Don't forget, they look so eroded because the sculptures have been eroding for 8,000+ years.
Also, the original article (original with regard the this HN thread, not the older article you linked to) talked about examining the tool marks. It's not just examining the large shape, it's about seeing the method of construction on a smaller scale.
It’s annoying that an article with this title has such a poor picture, even though much better ones are a quick search away. They talk about mind-boggling realism, but you would not believe it just from this photo. Thanks for the link!
I never realized that camels originated in the Americas
In contrast to popular wisdom, the camel did not originate in the Sahel or Levant. They apparently evolved in North America around 45 million years ago. From there they spread to South America (becoming alpacas, llamas and so on), Asia, and Africa some time in the Pleistocene, say the archaeologists. That isn't saying much, as the Pleistocene spans about 2.5 million years to 11,000 years ago.
Anyway, based on camel remains, it seems the splay-footed quadrupeds reached Arabia in the Holocene, at least 7,000 years ago. (Camels are believed to have reached ancient Israel only about 3,000 years ago.)
I wonder how many places have the geology for these massive stone walls that can be carved and ... folks saw it and thought "Man we should make this really big sculpture!".
My imagination makes me think that it's a pretty obvious thing to do for any number of reasons and that there have been quite a few that have been lost to time.
As evidenced by the amount of grafitti in public places, people just really like leaving their mark wherever they can. There's grafitti in ancient ruins that (aside from the language) could be mistaken for grafitti in a bathroom stall. People are just gonna people.
This is exactly the example I was trying to remember. I love things like this because it helps take the past off a pedestal. We've been the same raunchy species from the beginning.
This is exactly why I doubt all the expert opinions on cave art. "This undoubtedly had ritual significance." BS. It was probably just some teenagers screwing around.
I wouldn't go too far in the opposite direction though. Teenagers screwing around is more likely to be lewd carvings than life-size carvings of a camel.
A rule of thumb I've heard is that "ritual significance" is code for either "we have no idea" or "probably a sex toy", depending on context. In cases like this, I think the default assumption should be "probably art".
"ritual" is a pretty general term that doesn't quite match its colloquial meaning and generally doesn't have anything to do with sex toys. Imagine you find an old PCB that you weren't quite sure the purpose of. Is it unfair to call it "electronic" when there's a more specific term that could be applied if you knew what its purpose was? The same objection applies equally to "art".
Much of the cave art required people to go deep into hard to access areas of caves. People created the art over long periods of time. Many of the pieces incorporated elements of the cave wall to enhance the 3D realism of the figures. These were not simple scratching done at random, they were done with care and intent by people with skill.
It sounds like you only skim read the first paragraph.
The article says they were thought to be 2000 years old but have recently been found to be 6000 years older than that. The second paragraph makes the new dating range explicit.
They didn't miss the article you were referring to, they were just assuming you had read the topic article as well.
The article your read refers to 2,000 year old sculptures because it was written years before the research that added 6,000 years, not because they're different camels.
I read both, and they have different pictures. The original article, with the older time estimate, had a much more worn camel pic than the other one with the 2000 year estimate. Hence my wondering if that maybe means something.
Unfortunately it's vague whether or not the different pictures are from different time periods, different sites, or what exactly.
Wow, that sounds like something right out of the Babylon Bee. I really don't envy the folks at the Bee - it's hard to make up satire that's weirder and more outrageous than the actual truth!
Once again, an article all about something visual with neigh a proper visualisation in it, let alone a photo of a greater scope, and no original design trace out proposal or recreation. Both of the provided examples essentially look like weather-exposed rocks.
It's harder than it looks. My own photos of my sites/finds have rarely turned out interesting either. Usually things are simply an unremarkable pile of stones, unidentifiable blobs, or far too massive for the camera.
That's leaving aside the ethical issues with photographing funerary sites/remains, which most archaeologists avoid by simply not releasing any such photographs to the media.
Personally, id find those interesting too - I've always found archaeology grabs my attention.
Once I asked a local archaeologist about why articles are always like that, and she told me that there's also a problem with looters. They try to only release pictures that don't give away the location, to prevent looters from ruining a site. Not sure if that's a general thing or her specific area of expertise.
Depends on the location. You usually don't release wide landscape shots if that's a major concern, but super localized photos aren't necessarily an issue. Not all areas take the same degree of precaution though (e.g., scheduled monuments in the UK are pretty much public).
