Archaeologists have unearthed ancient stone carvings of huge animal traps in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which may be the earliest “blueprints” ever discovered.
Estimated to be between 7,000 and 8,000 years old, the engravings are accurate plans of nearby structures that archaeologists call “desert kites” – converging lines of stacked stones that were probably used to drive wild herds of gazelles and antelopes into holes along corners.
Regardless of the purpose of the structures, newly found plans show insight into huge kites – often larger than two football fields – that will be unmatched for millennia, says Rémy Crassard, an archaeologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and co-author of the study. published May 17 at PLUS ONE. Even today, kites can only be fully appreciated by observing them from the air.
“The surprising finding is that the plans are scaling,” Krassar says. They take a sophisticated approach to kites, “limited by shape, symmetry and size,” he adds. “We had no idea that people at the time could do it with such precision.”
Previously, several architectural plans for buildings and boats were known. Most of them are from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and may be up to 7,000 years old. There are also what may be a few rough stone age diagrams. But nothing so old and so accurate has never been seen before, the researchers say.
One engraving depicting a kite is carved on a stone approximately 80 centimeters long and 32 centimeters wide. Archaeologists found it in 2015 at an ancient campsite next to a kite in the Jibal al-Khashabiya area of the Jordanian desert.
Seven other nearby kites on the edge of a plateau that stretches more than 20 kilometers south are built in the same pattern: a star-shaped body with pitted corners and curved “rudder lines” to allow hunters to guide the panicking herd. into it, the researchers write in their study.
The heaped stones are often nothing more than lines on the desert floor, and Crassar notes that gazelles and antelopes could easily jump over them. But they were visible enough for the animals to shy away from them and run into the pits, he says. According to the researchers, each animal could provide one person with meat for several weeks.
The surrounding landscape is now a rocky desert, but it was greener when the kites were made and is still of majestic beauty, says archaeologist Wael Abu-Azize of the Badiya Southeast Archaeological Project in Jordan, another of the study’s lead authors.
“The plateau is bordered by a paleolake, a natural depression in which water collected in ancient times, and comes out to the horizon,” he says.
The second engraving, found in 2015 while surveying the Jabal al-Zilliyat escarpment in Saudi Arabia, is carved on a sandstone boulder over three meters wide and two meters high. The boulder is midway between two pairs of star-shaped desert kites that match the engraving. The entrances to each pair of kites are close together, suggesting that hunters may try to catch the herd no matter which way the animals run.
The researchers carried out radiocarbon dating of samples taken from Jordanian sites and found that the engravings and kites were made around the same time, approximately 8,000 years ago. they suspect that the engraving and kites in Saudi Arabia are about 7,000 years old.
An obvious interpretation is that the engravings represent kite building plans, making them the earliest “drawings” of anything ever discovered.
But they can also be maps of already built kites for hunting planning, or symbolic representations of kites that can be used in rituals, says Abu-Azize. “These people were living kites, kite-eating, sleeping kites… maybe they needed to translate that into structural blueprints.”
Abu-Azize cannot count how many hunters worked with kites, assuming they may have had dogs and therefore needed fewer people.
The research team first thought that nomadic hunters moved between distant kites with migrations of herds of gazelles and antelopes. But now it seems that the migrating animals tended to stay in roughly the same area, so a set of kites could be used for months, says Abu-Azize. It also suggests that the ruins of nearby camps (such as the one in Jordan) may have been longer-lived settlements, which he plans to explore further.
Archaeologists have discovered over 6,000 desert kites in the Middle East and Central Asia; parts of Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia have up to one kite for every square kilometer. Middle Eastern kites are the oldest and there is evidence that some have been in use for thousands of years.
Archaeologist Hugh Thomas of the University of Western Australia, who was not involved in the new study, is the director of a research project in Saudi Arabia dedicated to mustache– huge ceremonial monuments built by piling up stones about 8000 years ago. They are often found in the same areas as the desert kite, but appear to have been used for processions and worship.
More than 1,000 mustatils are known to exist. All of them are in Saudi Arabia. In some cases, kites were built before the Mustatils, but some kites were built later, indicating that kites were so effective as animal traps that new ones were built and used for a long period of time, Thomas says. .
“Similar to our study of the Mustatils, this article demonstrates that even 7,000 years ago Neolithic people could design and build monumental structures using the landscape,” he says.
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