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Guagnin adds that the camels shown in the images were probably wild.

This made us think that the Camel Site is part of this wider tradition but has a special place within that because it’s the only spot where we have it so concentrated and where we have high relief to the point that it looks like the animal is coming out of the rock.” “… Quite a few Neolithic depictions of fauna are equally life-size, detailed and naturalistic but they are two-dimensional. “Part of the difficulty in dating the site is that there are no parallels to it, so it was difficult to imagine what it was linked to,” Guagnin tells Haaretz. Other two-dimensional engravings have been found in the area, but nothing on par with the Camel Site. Guagnin says it’s unclear whether the same group that created the Camel Site also made the mustatils. The region’s inhabitants built thousands of stone monuments known as mustatils across tens of thousands of square miles. Whatever the symbolism of the sculptures, this may have been a place to bring the whole community together.Īt the time of the statues’ creation, around the sixth millennium B.C.E., the Arabian Peninsula was filled with grassland and much wetter than it is now. “Neolithic communities repeatedly returned to the Camel Site, meaning its symbolism and function was maintained over many generations,” says Guagnin in a statement. Patterns of weathering on the sculptures show they were reengraved and reshaped over time. “So whatever the symbolism of the sculptures, this may have been a place to bring the whole community together.” “Communities of hunters and herders tend to be very dispersed and mobile, and it’s important for them to meet at regular times during the year, to exchange information, spouses and so on,” Guagnin tells Haaretz’s Ariel David. This suggests that the site was tied to fertility or a specific time of year.

Some of the camels depicted in the reliefs have bulging necklines and round bellies-typical features of the animals during mating season. Carving each relief took between 10 and 15 days the ambitious project was likely a communal effort. They would have needed some type of scaffolding to reach the higher parts of the rocky surface. “Every day the Neolithic was more likely, until we realized it was absolutely a Neolithic site we were looking at,” Guagnin tells the National.Īs Stephanie Pappas reports for Live Science , the camels’ carvers used tools made out of a stone called chert, which was brought in from at least nine miles away. The Camel Site may have hosted regular gatherings organized by dispersed hunting and herding people. Additionally, a stone mason found no signs of pottery or the use of metal tools at the site. But radiocarbon dating, analysis of weathering patterns and other dating methods suggested a much older origin. The original estimate of the artworks’ age was based partly on the existence of other camel reliefs made in Jordan around that time.

In addition to about a dozen camels, the artwork depicts two animals that may be donkeys, mules or horses. “There were life-sized camels and equids two or three layers on top of each other.”Īncient artists carved the images into three rocky spurs, notes Ewelina Lepionko for Albawaba. “They are absolutely stunning and, bearing in mind we see them now in a heavily eroded state with many panels fallen, the original site must’ve been absolutely mind blowing,” lead author Maria Guagnin, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, tells the National. Researchers dated the carvings through a chemical analysis and an examination of tool marks found at the site, reports Daniel Bardsley for the National. In contrast, Egypt’s Pyramids of Giza are 4,500 years old, while England’s Stonehenge was built about 5,000 years ago. As Arab News reports, this timeline would likely make the sculptures the world’s oldest surviving large-scale, three-dimensional animal reliefs. The findings, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, suggest that the so-called Camel Site actually dates to between 7,000 and 8,000 years ago. Now, a new study suggests that this proposed timeframe was off by as much as 6,000 years.

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When researchers in northern Saudi Arabia found a series of life-size camel sculptures in 2018, they estimated that the artworks dated back some 2,000 years.

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