Archaeologists made an impressive discovery recently in Saudi Arabia. They found a series of stone carvings with the oldest known architectural plans and dating back 9,000 years.
These structures were called desert kites by aviators in the 1920s, as this is the shape they appear to have when seen from the air.
“They are large structures, delimited by low walls, which are several kilometers long (…) and which lead to an open space of approximately one hectare, in which deep pits of several meters are dug”, said Olivier Barge, archaeologist and cartographer at the Archeorient Laboratory of the University of Lyon-2 in France.
Sophisticated hunting technique
Constructions of this kind would allow “a sophisticated hunting technique, the animals being driven into that space before being directed to the pits where they were slaughtered”, explained the French specialist, co-author of the study published this month in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), according to g4media.ro.
“We would not be able to accurately reproduce the plan of a kite, as is the case here,” the archaeologist also said.
“We have no idea how they managed this,” added Olivier Barge, who emphasized “the vastly underestimated mental mastery of spatial perception.”
According to current theories, the art of cartography was born much later, more precisely “in a culture that mastered writing, with a tradition of archives, integrated in exchange networks”, explained the same specialist.
Like that of Mesopotamia, more than 5,000 years old, or even Bronze Age Europe, 4,000 years old, this too has a real chance of changing everything known about history.
The discoveries in Jordan and Saudi Arabia call into question the theories formulated so far. The mega-structures are built in a complex topography, excluding the idea of an initial plan that was then implemented on the ground, g4media.ro also informs.
