^
(Guagnin et al., J. Anthropol. Archaeol, 2017)
This 8,000-Year-Old Rock Art Is The Earliest Depiction of Domesticated Dogs
Who's a good ancient boy?
MICHELLE STARR
17 NOV 2017
Dogs have been our best friends for a very long time, and now we have the earliest ever pictorial evidence of that bond.
Prehistoric rock art found in Saudi Arabia shows humans hunting with dogs on leashes - and it looks like those pictures could be at least 8,000 years old, making them the earliest art depicting dogs.
If the dating turns out to be accurate, it would also beat
Iranian pottery painted with dogs from just under 8,000 years ago.
We have evidence of dog domestication that stretches back for millennia.
Fossils that are over 30,000 years old show a breed of canid that differed from wolves, more closely resembling dogs.
The earliest strong evidence for domestication to date is the
remains of a dog found buried with two humans, dating back 14,700 years, in Germany.
Fossil records are one thing, but there is a lot they can't tell us - such as how humans interacted with their canine companions.
This is where the rock paintings come in, found at two sites in Saudi Arabia, Shuwaymis and Jubbah. Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History archaeologist Maria Guagnin has been helping catalogue over 1,400 rock art panels from the two sites, between them depicting over 7,000 humans and animals.
In among the cattle and often obscured by later pastoral carvings, Guagnin discovered at least 349 dogs - 156 in Shuwaymis and 193 in Jubbah.
A human and a pack of dogs hunting an equid and its young. (Guagnin et al., J. Anthropol. Archaeol, 2017)
"When Maria came to me with the rock art photos and asked me if they meant anything, I about lost my mind," co-author Angela Perri, a zooarchaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology,
told Science.
"A million bones won't tell me what these images are telling me. It's the closest thing you're going to get to a YouTube video."
Around 10,000 years ago, the two regions were much more hospitable, and humans
began to settle there, perhaps after
leaving them for a period during which they were too arid to be habitable.
However, transitioning from hunting-based subsistence to farming and raising cattle wouldn't occur until
sometime between 6800 BC and 6200 BC - around 7,000 to 8,000 years ago, based on bones found in the region.
The carvings of dogs probably appeared prior to this time - based on the later pastoral carvings and the weathering of the rock.
"The dog art is at least 8,000 to 9,000 years old,"
Guagnin said.
During the interval of hunting for subsistence, it seems the human settlers hunted with their dogs. The dogs are shown with lines carved connecting them to the hunters - which could be either leashes, or a metaphor for the bond between man and beast.
The dogs are also depicted assisting in the hunt. Three dogs are shown biting the necks and the belly of ibex, as well as the necks of gazelles. Another scene shows dogs surrounding an
equid and its young, setting on the younger animal and biting its neck.
Different landscapes also suggest different hunting strategies. The Shuwaymis art shows larger packs, better to drive game into the narrow traps afforded by the sandstone escarpments. The Jubbah art shows smaller packs, better suited to ambushing prey at watering holes.
Meanwhile, the accompanying humans are shown bearing weapons that look like bows and spears.
(Guagnin et al., J. Anthropol. Archaeol, 2017)
The dogs are curly-tailed, medium-sized, with pricked ears, short snouts and a deeply angled chest. They resemble, the researchers said, the modern
Canaan breed of dog.
These mostly feral dogs are a
basal breed, and have lived in the Middle East
for thousands of years, although it is unknown whether they originated there or elsewhere.
What's even more awesome is that all of the dogs have individual traits. Some are drawn with spots on their coats, or white patches on the head or chest. Some are clearly male, and all have different tail positions, stances, and coat colourations.
This could mean that the artists carving the dogs were merely trying to depict a broad dog population - but it could also mean that the dogs were specific, individual dogs known to the artists, and special to them.
The carvings tell us a lot about how the humans controlled and hunted with their dogs, as well as about the dogs themselves - their coats and behaviour. Now, they say, more research will be required to search the area for domestic dog remains from the time period.
