I hate to burst the bubble of certain creationists, but one of your favorite pieces of evidence that man and dinosaurs lived together is a forgery.
The Ica stones are these engraved andesite stones from Peru that depict, among other things, humans and dinosaurs running around together.
There are actual engraved Ica stones that date back to the pre-Hispanic cultures of Peru.
These have fascinated explorers and archaeologists for centuries.
But you know what sometimes happens in cases like this?
The locals think the academics are little loopy for taking such an interest in something as banal as some carved rocks.
So to take the mickey out of some of these people, frauds forever pop up in archaeology.
And such is the case of the Ica stones with dinosaurs on them.
A local famer named Basilio Uschuya made some money selling these stones to tourists. He even sold one to a Peruvian physician named Javier Cabrera Darquea. It was Cabrera who popularized these stones internationally.
Later on, Uschuya was arrested for selling these stones, which may have been of true archaeological significance. Uschaya admitted to making the designs the stones, and they were nothing more than forgeries.
Later analysis of the dyes and paints used on the stones found that they contained modern materials.
And the case was closed.
So whenever you hear a creationist use these stones as evidence for human and dinosaur cohabitation, please understand that the stones are forgeries.
It’s a big hoax.
Someone not versed in dating rocks, but who knows a little something about dinosaur anatomy can see it is a forgery.
The depicted dinosaurs look like something out of an outdated Charles Knight illustration book; apatasaurs with swan-necks and tyrannosaurs standing in a “kangaroo stance”. If the Incas truly did interact with dinosaurs, then they would have known that both traits are anatomically impossible.