'Superhighways' used by a population of up to 6.5 million Indigenous Australians to navigate the continent tens of thousands of years ago have provided.
Get email notification for articles from Ruth Schuster
Follow
Apr. 30, 2021 2:12 AM
Thousands of giant stone structures dot the desert of the Arabian peninsula, chiefly in northwest Saudi Arabia. The age and purpose of these monumental edifices, which differ in size and shape, has been a mystery. Now a new paper published in the journal of Antiquity puts a timeline on their prehistoric construction, and supports the theory that these were not traps, or pens, or burials; they were some of the earliest monumental ritual structures in the world.
The monumental structures, called mustatils, based on the Arabic word for “rectangle,” were erected between 8,500 to 4,800 years ago, the period known as the Middle Holocene, write Hugh Thomas of the University of Western Australia and colleagues in Antiquity.
Mysterious stone structures in Saudi Arabia older than Egypt s pyramids were used 7,000 years ago by a Neolithic cattle cult to sacrifice animals to an unknown god
Rectangular stone structures have been found scattered across northwestern Saudi Arabia that experts say are 2,500 years older than Stonehenge
Over 1,000 of the rectangular chambers were found, twice previous estimates
The range 65 feet to nearly 2,000 feet long, with sandstone blocks used to make them weighing up to 1,000lb
Cow horns and bones at the sites suggest they were used by a cattle cult
Experts say ancient people sacrificed animals to pray to an unknown god
DUBAI: To be located in AlUla amid the ruins of the ancient North Arabian Kingdom of Dadan and as if to bring back to life the dazzling past of this still enigmatic civilization, the recently announced Kingdom’s Institute, established under the auspices of the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU), is marked to become AlUla’s global hub for archaeological and conservation research.
Its most prominent buildings are destined to be carved themselves into the mountains opposite the archaeological site of Dadan while the design of the remaining edifices will be inspired by the archaeological structures uncovered pertaining to the Dadan civilization.