to the stone museum, I decided to deepen my research and go directly to Ocucaje, both to try to learn the truth about this strange story and to see the fossil cemetery (mostly whales) up close, in the desert surrounding the village.
Juan Aparcana accompanied me, a reliable and calm person who had frequented Basilio Uchuya for many years.
Aparcana confirmed to me that everyone in the city knew about Mr. Uchuya's craft activity and he himself cannot explain how it was possible that the history of ancient humanity developed so much in the world. Surely Dr. Cabrera was a good communicator who found "fertile ground" when he met with some foreign pseudo-scientists, who not only believed in "his ancient humanity", but even added various details to the story.
With this article I do not want to discredit the name of Javier Cabrera, who in my opinion was a nice and imaginative visionary, nor the late Uchuya, a skilled craftsman who earned his living by carving stones and then selling them. My intention is to shed light on a false mystery that has been inflated by pseudo-scholars who, in the vast majority of cases, have never traveled either to Ica or even to the Ocucaje desert. Once again I verified the reality of this legend directly on site, talking to people and trying to get to the truth, both with logical reasoning and with direct experience.
All this aside, it must be said that the stones of Ica are beautiful, indeed beautiful. Whoever engraved them was truly expert and imaginative. It's nice to daydream every now and then, but even more important is to shed light on our extraordinary past without closing ourselves off to new and fascinating hypotheses, but analyzing them from a scientific point of view to get closer to reality.
YURI LEVERATTO
