Page 4 - Middle Holocene News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Scientists have found new evidence that the Renland Ice Cap in eastern Greenland has grown and shrank repeatedly ...

Archaeologists Say a Mystifying Group of Ancient Monuments in Saudi Arabia Suggests the Existence of a Prehistoric Cattle Cult The massive monuments were built at a time when the land was covered in verdant green plantlife. Surveying mustatils via helicopter reconnaissance. Photo ©Aerial Archaeology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Royal Commission for AlUla. A mysterious group of ancient monuments first discovered in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, known as mustatials, predate the first Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge by over 2,000 years, making them the world’s oldest ritual landscap...

‘Mustatil’ sounds like a low-priced knockoff of a popular incontinence medication, but it’s more like a monumental knockoff of Stonehenge … except these stone monuments in Saudi Arabia are older that Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid and more numerous than their stone counterparts in England. While these mustatils (the name means ‘rectangle’ in Arabic) have been known about for years, it was only recently that aerial mapping counted their numbers (over 1,000) and ground studies confirmed their age (over 7,000 years old). However, their purpose to the area’s prehistoric culture re...

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, base...

The results of their research have now been published in the journal Antiquity and it is the largest study of these structures ever conducted. The paper reveals that there are nearly twice as many mustatils in the region than previously believed. Dr. Thomas says, “We documented over 1000 mustatils, covering over 200,000 km².” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the impressive nature and sheer number of aerial photographs motivated the team to want to explore them on the ground too. Dr. Thomas says, “that's when we really began to realise how complex these structures actually are!” Features of...