Ancient Arabian desert rock art showing camels marked water sources

By Will Dunham

(Reuters) -About 12,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers who inhabited a swathe of Arabian desert carved life-sized images of camels and other animals on sandstone cliffs and boulders, using rock art to mark the location of water sources in an illustration of how ancient people tackled some of Earth’s most inhospitable environs.

Researchers said the monumental rock art was found south of the Nefud desert of northern Saudi Arabia at locales spanning a distance of about 20 miles (30 km) in mountainous terrain.

About 60 rock art panels bear more than 130 images of animals – primarily camels, but also ibex, gazelles, wild donkeys and an aurochs, a bovine thought to be the wild ancestor of modern domestic cattle. Some of the camel engravings were more than 7 feet (2 meters) tall and 8-1/2 feet (2.6 meters) long.

While many of the images were situated on boulders within easy reach of the ground, some were crafted on towering cliffs including one that was about 128 feet (39 meters) off the ground and was engraved with 19 camels and three donkeys.

“The engravers would have had to stand on a ledge directly in front of the cliff,” said archaeologist and rock art researcher Maria Guagnin of the University of Sydney and the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature Communications.

“It would have been extremely dangerous to make these engravings as the ledge is very narrow and slopes downwards. Standing on this ledge, the engravers would also not have been able to see the whole image they were creating. But they had the skill to still produce a naturalistic representation,” Guagnin added.

The researchers said the rock art marked the location of transient water sources on the harsh desert landscape.

“These ancient communities survived in the desert by moving between seasonal lakes, and they marked these water sources, and the paths leading to them, with monumental rock art,” Guagnin said.

The researchers used a technique called luminescence dating on simple stone tools they discovered that were used to make the rock art in order to determine that the engravings were made between 12,800 and 11,400 years ago.

“The findings show that communities were able to become fully established in desert environments much earlier than previously thought,” Guagnin said. “They must have known the landscape incredibly well.”

“Most of the camels show male camels in rut, identifiable by the straining neck muscles as they make a rumbling noise during the mating season – which is normally during the wet season. So the rock art links to the rainy season and marks locations where water pools,” Guagnin added.

There also is evidence that these people added to the rock art for two to three millennia, Guagnin said.

The researchers do not know if the art originally was colorfully decorated with paint.

“The engravings are exposed to the elements, and if they were once painted the pigment would have washed off long ago,” Guagnin said.

During the height of the last Ice Age some 20,000 to 25,000 years ago, Arabia was so arid that there was no known human habitation. But about 15,000 years ago a period of higher rainfall began, forming some wetlands and ponds in a desert environment that was getting a bit greener. The rock art reveals the timing of the hunter-gatherers who subsequently inhabited the region, the researchers said.

“This story resonates today in that these people show remarkable abilities to expand, cope and survive in marginal landscapes,” said anthropologist and study co-author Michael Petraglia, director of the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University.

Some artifacts recovered in the excavations resemble those found in the broader region, suggesting a degree of interaction between these hunter-gatherers and other peoples. But the monumental rock art is unlike anything else known in the broader region.

“These communities had contact with neighboring groups in the Levant over 400 km (250 miles) away, but they also had their own identity,” Guagnin said. “They clearly marked water sources with rock art, but we can’t be sure if that marks access rights, or perhaps also expresses a wish for the water to return in the next season. Perhaps there were multiple reasons. From the sheer effort that was required, we can tell this rock art was very important to them.”

(Reporting by Will Dunham in Washington, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)