More than 50 geoglyphs, including one shaped like a swastika, have been discovered in northern Kazakhstan. 
 
 More than 50 geoglyphs with various shapes and sizes, including a massive swastika, have been discovered across northern Kazakhstan in Central Asia, say archaeologists. 
 
 These sprawling structures, mostly earthen mounds, create the type of landscape art most famously seen in the Nazca region of Peru. 
 
 Discovered using Google Earth, the geoglyphs are designed in a variety of geometric shapes, including squares, rings, crosses and swastikas (the swastika is a design that was used in ancient times). Ranging from 90 to 400 meters (295 to 1,312 feet) in diameter, some of them are longer than a modern-day aircraft carrier. Researchers say that the geoglyphs are difficult to see on the ground, but can easily be seen from the sky. [See Photos of the Amazing Geoglyphs in Kazakhstan] 
 
 Over the past year, an archaeological expedition from Kazakhstan's Kostanay University, working in collaboration with Vilnius University in Lithuania, has been examining the geoglyphs. The team, which is conducting archaeological excavations, ground-penetrating radar surveys, aerial photography and dating, recently presented its initial results at the European Association of Archaeologists' annual meeting in Istanbul. 
 
 The geoglyphs were made of earthen mounds. 
 
 Archaeological excavations uncovered the remains of structures and hearths at the geoglyphs, suggesting that rituals took place there, said archaeologists Irina Shevnina and Andrew Logvin, of Kostanay University, in an email to Live Science. Ancient tribes may also have used the geoglyphs to mark ownership of the land, the researchers noted. 
 
 "As of today, we can say only one thing — the geoglyphs were built by ancient people. By whom and for what purpose, remains a mystery," said Shevnina and Logvin. 
 
 Why they're builders used geometric shapes is also a mystery, although the swastika is an ancient symbol found throughout Europe and Asia. 
 
 Geoglyphs around the world 
 
 While Peru's Nazca Lines are the world's most famous geoglyphs, archaeological research suggests that geoglyphs were constructed in numerous areas around the world by different cultures. 
 
 For instance, in the Middle East, archaeologists have found thousands of wheel-shaped structures that are easily visible from the sky, but hard to see on the ground. Also recently in Russia, archaeologists excavated a geoglyph shaped like an elk, which appears older than the Nazca Lines. 
 
 Ancient geoglyphs have also been reported in many other countries, including the United Kingdom, Brazil and even the Southwestern United States. The introduction of high-resolution Google Earth imagery over the last decade has helped both professional archaeologists and amateurs detect and study these enigmatic structures. 
 
 Editor's Note: This article was updated to reflect the fact that all of the geoglyphs were made of earthen mounds. 
 
 Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. ||||| Over 50 geoglyphs have been discovered across the northern steppe of Kazakhstan, deepening the mystery of why the ancient patterns were created. 
 
 Using Google Earth, archaeologists found the geoglyphs - man-made outlines on the ground made from mounds or ditches that are visible from above - in a variety of shapes, including squares, rings and swastikas. 
 
 Often attributed to the sun, the swastika was used among the ancient Celts, Indians and Greeks, and later in Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism. In Asia, the symbol first appears in archaeological records around 2,500 BC in the Indus Valley Civilisation. 
 
 "As of today, we can say only one thing – the geoglyphs were built by ancient people," archaeologists Irina Shevnina and Andrew Logvin, who discovered the Kazakh geoglyphs, told Live Science. 
 
 They added that other structures and evidence of fireplaces within the geoglyphs suggest rituals took place there. 
 
 Experts have compared the findings in Kazakhstan to the famous Nazca Lines in Peru, which were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. 
 
 Although some of the Peruvian geoglyphs resemble Paracas motifs, an Andean society that lived between 800 and 100 BCE, scholars believe they were created by the Nazca culture between 400 and 650 AD. 
 
 In the past year, researchers from Kostanay University and Vilnius University in Lithuania have been conducting archaeological excavations, aerial photography and ground-penetrating radar surveys to examine the geoglyphs in Kazakhstan. 
 
 The symbols vary in shapes and size. One swastika was made from timber, although the majority of the geoglyphs were made using mounds of earth. 
 
 One of the largest measures 1,312ft in diameter, suggesting it was created by a larger, well-established culture, the researchers said. 
 
 Ancient tribes may have used the geoglyphs to mark ownership of the land, but the reason behind the creation of the patterns remains unknown. 
 
 Central Asia is pockmarked with other mysterious ancient constructions called kurgans, mounds heaped over a burial chamber. Found across Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Poland, the earliest kurgans appeared in the 4th millennium BC in the Caucasus and are associated with the Indo-Europeans. 
 
 Geoglyphs and similar patterns have been discovered across the world, including in Britain, thanks to the introduction of Google Earth. In 2012, a giant elk-shaped geoglyph was discovered near Lake Zjuratkul in the Ural Mountains in Russia. 
 
 The Kazakh geoglyphs were presented at the European Association of Archaeologists' annual meeting in Istanbul. ||||| The giant stone structures form wheel shapes with spokes often radiating inside. Here a cluster of wheels in the Azraq Oasis. 
 
 They stretch from Syria to Saudi Arabia, can be seen from the air but not the ground, and are virtually unknown to the public. 
 
 They are the Middle East's own version of the Nazca Lines — ancient "geolyphs," or drawings, that span deserts in southern Peru — and now, thanks to new satellite-mapping technologies, and an aerial photography program in Jordan, researchers are discovering more of them than ever before. They number well into the thousands. 
 
