In Jordan and Saudi Arabia, archaeologists have unearthed ancient stone carvings of vast animal traps, perhaps the oldest “blueprints” ever discovered.
Estimated to be about 7,000 to 8,000 years old, the carving is an accurate plan of a nearby structure that archaeologists call a “desert kite,” possibly holding a flock of wild gazelles or antelopes in its horns. A converging row of stacked stones used to drive into a pit.
Archaeologist Remy Classard of the French National Center for Scientific Research says that regardless of the building’s purpose, the newly discovered blueprints are giant kites (often football (CNRS) and co-lead author of the study published May 17. pro swan. Even today, kites can be fully appreciated just by looking at them from the sky.
“The surprising finding is that the program scales,” says Classard. They represent a sophisticated approach to kites “constrained by shape, symmetry and dimensions,” he added. “I didn’t know people back then could do it with such precision.”
Several architectural plans for buildings and boats were known. Most are from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and at most he may be 7,000 years old. There are also some what appear to be rough schematics dating back to the Stone Age. But researchers say they’ve never seen anything this old and precise.
One sculpture depicting a kite is carved into the rock about 80 centimeters long and 32 centimeters wide. Archaeologists discovered it in 2015 at an ancient campsite next to a kite in the Jibal al-Hashabieh region of the Jordanian desert.
Seven other kites nearby, on the edge of a plateau that stretches more than 20 kilometers to the south, are also built in the same pattern. The star-shaped enclosure has holes in the corners and curved “running lines” that hunters can use to guide panicked herds. Researchers write in it in their studies.
Stacked stones are often just lines on the desert floor, and gazelles and antelopes could have easily jumped over them, Crassard said. But they were visible enough that the animals would have avoided them and taken refuge in the pits, he says. And each animal would have provided one person with several weeks’ worth of meat, the researchers estimate.
The surrounding landscape, which is now a stony desert, was greener when the kites were made and is still sublimely beautiful, says Badia Archaeologists in Southeast Jordan, one of the lead authors of the study. Project archaeologist Wael Abu Aziz said.
“This plateau borders Paleolake, a natural depression that collected water long ago, and overlooks this lake toward the horizon,” he says.
The second carving was discovered in 2015 during surveys of the Jebel as Ziriyat cliffs in Saudi Arabia and is carved into a sandstone rock that is over 3 meters wide and 2 meters high. This rock is situated between two pairs of star-shaped desert kites that correspond to the carvings. The entrances of each pair of kites were close to each other, suggesting that hunters may have tried to trap the flock regardless of which direction the animals fled.
Researchers performed radiocarbon tests on samples taken from archaeological sites in Jordan and found that the carvings and the kites were made around the same time, about 8,000 years ago. They believe that both the sculpture and the kite in Saudi Arabia are about 7,000 years old.
The obvious interpretation is that the sculpture is a plan for constructing a kite, making it the earliest ‘blueprint’ ever discovered.
But they could also be kite maps already constructed to plan hunts, or symbolic representations of kites that could be used in rituals, Abuazidze says. “They were living kites, eating kites, sleeping kites… Perhaps they needed to convert this to structural drawings.”
Abu Azidze could not estimate how many hunters had flown the kites, reasoning that they had dogs, so fewer people would be needed.
The researchers initially thought that nomadic hunters migrated between distant kites as gazelles and antelope herds migrated. But now, migratory animals tended to stay in roughly the same area, and a set of kites could have been in use for months at a time, says Abuazidze. This also suggests that the remains of nearby camps (such as the Jordanian camp) may have been longer-lasting settlements, which he intends to investigate next.
Archaeologists have found over 6,000 desert kites in the Middle East and Central Asia. In some areas of Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, there is a maximum of one kite per square kilometer. Kites from the Middle East are among the oldest, with 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, focused on the Mastill, a huge ceremonial monument built of stacked stones about 8,000 years ago. Director of a research project in Saudi Arabia. They are often found in the same area as desert kites, but apparently were used for processions and worship.
Over 1,000 mustachils are known to exist. They are all found in Saudi Arabia. In some cases the kites were made before the Mustatil, but some were made after, and the kites were so effective as animal traps that new kites were made and used over a long period of time. says Thomas.
“Similar to our study on Mustatil, this paper shows that even 7,000 years ago, Neolithic people were able to design and build landscape-based monumental structures. It shows,” he says.
