8,000-year-old rock carvings in Arabia may be world’s oldest megastructure blueprints

Stars and contours engraved in rocks on the Arabian Peninsula could signify close by looking traps, making these carvings the primary scale-plan diagrams in human historical past, in keeping with a brand new research that reveals people’ refined understanding of area round 8,000 years in the past.

Archaeologists first observed these buildings, often called desert kites, about 100 years in the past, when aerial pictures started taking off with airplanes. Kites are giant areas of land bordered by low stone partitions, generally with pits scattered on the within close to the sides. Discovered primarily within the Center East and Central Asia, kites are thought to have functioned like pens or traps for animals. Hunters would herd animals, like gazelle, into the kite by way of an extended, slim passage, the place the sport can be unable to flee the partitions or the pits, making them simpler to kill. 

Due to their huge dimension — averaging near the sq. footage of two soccer fields — kites can’t be seen of their entirety from the bottom. However the introduction of publicly accessible, high-resolution satellite tv for pc photographs, corresponding to these from Google Earth, has jump-started the research of desert kites prior to now decade.

The latest discovery of architectural-like designs engraved in rocks in Jordan and Saudi Arabia has revealed how Neolithic people could have deliberate these “mega-traps,” in keeping with a brand new research, printed Wednesday (Might 17) within the journal PLOS One (opens in new tab).