 Referred to by archaeologists as "wheels," these stone structures have a wide variety of designs, with a common one being a circle with spokes radiating inside. Researchers believe that they date back to antiquity, at least 2,000 years ago. They are often found on lava fields and range from 82 feet to 230 feet (25 meters to 70 meters) across. [See gallery of wheel structures] 
 
 "In Jordan alone we've got stone-built structures that are far more numerous than (the) Nazca Lines, far more extensive in the area that they cover, and far older," said David Kennedy, a professor of classics and ancient history at the University of Western Australia. 
 
 Kennedy's new research, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science, reveals that these wheels form part of a variety of stone landscapes. These include kites (stone structures used for funnelling and killing animals); pendants (lines of stone cairns that run from burials); and walls, mysterious structures that meander across the landscape for up to several hundred feet and have no apparent practical use. 
 
 His team's studies are part of a long-term aerial reconnaissance project that is looking at archaeological sites across Jordan. As of now, Kennedy and his colleagues are puzzled as to what the structures may have been used for or what meaning they held. [History's Most Overlooked Mysteries] 
 
 Fascinating structures 
 
 Kennedy's main area of expertise is in Roman archaeology, but he became fascinated by these structures when, as a student, he read accounts of Royal Air Force pilots flying over them in the 1920s on airmail routes across Jordan. "You can't not be fascinated by these things," Kennedy said. 
 
 Indeed, in 1927 RAF Flight Lt. Percy Maitland published an account of the ruins in the journal Antiquity. He reported encountering them over "lava country" and said that they, along with the other stone structures, are known to the Bedouin as the "works of the old men." 
 
 Kennedy and his team have been studying the structures using aerial photography and Google Earth, as the wheels are hard to pick up from the ground, Kennedy said. 
 
 "Sometimes when you're actually there on the site you can make out something of a pattern but not very easily," he said. "Whereas if you go up just a hundred feet or so it, for me, comes sharply into focus what the shape is." 
 
 The designs must have been clearer when they were originally built. "People have probably walked over them, walked past them, for centuries, millennia, without having any clear idea what the shape was." 
 
 (The team has created an archive of images of the wheels from various sites in the Middle East.) 
 
 What were they used for? 
 
 So far, none of the wheels appears to have been excavated, something that makes dating them, and finding out their purpose, more difficult. Archaeologists studying them in the pre-Google Earth era speculated that they could be the remains of houses or cemeteries. Kennedy said that neither of these explanations seems to work out well. 
 
 "There seems to be some overarching cultural continuum in this area in which people felt there was a need to build structures that were circular." 
 
 Some of the wheels are found in isolation while others are clustered together. At one location, near the Azraq Oasis, hundreds of them can be found clustered into a dozen groups. "Some of these collections around Azraq are really quite remarkable," Kennedy said. 
 
 In Saudi Arabia, Kennedy's team has found wheel styles that are quite different: Some are rectangular and are not wheels at all; others are circular but contain two spokes forming a bar often aligned in the same direction that the sun rises and sets in the Middle East. 
 
 The ones in Jordan and Syria, on the other hand, have numerous spokes and do not seem to be aligned with any astronomical phenomena. "On looking at large numbers of these, over a number of years, I wasn't struck by any pattern in the way in which the spokes were laid out," Kennedy said. 
 
 Cairns are often found associated with the wheels. Sometimes they circle the perimeter of the wheel, other times they are in among the spokes. In Saudi Arabia some of the cairns look, from the air, like they are associated with ancient burials. 
 
 Dating the wheels is difficult, since they appear to be prehistoric, but could date to as recently as 2,000 years ago. The researchers have noted that the wheels are often found on top of kites, which date as far back as 9,000 years, but never vice versa. "That suggests that wheels are more recent than the kites," Kennedy said. 
 
 Amelia Sparavigna, a physics professor at Politecnico di Torino in Italy, told Live Science in an email that she agrees these structures can be referred to as geoglyphs in the same way as the Nazca Lines are. "If we define a 'geoglyph' as a wide sign on the ground of artificial origin, the stone circles are geoglyphs," Sparavignawrote in her email. 
 
 The function of the wheels may also have been similar to the enigmatic drawings in the Nazca desert. [Science as Art: A Gallery] 
 
 "If we consider, more generally, the stone circles as worship places of ancestors, or places for rituals connected with astronomical events or with seasons, they could have the same function of [the] geoglyphs of South America, the Nazca Lines for instance. The design is different, but the function could be the same," she wrote in her email. 
 
 Kennedy said that for now the meaning of the wheels remains a mystery. "The question is what was the purpose?" 
 
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– Google Earth can be used for more than peeking into your neighbor's backyard: Archaeologists have discovered more than 50 geoglyphs in Kazakhstan, thanks to images from the virtual geographical and map service, reports the International Business Times. Geoglyphs are large designs on the ground, usually created out of mounds of dirt and other natural elements, that can be seen from above. Scientists from Kostanay University, who made their announcement about the structures at an archaeology meeting in Istanbul, say the geoglyphs range in size from 295 feet to 1,312 feet in diameter and come in the shape of squares, circles, crosses—and even a giant swastika, LiveScience reports. (Click to a photo slideshow.) Geoglyphs like these that resemble Peru's famous Nazca Lines have been found all over the world, including giant "wheels" in the Middle East and an elk-like structure in Russia. It may seem surprising at first that a swastika is one of the Kazakhstani creations—and it was made of timber, not dirt, LiveScience notes—but many ancient cultures and religions used the swastika long before Hitler appropriated it. "Swastika" is derived from the Sanskrit term for "good fortune" or "well-being," and the symbol itself is believed to show the sun's movement in the sky, notes the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. "As of today, we can say only one thing—the geoglyphs were built by ancient people. By whom and for what purpose, remains a mystery," two of the project's scientists said in an email to LiveScience. (See what was revealed when sandstorms blew over the Peruvian desert last month.)