Anyway, if you'd like an example of an "onsite" photo, I've uploaded one from an ancient settlement (2k+ years old): https://i.imgur.com/0ITzYZD.png
Bonus points if you can figure out which country it's from or better yet, pinpoint the location to within 50 miles.
Internet Historian is humorously documenting that it is possible to pinpoint the worldwide location of a flag with only the blue sky behind, or inside a hut lost in lapland, or inside a flat without outside light, or even a stone buried somewhere in the world (South of Spain). https://youtu.be/vw9zyxm860Q
I understand it would be possible with a photo to guess which side a rock faces, thanks to the sun/shadows, and then find all the rocks pointing this way in a country using satellite image, and filtering those which are not currently at war etc.
To the best of my knowledge, you can only determine latitude with shadows (and even then, current state of the art requires multiple photos to resolve ambiguities). To determine longitude, you need to correlate time or match features somehow. The flagpole search did that with flight paths and honking, which isn't applicable here. Vegetation would probably be a more useful hint if imgur didn't compress the detail out of it, but be particularly challenging regardless at the true latitude.
Thanks for the example! I'm not so good at sleuthing things from photos, so no bonus points for me :D.
I sort of see what you mean about "unremarkable", at least without context. Knowing its an archaeological site of course raises questions: What does an archaeologist see in those rocks that I don't? What made people settle here 2kya (besides the water source)? Why dig here to begin with (instead of a km either direction, instead of 5m either direction, etc)?
Similarly, if I was reading about the dig (a report or article or whatnot), I'd be asking questions like: what does the place these ancient humans chose look like? What does "near the river bank" mean? etc. This photo would help me understand those.
The key feature is actually the little slope you can see in profile. That's the flat land above the river being eroded down into the waterway, exposing subsurface materials. Some of the rocks had fallen out of that bank and it looked suspiciously anthropogenic. We were already in the area looking along that river because the statistical model of the landscape built up over previous expeditions + other evidence indicated that there should be something to find. There were a number of other sites (e.g. lithic production) found the same way. These rocks in particular were probably to support something like semi-permanent tent poles.
As for timing, people had been in the area since the last glacial maximum. I actually have photos of a blade from prior to the LGM in a nearby area, but it has colleagues visible in it. We simply haven't found evidence of people building these kinds of structures much prior to then in that area. I should mention that I'm deliberately underestimating this particular site's age because definitive dating hadn't come back last time I heard and it makes the guessing harder.
Thanks! This picture is so much better - really shows the scale and the detail.
My intuitions and my knowledge of statistics hints that there's really no reason much, much older somewhat advanced "societies" couldn't have existed but have just not been excavated or have vanished because of porous materials.
Does anyone know of any good podcasts / books that delves into topics like this?
I've always found fringe theories of lost or "hyper-ancient" civilisations fascinating.
> Does anyone know of any good podcasts / books that delves into topics like this?
"Civilization is always older than we think; and under whatever sod we tread are the bones of men and women who also worked and loved, wrote songs and made beautiful things, but whose names and very being have been lost in the careless flow of time."
- Will Durant
While I have only read his "The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time", his wife Ariel Durant and him co-wrote an 11 volume "biography" of civilization called "The Story of Civilization", which I believe deals with such things.
It’s not so much about ancient civilizations, but Michael Mann’s 1491 does a spectacular job expanding on the size and complexity of the civilizations of the Americas, which has only really become clear in the last couple decades.
Maybe you know Dan Carlin? His Hardcore History podcasts are amazing. History how it should be.
In this case try the King of King, series.
Although almost all of his podcasts are spellbinding and thoughtful.
For all ages too. Excellent for road trips.
https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-series/
There is also the extent to which settlements would have been on the coast and are now submerged well offshore thanks to sea level rises after the last glacial period.
If you're looking for lost and re-found civilizations, maybe look into the archeological history of Troy, or maybe the Olmec culture of south America. (There are many)
My favorite though is this documentary series on YouTube. The 2nd installment is especially good. Highly recommend:
there's always graham Hancock. he has a couple books and has done some podcasts.
the JRE podcast with graham and Randall Carlson always gets my imagination going on ancient societies...
The northern part of saudi Arabia is actually part of the Fertile Crescent also known as 'The Cradle of Civilization' extending from Iraq where human first started cultivating and herding animals [1]. Yes it's now mostly desert but it used to be greener than it's today.
