Aliens, killer whales with knives, and the robot Wall-E: more than 300 new geoglyphs have been found on the Nazca Plateau. Photo

303 new geoglyphs have been discovered in the Nazca Desert in Peru. Among the mysterious patterns are aliens, killer whales with knives, and even something that looks like a robot Wall-E.

Researchers managed to find new images on the Nazca plateau using artificial intelligence. According to experts, the mysterious lines may date back to 400 BC, DailyMail reports.

The Nazca Lines were first spotted in 1939 when a pilot flew over the plains in the coastal highlands of Peru. Since then, scientists have been trying to unravel the mystery of these enigmatic drawings, but so far there are only guesses.

Some scientists believe that these images were meant to serve as a kind of observatory to indicate the places where the Sun and other celestial bodies rose or set during the solstices.

Other theories suggest that geoglyphs were created to be seen by the gods in the sky. Or they could also be simply artistic expressions of ancient people.

The 303 newly discovered drawings were described in detail by a team of researchers from Yamagata University in Japan and the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It took nearly a century to discover a total of 430 Nazca figurative geoglyphs, which offer significant insight into ancient Nazca cultures. Thanks to the deployment of an artificial intelligence system across the Nazca region, 303 new figurative geoglyphs were discovered in just six months of field research," the scientists said.

The researchers scanned aerial photographs of the Peruvian site using IBM's artificial intelligence, as it can identify marks on the landscape that the human eye is unable to notice.

The newly found drawings mostly depict animals – orcas, camels, cats. There are also what appear to be pairs of primates playing together. Robots and humanoids can be seen among the lines. And there are some very strange ones, like a single head on a pair of legs or a head with spiky hair.

According to experts, IBM's artificial intelligence can discover even more geoglyphs. "Artificial intelligence may be on the verge of ushering in a revolution in archaeological discovery similar to the aerial photography revolution," the scientists write in their article.

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