12,000-year-old rock art emerges in Saudi Arabia

The discovery hints at complex early settlement in the region after Ice Age

- FRANZ LIDZ

A panel of weathered, two-dimensional carvings depicting 19 life-size camels and three donkeys was etched into the escarpment 130 feet above. The engravings, on the side of a mountain known as Jebel Misma, were later found to have been created between 11,400 and 12,800 years ago. Theyare the oldest large-scale naturalistic animal art ever found in the Middle East and are among the oldest in the world.

“We got really lucky with this discovery,’ said Maria Guagnin, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Germany who directed the field project. “The engravings are so faded that they are only visible forabout 90 minutes in the morning, when the sun rises over the mountain and the light hits the rock art at just the right moment.’

She is the lead author of a study published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications that helps to closea gap in the archaeological record for this region. The paperargues that freshwater sources like water holes and seasonal lakes shaped early human settlement in the desert after the Ice Age.