The research has been published in the
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.
https://www.sciencealert.com/1000-y...abia-earliest-depiction-domestic-dogs-hunting
Cool. Not long ago the Arabian sand cat was proven to be the ancestor of the domesticated cat as well.
DNA Study Reveals Tale of Cat Domestication
Monday, June 19, 2017
(© Hierakonopolis Expedition)
LEUVEN, BELGIUM—Cat domestication is thought to be linked to the beginning of agriculture, when early farmers first stored rodent-attracting grains. According to a report in
Seeker, a team led by Claudio Ottoni of the University of Leuven analyzed the DNA of 200 domestic cats who lived over a period spanning 9,000 years in the Near East, Egypt, Europe, north and east Africa, and southwest Asia.
The study suggests that all domesticated cats descend from the African wildcat Felis silvestris, and were first tamed in the Near East some 10,000 years ago. The animals traveled with migrating farmers to Europe, and later spread out from Egypt on rodent-infested trade ships. Ottoni explained, however, that it is unclear whether the Egyptian domesticated cat descended from domesticated cats imported from the Near East, or whether a second, separate, domestication took place in Egypt.
Most house cats alive today descend from cats that can be traced back to Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. The DNA analysis also revealed that the blotched coat pattern did not become common in cats until the medieval period. Until then, most cats were striped. For more on felines in the archaeological record, go to “
Baby Bobcat.”
http://www.archaeology.org/news/5668-170619-dna-cat-domestication
My favorite cat is the Arabian sand cat.
Hunting with Saluki dogs in the desert;
Race in UAE (the title of the video is wrong);
They are great hunting dogs and I wonder if those ancient dogs depicted are the ancestors of Salukis? Most likely.
A Close-Up on Mysteries Made of Stone in Saudi Arabia’s Desert
Structures that may have been created by ancient tribes could only be studied using Google Earth. Saudi officials finally invited an archaeologist to observe them via helicopter.
By
Nicholas St. Fleur
Nov. 17, 2017
Image
A group of 19 "keyholes" at Al Wadi, in the Saudi Arabian desert, observed by archaeologist David Kennedy from a helicopter. Dr. Kennedy took more than 6,000 aerial photographs of these mysterious, ancient structures.CreditDavid Kennedy
For nearly a decade,
David Kennedy marveled from behind his computer screen at thousands of mysterious stone structures scattered across Saudi Arabia’s desert. With Google Earth’s satellite imagery at his fingertips, the archaeologist peeked at burial sites and other so-called Works of the Old Men, created by nomadic tribes thousands of years ago.
But he was unable to secure permission to visit the country to observe up close the ancient designs that he and amateur archaeologists had studied from their desktops.
Last month, after announcing he had identified nearly
400 stone “gates,” Dr. Kennedy received the invitation of a lifetime from Saudi officials to investigate the hidden structures from a helicopter.
“They are absolutely astonishing,” said Dr. Kennedy, who recently retired from the University of Western Australia. “From 500 feet, you can see the vital details of structures that are invisible in the fuzzy image on Google Earth.”
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Over the course of three days, he snapped more than 6,000 aerial photographs, lifting the veil on the ancient wonders.
Image
"Gates" at Samhah, which are more than 1,200 feet long.CreditDavid Kennedy
Since 1997, Dr. Kennedy has studied similar structures in neighboring Jordan from the ground and sky. Many of the stone figures in both countries are in basalt fields known as harrats. The fields often feature dried up lava streams that twist and turn like slithering snakes across the dark landscape.
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In Saudi Arabia, he explored 200 sites from the air across the regions of Harrat Khaybar and Harrat Uwayrid. The structures he observed ranged in shapes and sizes, which he describes as gates, kites, triangles, bull’s eyes and keyholes.
Of the 400 structures he describes as “gates” that he had identified on Google Earth, Dr. Kennedy studied about 40 from the helicopter and found that the structures were not randomly put together.
Image
Gates with a "bull's eye." CreditDavid Kennedy
“We could see immediately they were much more complicated than they appeared on Google Earth,” Dr. Kennedy said. They were not simply heaps of stone.
