Stone Age blueprints are the oldest architectural plans ever found

9,000 years ago, architects created a very precise plan for the vast stone-walled hunting trap. It represents the oldest known architectural plan of any scale in human history.

The plan is carved into a huge stone slab, recently discovered near an elaborate trap known as a desert kite, whose shape is so extensive that it can only be recognized from the air. Remy Classard, of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), said the findings point to an “underappreciated mental mastery of landscapes and spaces” long before Neolithic humans were literate. It is said that it supports that he had

“These are definitely clever person They were as intelligent as we are, but it was the This is the first time,” he says. “It shows how deeply rooted this way of thinking was in their culture.”

Saudi Arabian and Jordanian kites feature funnel-like lines up to 5 kilometers long and up to 10 pointed branches leading to a 4-meter deep hole. First spotted from above in the 1920s and named by an airplane pilot who thought it resembled a toy kite, the structure probably lured gazelles and other wild prey into narrow sections of the structure, where they hunted them down. Wael Abu-Azizeh said it was probably to get hit and fall. At the French Near East Institute.

But despite the complexity of these Stone Age structures, the rare artistic representations of them that have been found so far have been little more than crude abstract sketches. Scientists believed that the earliest true architectural plans, at least intended to scale, belonged to the Mesopotamian civilization 2,300 years ago.

In March 2015, Crassard and his colleagues stumbled upon an 80-centimeter-high, 92-kilogram slab of limestone unearthed at a campsite near a 9,000-year-old kite in Jordan, engraved with detailed architectural plans. was They could scarcely believe it, but even more amazingly, only three months later, this time, a 3.8-meter-tall bird fell off a cliff near his pair of 7,500-year-old kites. I found a second kite plan carved into the sandstone rock. Old kite from Saudi Arabia.

“This was a really moving moment in our scientific career,” says Clashard. “Finding one was already exceptional, but finding two was even more exceptional. We were screaming and dancing!”

Recognizing the similarities to nearby kites, the researchers used computer modeling to mathematically compare the sculpted image with satellite imagery of 69 kites. The plans, carved into the stone, turned out to be a “surprisingly realistic and accurate depiction” of an actual kite within a kilometer or two, Classard said. The two plans he had made in 1:175 and 1:425 scales also included his three-dimensional holes representing kite pitfalls.

The plan may have helped build the huge and intricate structures, but it may also have led hunters to understand how best to use them, Abuazidze says.

That seems the most plausible explanation, says Sam Smith of Oxford Brookes University, UK, who was not involved in the study. Like a football coach drawing tactics on a whiteboard, members of Neolithic communities may have used scale images to communicate with each other about their group’s hunting strategies. “It’s easy to imagine that these sculptures would have formed a key element of the plan,” he says.

The fact that they were inscribed on a “very durable medium” may have meant they were meant to remain for future generations, he added. “New members of the community and hunting parties have no real way of understanding kites without a depiction like this,” says Smith.

Olivier Barge, also of CNRS, is baffled how ancient engineers could have achieved such geometric accuracy without modern tools such as GPS and tacheometers. says. “I don’t know how they did it.”