In bird's-eye view, on a terrain in Kazakhstan, space-age technology have uncovered an ancient mystery. Rare, massive patterns of different shapes were revealed in satellite images released by NASA. These shapes, according to experts, are estimated to be 8000 years old.

In 2007, Dimitriy Dey, an economist and archaeology enthusiast, unexpectedly discovered these enormous shapes - otherwise known as Steppe Geoglyphs - while he was browsing Google Earth.

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He found these thought-provoking soil markings while looking through an empty landscape in Central Asia. At first, Dey thought that the giant square with a crisscrossed X was one of Nikita S. Khrushchev's experiments, but the next day, he saw another. By 2012, he had listed 19 of them, and now, it counts up to 260.

They excavated one of the mounds and found that "It was not a cenotaph, where there are belongings," he recalled. But not far away, researchers found Neolithic artifacts like spear points that date yo 6000 to 10000 years ago.

NASA took satellite photos, 430 miles up in the sky, and released them two weeks ago. "I've never seen anything like this; I found it remarkable," senior biospheric scientist for NASA Compton Tucker told The New York Times.

The images with uniform circular heaps portrayed large geometric shapes like squares, crosses, swastikas and rings. The patterns, which are the size of a number of football fields combined, are approximated to be three millenniums older than the pyramids of Egypt.

Dey's study suggests that early inhabitants of the Mahandzhar culture, who lived in what is now Kazakhstan around 5000 to 7000 BC, could have made the structures. Dismissing the sneaking suspicion of aliens, he speculates that figures were "horizontal observatories to track the movements of the rising sun." Furthermore, he added, "I don't think they were meant to be seen from the air."

With this discovery and other finds of similar figures and images in Chile and Peru, scientists are starting to change their perception about early nomads.

TagsNASA, Kazakhstan, Geometric patterns in Kazakhstan, Central Asia, Google Earth