Giant stone balls of Costa Rica
They vary in size from as small as a tennis ball up to an astonishing 8 feet in diameter and weighing 16 tons. Almost all of them are made of a hard, igneous stone not local to the region.
Deep in the jungles of Costa Rica, back in the 1940s, workmen clearing dense jungle for a United Fruit Company banana plantation were amazed to find dozens of large stone ball-shaped objects, many of them perfectly spherical.
The stones are believed to have been carved between 200 BC and 1500 A.D. Most stones are no longer in their original locations. The culture of the people who made them, disappeared after the Spanish conquest.
Numerous myths surround the stones, such as they came from Atlantis, or that they were made as such by nature. Some local legends state that the native inhabitants had access to a potion able to soften the rock.The spheres are perfect, or very near perfect in roundness. How did primitive people with crude tools manage to sculpt huge artifacts like these with such great precision, and why? The giant stone balls of Costa Rica remain a mystery.
