Overview

The Ica stones are engraved andesite cobbles from the desert region around Ica, in southern Peru, that became famous through the collection of the local physician Javier Cabrera Darquea from the mid-1960s. Their carvings show human beings interacting with dinosaurs, performing heart transplants and brain surgery, and using telescopes and other instruments. To fringe and young-earth creationist writers these images have seemed to prove that humans lived alongside dinosaurs and possessed advanced knowledge in deep antiquity.

In reality the stones are modern. The farmer who supplied most of them confessed to carving them, no example has ever come from a controlled excavation, and the imagery depends on ideas, such as the appearance of specific dinosaurs, that could only be known from modern books. The site records the Ica stones as a debunked hoax whose objects are extant, since the carved stones plainly exist; what is rejected is the claim that they are ancient records of impossible knowledge.