About 7,000 years ago, a small group of people sat around a fire, next to a small lake in what is now the Nefud Desert of northern Saudi Arabia.
About 7,000 years ago, a small group of people sat around a fire, next to a small lake in what is now the Nefud Desert of northern Saudi Arabia.
We found some of the tools they left behind—and on close inspection of the tools, we discovered these Stone Age herders were busy grinding animal bones, wild plants and pigments while their meat was cooking.
Our results are published in a new paper in PLOS ONE.
Our earlier research has shown that between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago much of Arabia was far wetter and greener than it is today.
Grasslands spread, and trees and shrubs grew near water sources. Lakes formed and provided water. Herders lived around these lakes and led their cattle, sheep and goats to the best pastures.
These Stone Age herders were also skilled artists. They carved thousands of images into rock surfaces on cliffs and boulders, documenting their daily lives.
The rock art shows Stone Age people hunting gazelles, wild donkeys and ibex, and it also shows their most precious possession: their cattle.
Archaeological sites from this period consist of collections of small fireplaces. The herders seem to have been extremely mobile, moving around the landscape with their herds, searching for pasture and water.
On these routes they made small camps near lakes, returning to the same places again and again as the years passed and the seasons turned.
A few years ago, we discovered one such camp at Jebel Oraf, near the Jubbah Oasis, in the Nefud Desert of Northern Saudi Arabia.
On the shores of a small, ancient lake, we discovered 170 small fireplaces.
