12,000-year-old rock art hints at the Arabian Desert’s lush past

The camels at Jebel Misma have been frozen in a march for 12,000 years. “They are really spectacular,” says paleoanthropologist Michael Petraglia. “They’re beautiful, monumental.”  

A herd of the animals are cut into a cliff towering above the mostly flat desert landscape of Saudi Arabia’s Nefud. The engravings are life-size, inscribed with about 150 other newly documented petroglyphs that all date to between 12,800 and 11,400 years ago, Petraglia and colleagues report September 30 in Nature Communications.

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