( AFP ) - For the past couple of years, these mysterious circles of carved stone figures, which villagers in southern Nigeria still worship on occasion, have been causing a frenzy of excitement here.
Newspapers have trumpeted the Ikom monoliths - phallic-shaped pieces of volcanic rock largely ignored for centuries - as being remnants of a glorious civilization made up in equal parts of Ancient Egypt and the Old Testament.
One theory even cites them as evidence that the biblical Garden of Eden lay in what is now Nigeria.
Nigerian bloggers have been waxing lyrical about a "high technology civilization based in the present-day location of the Sahara desert". This civilization, whose "hallmarks included the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid of Egypt", was "decimated by the deluge and by the war of the gods of antiquity".
The stones themselves, which stand between 1 and 1.8 metres (3 and 5 feet) high, and which are laid out in some 30 circles in and around Alok village in Cross River State, are intriguing rather than awe-inspiring.
They were recently added to the World Monuments Fund's (WMF) list of sites in danger and are on the "tentative" list for possible inclusion in UNESCO's World Heritage Site list.
If included they would be Nigeria's third site, after Sukhur and the Sacred Forest of Osun.
The most immediate threats to the stones are erosion, exposure to humidity, heavy rainfall and extreme heat and sun, damage from falling trees and theft and vandalism, WMF says.
In the state capital Calabar giant versions of the stones - 20 or 30 times the size of the originals - were constructed last year to decorate a roundabout.
The population knows they come from "somewhere after Ikom", a town several hoursA' drive to the north.
"The people up there used to worship them; sometimes they still do," ventures a local resident called Wisdom, viewing one of the original stones in the garden of Calabar museum.
But even 20 or 30 kilometres outside Alok, ask for the "big grey stones" and all you will get is a blank look.
Only a cousin of Alok's Chief Sylvanus Ekoh Akong, located by chance at a makeshift roadside bar, was able to show the way.
Chief Sylvanus' monoliths have been given a walled enclosure planted with a huge orange tree, poinsettias and palms. Despite his immense girth, the chief trots from stone to stone, sweat trickling down from under his black felt hat.
He reads into the facial features and geometrical carvings everything from the symbols of leadership to the birth of feminism, fertility, war and peace.
Dates however, are not the chief's strongpoint - he explains the first archeologists to study the monoliths in a neighbouring village used carbon dating to put their age at around 2000 years.
More recent studies, he said, also using carbon dating, have estimated the age of the stones at Alok at 4500 years - that is roughly as old as the Egyptian pyramids.
A question on the likelihood of subsequent civilisations having built the same type of monolith over a period of 2500 years leaves him unfazed.
Ten minutes later he has multiplied the age of the stones by 100 and is assuring his visitors the monoliths are 450,000 years old.