Observatoire des droits humains (anglais seulement)

12,000-year-old rock art marked ancient water sources in Arabia’s desert

(Version anglaise seulement)

par Maria Guagnin, Director, Ha’il Archaeology Identification Project, University of Sydney; Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology
Ceri Shipton, Lecturer in Palaeolithic Archaeology, UCL
Frans van Buchem, Professor, Earth Systems Science and Engineering
Michael Petraglia, Director, Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University

About 12,000 years ago, high up on a cliff in the desert of northern Arabia, an artist – or perhaps artists – was hard at work.

Standing on a narrow ledge and with primitive tools, they engraved into the rock an image of a life-sized camel. This wasn’t the first artwork of its kind: in fact, there was already an entire row of fresh camel engravings on the 39-metre-high cliff face, below which a shallow lake sparkled in the sunshine.

Over thousands of years, these engravings weathered the elements. They gradually eroded until they were almost invisible and had been forgotten.…

Lire l'article complet