Rather, each long bar was actually made up of two parallel lines of flat slabs placed on their edges facing each other with small stones filling the space in between.
“They are much more sophisticated than I was prepared for,” he said.
Some gates were larger than 1,000 feet long and 250 feet wide. He suspected the oldest may be about 9,000 years old. Though he is not sure of their purpose, he speculated they may have been used for farming purposes.
Image
A "kite" structure in the Harrat Khaybar region.CreditDavid Kennedy
Dr. Kennedy also got a closer look at about a dozen of the “kites” that were first discovered in the Middle East by pilots in the 1920s. These are the most famous of the Works of the Old Men, and Dr. Kennedy has identified more than 900 of them in Saudi Arabia’s Harrat Khaybar.
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From above, they typically resemble kites with strings and tails. They are often very large, with many stretching more than a quarter-mile. Archaeologists think gazelle were corralled into the head of the kite, where the hunters would come out to kill them. Sometimes multiple kites would overlap, so that if the animals got past one funnel they would get caught in another.
“Essentially there was no escape,” said Dr. Kennedy.
The ones in Saudi Arabia looked as if they were better built than the ones in Jordan, according to Dr. Kennedy.
Image
Left, Dr. Kennedy's helicopter casting a shadow near a bullseye. Right, a Khaybar kite.CreditDavid Kennedy
The harrats were littered with the smaller structures he has named keyholes, wheels, triangles and bull’s-eyes.
Dr. Kennedy said he was surprised at how straight the lines of the triangles and keyholes were, as if the people who made them had picked out specific flat stones rather than random rocks.
Each triangle was isosceles and looked like it was pointing at something. Sometimes they were directed to a bull’s-eye that was about 15 feet or 150 feet away.
There were also several keyhole structures, sometimes lined up together. The heads of the keyholes were almost always near-perfect circles, and the walls were about three feet high.
These structures may have served some funerary or symbolic purpose. Dr. Kennedy did not date any of the structures he visited with radiocarbon testing, but he said that future groups should perform more thorough analysis.
“It’s absolutely vital that somebody follows up with serious groundwork,” he said.
Image
Keyhole pendants.CreditDavid Kennedy
Dr. Kennedy was invited by Amr AlMadani, the chief executive officer of the Royal Commission for Al-Ula Province, which was created to safeguard some of the country’s geological, historical and archaeological sites.
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“Dr. Kennedy has spent many years poring over Google Earth images, and we were able to get him much closer to the sites,” said Mr. AlMadani, who joined Dr. Kennedy in the helicopter and described the experience as exciting.
“Thinking about how life was in the Arabian Peninsula and trying to imagine the way people hunted, lived and buried the dead was very much enriching,” he wrote in an email.
Image
A bull's eye and triangle formation at Samhah as it's seen from Google Earth, left, and photographed by Dr. Kennedy.CreditLeft, Google Earth; Right, David Kennedy
“Seeing it on Google images is one thing, but seeing it from a helicopter window from 300 feet is a totally different thing,” said Don Boyer, who accompanied Dr. Kennedy.
At the age of 70, Mr. Boyer is completing his doctorate in geoarchaeology and hydrology. “I think I was on a high the whole time. It was just remarkable. You run out of adjectives.”
Image
A gate overlain with a bullseye pendant, surrounded by lava rock.CreditDavid Kennedy
Archaeologists not involved in the work called it a step forward in showing the rich and complicated prehistory of the Arabian Peninsula.
Huw Groucutt, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, said the new images were very important, and that they can help show how human societies have modified the landscape.
“The challenge now is to conduct work on the ground,” he added.
Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, agreed.
“What is so critical is to do ground survey and detailed excavation work. Otherwise, archaeological sites will often time seem mysterious and enigmatic,” he said in an email.
“Now the big and more difficult task is to document such structures on the ground to examine their function and to understand human life” in the region over time, he added.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/science/saudi-arabia-gates.html