Archaeologists discovered 62 rock art panels with 176 animal and human prints. The white layout shows the oldest layer and different shades of blue show overlapping prints. The scale is 10 centimeters wide.
176 engravings about 12,000 years old were discovered in Saudi Arabia. Representations of camels recorded on cliff faces over 40 meters high served to guide the way.
The oldest inhabitants of the Arab desert created monumental works of rock art on cliff faces.
These authentic visual headlights They served as traffic signs to guide people toward crucial water sources.
Michael Petragliafrom Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and his colleagues discovered, in 2023, 176 engravings In 62 panels with 12,000 years in the Nefud Desert, Saudi Arabia.
These works of art – called as Prehistoric traffic signs -They were now detailed in a study this Tuesday in Nature Communications.
There were 90 images of “Signal Camels” In actual size, another 15 smaller camel prints and two camel footprints.
One of the rock art places had a 3 meter high dromedary; And it was more than 40 meters above the cliff. Only impossible for team members to reach and safely examine using a drone.
“It was dangerous to do these prints. I would never go up there,” the investigation leader told.
As the same magazine describes, next to the camels, and highlighting how most benign the climate must have been, other large animals are including ibex, horses, gazelles and auroques.
The team also found recorded human figures and facial masks.
“This is not just scribbling or marking the landscape. These are engravings of things that would have been iconic to them culturally,” says Petraglia.
Petraglia describes artists like “these will probably have been very mobile and highly innovative people,” he says. “These are sophisticated and definitely not people trying to understand things rudimentary hunters.”
The path of “rare waters”
Investigators say the images may have been carved to warn any outsiders that the earth was already occupied or to serve as SIGNALIZATION OF PRECIOUS WATER SOURCES.
As noted to New Scientist, the new findings add evidence of the extensive past occupation of Saudi Arabia in prehistoric times.
Indicating the antiquity of the images, a natural varnish About the engravings, a process that investigators know how to take about 8000 years. However, it was not possible to directly date the art, so the team escaped the sediments under the rock art panels.
Then they found stone tips, accounts, and oysters indicating connections with the people of the final neolithic in the uprising, as well as tools that would have been used to make the engravings.
The objects were dated between 12,800 and 11,400 years.
