Ica Stones
Andesite stones engraved with humans riding dinosaurs and performing surgery — a documented modern hoax whose carver confessed to making them.
Beginning in the 1960s, Peruvian physician Javier Cabrera Darquea amassed a collection that eventually numbered some 15,000 engraved stones, displayed at his museum in Ica, Peru. The engravings depict scenes impossible for any genuine antiquity: humans hunting and riding dinosaurs, organ transplants, telescopes, and maps of lost continents. Cabrera claimed they recorded an advanced prehistoric civilization. His principal supplier was a local farmer named Basilio Uschuya.
The stones are a staple of fringe television, presented on Ancient Aliens and within the ancient-astronaut hypothesis as evidence that humans coexisted with dinosaurs and possessed advanced — possibly alien-gifted — knowledge.
This is a documented fraud. Basilio Uschuya admitted in interviews that he carved the stones himself, using imagery copied from comic books, magazines, and schoolbooks, and aged them with shoe polish and by baking them in dung. (He later partly recanted, reportedly to avoid prosecution for selling ‘genuine antiquities,’ which is illegal in Peru — but that does nothing to make the impossible content authentic.) The stones bear no genuine patina of age, exist in no controlled excavation, and reproduce specific modern — including outdated — reconstructions of dinosaurs. They are 20th-century carvings.