This is an excellent documentary where teams of archeological experts from around the world trying to unravel the mystery of one of the earliest man made monuments in northern Saudi Arabia [2].
You should know that camels (like horses) originally evolved in North America, in far north latitudes. They're not from the desert originally, they're from the cold northern icy tundra. So needless to say they're very adaptable.
It would have still been hot and relatively arid, just less so. These camels are native to all of North Africa, Arabia, and the middle east. There's a lot of different environments in that range.
The theory parent is mentioning, doesn't just talk about "less hot and less arid" but a lush green and very favorable for agriculture.
If these people went as far as to carve camels in stones, that would mean these animals were prevalent in their areas and way of life which is in direct conflict with assuming their land were anything but hot and arid.
I have heard of the theory about different climate of Egypt and Iraq in ancient times. It seems logical that civilization should have started in a climate supportive for mass agriculture.
It's depressing when we think of earth's climate change over a time scale unimaginable for humans. The theory implies (at least for me) that the decline of quality of life in ME/NorthAfrica has more to do with a random external change not in control of insignificant humans.
In the book, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, the author goes over Ptolemy's historical records of rain in Alexandria and compares it to today. In short, Alexandria used to get continual rain throughout the year whereas today it gets rain from October to March and then not much else. I believe it's in chapter 2 if anyone wants to look at the charts on the Amazon preview.
Arizona is very hot, very arid, and also very favourable for agriculture, with significant production of lettuce and cotton. As long as you can make sure your crops get water through irrigation (which ancient Mesopotamians were very skilled at), your crops will thrive. In fact, the heat and sunlight actually provide a bit of an advantage.
However, a number of factors eventually led to the collapse of the civilisations in the fertile crescent. One factor has been the region getting warmer and drier, which poses a challenge even with irrigation. As an example of how different the climate is now from what it was then, Uruk used to be on a channel of the Euphrates, but now that riverbed is completely dried up. Meanwhile, Ur was once a coastal city, but is now ten miles inland.
Another factor for the collapse of these civilisations is that the process of irrigation accumulated salt in the soil. The very process that made complex civilisation possible in this part of the world eventually contributed to its end.
Semi-arid is perfectly compatible with agriculture. In fact, many of the earliest sites for agriculture around the world are found in arid or semi-arid environments. I'd suggest reading Dennell's paper on the deserts of Asia.
The climate wasn't that different, just a little wetter. Also we don't know what wild dromedaries were like, given that they are extinct for 2000 years now.
And the depicted ones were almost certainly wild, given that dromedaries were domesticated only 4000 years ago, well past when the first pyramids were build.
“Deserts” can have pretty wide variation ranging from barren sand (where camels don’t live) to mild shrubs and seasonal rain (where you’ll find camels) in proximity to land suitable for pastoralists and even rivers suitable for agriculturalists.
So one wonders what is still to be found, what was lost to sea level changes or other climate erosion over time. But the level of craftsmanship old times long past still amazes me as the skills to achieve that was far more common in those times as a percentage of the populous than it is today. Which as tools developed, we have shifted that level of hand craftsmanship towards expensive art today.
Equally, one wonders what structures we build today would still be around in an equally period of time - building wise, not many that spring to mind and even then, not sure how the ravages of time would effect them. Certainly a large exercise but I wonder if anybody has done any climate modelling for that kind of duration and how today's monuments around the world would endure. Makes you wonder what would be left as even plastics would break down after 500 years - let alone 8,000 or 40,000 years from now.
I find it amazing that early humans tended to make art of animals not humans. Like the cave paintings in France. It seems that early humans put the animals front and Center at some point.
Yeah, we should remember also that permanent or periodic nomadism was the norm on large swaths of the planet. Animals were obviously key to move significant numbers of people (women, children...), as well as to produce food on the go. If the camel-god says no, you're stuck in the middle of the desert, so you better keep him happy.
Here are a few examples of human figures from 30,000 years ago [1], and 35,000 to 40,000 years ago [2, 3]. For comparison, the eroded camel sculptures are from 8,000 years ago at best.
Moreover, beware of possible biases which could explain what we see today: there is a difference between what we observe and what was. Remember for instance the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan [4], which happened less than 1,500 years after they were built. It is extremely unlikely that a work of art survives for 40,000 years, and some may be more likely to be destroyed than others, depending on location, weather, traditions, history, etc.
Imagine how much more creative we'd tend to be if we didn't have television and Internet distractions! What do you do after a long day of herding livestock? Take your chert, grab a drink and carve some camels!
What exactly are we being distracted by on the internet and television? The flourishing unbridled creativity of millions of people like us, far more than ever before in history, no?
If people were the same back then:-
Most people hung out and watched the Camels being carved, many watched others `reacting` to the Camel carvings, and a few critiqued the Carvings.
Only a few did the carving.
I'd agreed that's true for a small percentage of the population and that the rest are consumers. For these projects, you probably had a "visionary" but it's stated that the creations were likely a community effort and maintained over time.
Community projects are still a thing, they're just not as grandiose, partially to do with different priorities and restrictions (making giant rock carvings is rarely top of peoples agendas, nor top of the local councils approvals), and partially due to the fact that they look lesser due to all the other amazing things people are doing on the internet.
My kids (10yo, 9yo, 8yo) got grounded for a week for not listening and misbehaving, with no TV or tablets... and the amount of bickering and complaining about each other dropped like a rock because there's nothing to fight over.
In all fairness, building something like Newgrange or Stonehenge (never mind the Egyptian pyramids) requires orders of magnitude more effort than carving some camels out of soft sandstone...
This headline seems odd. It feels like it's implying that carving a life size camel into rock is more technologically sophisticated than assembling Stonehenge or the pyramids and therefore we should be surprised.
I get that they thought they were newer, and now think they are older, still strange headline to lead with.
I'm pleasantly surprised that these sculptures survived the centuries of intentional destruction of such artifacts in the region. The scratched(?) graffiti is disappointing though.
Not to be a pedant, but are these really life-size? It's hard to get a sense of scale from the images but they look significantly larger than life size.
I did a solid for an archaeologist once in the Middle East and so stayed in the dig camp awhile.
It struck me how eager archaeologists were to get to work, and how happy they were in the field. Hot as hell, dusty, disease ridden, flies, bad food. And they were ecstatic.
They were all poor as fuck though, so there are trade offs.
> the time of the statues’ creation, around the sixth millennium B.C.E., the Arabian Peninsula was filled with grassland and much wetter than it is now.
We’re camels significantly different during this time? How much of their current features are things evolved to deal with the desert climate?
They were very much like they are now, not different physiology in any recognizable way. But they're very adaptable creatures. They're not truly native to that region, they are actually from North America, specifically the northern latitudes. That should give you an idea of how adaptable they are.
> They're not truly native to that region, they are actually from North America, specifically the northern latitudes.
These Dromedary camels, Camelus dromedarius, are very much native to the region. The Dromedary likely evolved right in the Arabian peninsula, having separated from the Bactrian of Central Asia more than a million years ago. The North American ancestor, Paracamelus, arrived in Eurasia maybe 7.5 million years ago. While North America is the home of the last common ancestor of modern camelids, it is not the native home of any modern camels.
This used to be a comment about how all White Americans should protect Indian heritage. Which they of course should, but he also accused all White people of "ravaging" Indian sites etc.
European settlers trashed an entire continent in a few hundred years; stop and imagine what it must have looked like when they first arrived.
How this ends up filed under Camel art is a mystery.
Very few "White Americans" alive today have ravaged any American Indian sites.
Even if you have the deranged notion that people should bear the responsibility for what their ancestors did hundreds of years ago, it's still just tiny fraction of current Americans that should be the target of your anger.
I understand where you're coming from, but in the interests of education it should be pointed out that a significant amount of destruction of native sites has occurred within "our" lifetimes. For instance, many suburbs in Chandler, AZ were directly built on bulldozed Hohokam pueblos in the 50s-80s. The power plant in Needles, CA was built over what was formerly the largest geoglyph in North America during the 70s, destroying most of the site. The wholesale looting of mimbres sites with heavy machinery mostly began in the 70s as well. The main reason this has slowed in recent years is that the looters have already gotten most of the obvious sites that aren't explicitly protected.
Most people aren't aware of how much destruction of archaeological heritage suburban development has entailed. A good percentage of Americans, especially those in the great lakes or Southwest regions, have used infrastructure built on native sites. It's pretty inescapable.
Awful. Seems to be a common denominator when building dams. The people responsible should be put in jail, but it can’t be blamed on “White Americans” in general, that’s just absurd.
