Hundreds of Mysterious Stone ‘Gates’ Found in Saudi Arabia’s Desert | Hacker News Reader

Hundreds of Mysterious Stone ‘Gates’ Found in Saudi Arabia’s Desert

nytimes.com

126 pointsQAPereo44 comments

Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these masons however primitive their works may seem to us.

Cormac McCarthy

Wow. Where is that from?

It's a passage from Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

I love Blood Meridian. I read it at least once a year.

I just picked up the audio book and am listening to it now.

Earthworks are facinating to me. In Ohio there is the serpent mound, which aligns with star patterns during the solstice. Nearby is a native american fortress on a hilltop, with earthen walls and "doorways". What I always take away visiting these sites is how at one point, these people realized that they could actually change their environment to suit them. They no longer had to wait for nature to provide, they could be proactive. Seems for granted now but at the time, what power they must have felt.

I think it's frustrating that when you google for additional information:

1. Search results are a long list of extremely similar popular science summaries, in various publications

2. Each article is essentially an advertisement for the paper "due to be published next month" -- I'd prefer to simply read the original paper!

You can set up a Google Scholar alert

https://googlesystem.blogspot.com.ar/2010/05/email-alerts-fo...

Sorry to go off topic, but I've been waiting a thread about weird stuff found on gmaps for a long time.

Does anyone know what is this geological formation (26.621298, 55.490281) and why it looks like a crater? Didn't find any reference to it (there could be something in Farsi, though)

I get a forest on google maps with these coordinates.

He means the circular dark area you see when you zoom out.

the island is Qeshm, and it's a unesco site.

Frustratingly I can't find any particular info about that bit, unless it's what's called stars valley.

http://epod.usra.edu/blog/2012/05/stars-valley-on-qeshm-isla...

It seems to be known as the Qeshm salt dome: http://wikimapia.org/11589307/Qeshm-Salt-dome

This is called a salt dome. It seems this one in particular is called the "Qeshm salt dome".

http://geology.com/stories/13/salt-domes/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_dome/

most likely used for farming, you keep removing stones from the fields ... Landscapes can change fast, from grassland to desert and back to grassland in just a few hundred years.

Agreed, I also thought they might have been a way to catch rain water in cultivated lots of land.

I was thinking of an animal pen for livestock?

"He added that he would have liked to have seen some suggestions from Dr. Kennedy as to what the gates may have been used for, if only to dissuade people from speculating as to extraterrestrial origins, as they have regarding the Sphinx and the Nazca Lines in Peru."

I am with the Professor who gave quote above from article.

I can only comment on livestock we keep. Goats and cows. The cows may struggle to cross piled rocks. Goats on the other hand are more nimble on their feet. I don't much about sheep.

Either way hope more evidence is published so I can satisfy my curiosity :-).

In the other comment thread [0] there are links [1] to a piece describing the finding of "thousands of discarded foot bones of butchered antelopes unearthed at the site".

Prior to reading that I was also highly skeptical that it was used for capturing wild antelope. Assuming it's truthful it seems pretty strong evidence though.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15525409 [1] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/desert-kites-out...

This is talking about the “kites” though, not the “gates”.

The Bible mentions Jacob placing rocks in formation around his head before going to sleep in the wilderness. The assumption there is that he did this to protect himself from wild animals.

so we have another proof that stargates exist and ancient aliens were here? ;)

I tried to find it on Google Earth but could not. Sadly the article doesnt note the coordinates. Reminds me quite a bit of the Gates described in the tales of Gog and Magog.

Whenever I hear Gog and Magog it reminds me of how W invoked it to justify his wars... (from wikipedia)

> Some Post–Cold War millenarians still identify Gog with Russia, but they now tend to stress its allies among Islamic nations, especially Iran. For the most fervent, the countdown to Armageddon began with the return of the Jews to Israel, followed quickly by further signs pointing to the nearness of the final battle—nuclear weapons, European integration, Israel's seizure of Jerusalem, and America's wars in Afghanistan and the Gulf. In the prelude to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush told Jacques Chirac, "Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East". "This confrontation", he urged the French leader, "is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase His people's enemies before a new age begins". Chirac consulted a professor at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Lausanne to explain Bush's reference.

And people think the current president is insane, sheesh. Where was the uproar when Bush said such idiotic things?

LiveJournal.

There is a difference between a set of internally consistent beliefs executed upon in good faith (no pun intended) and someone looking for the spotlight and mirror to reflect his ego in. You can work with and negotiate with someone who is thinking, however far from your own beliefs - an attention seeker can only be manipulated or you may find yourself manipulated by him.

There's no credible source for that quote: http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/15/bush-chirac-and-the-war-...

The article mentions "Harrat Haybar", which can be found on Google maps. After some looking around in that area, you can find some interesting ground markings: https://www.google.co.il/maps/place/Harrat+Khaybar/@25.02546... https://www.google.co.il/maps/place/Harrat+Khaybar/@25.03256... I couldn't find the "gates", but perhaps I didn't look hard enough. It's a huge area, after all.

There's a link to Google Maps at the end of the article: https://www.google.com/maps/@25.8941446,39.4083335,721m/data...

The article has a link to https://www.google.com/maps/@25.8813729,39.3933695,1523m/dat... which features quite a few.

Animal pens.

”The longest gate he had identified was more than 1,600 feet long, though most were between 160 and 500 feet long. Sometimes the posts were as thick as 30 feet”

1,600 feet is a _big_ pen, and 30 feet thick seems overkill for a holding pen.

meter please

divide by 3, or google it

foo_meters = foo.replace("(\d+)", "$1/3")

1600 feet is roughly 490 meters.

30 feet is roughly 9 meters.

(I understand the "just google it" response, but just giving the numbers saves a few moments of work for many people.)

> 1,600 feet is a _big_ pen, and 30 feet thick seems overkill for a holding pen.

Imagine driving a panicking large herd of animals into these pens - where would you see a need for reinforcing the structure to withstand the force of a whole herd pressing against it?

Presumably I want the animals to live; if the herd is generating so much force at the edges - force transmitted through the animal touching that edge - that I need 30 feet thick walls to prevent the walls being pushed through, the animals at those edges will now be turned into a paste.

They're not solid walls. It looks like the walls are loose rocks.

Just what kind of animals did they have in there anyway?

People?

Maybe...

These remind my of walled off fields in Bolivia.

https://goo.gl/maps/xpnX311AH592

These seemed to be used both at fields for growing crops if the soil was still good. Or as pens/grazing areas for lama's if not. Bolivia's attempt at land reform was kinda disastrous with resulting over farming, over grazing and subsequent soil loss. Over just 50 years.

If someone claimed that there used to be thin volcanic soil that later blew away, would not be surprised.

There's also an article on Ars Technica [1] about this.

The Desert Team is skeptical of the idea that they were used for trapping animals for slaughter:

> One hypothesis about the kites is that hunters herded animals into them for easy slaughter, but the Desert Team notes that the walls would have been too low to fence the animals in.

That makes sense if you are imagining that they chase the animals into the structure and then keep chasing them at full speed, so that the animals are running when they encounter the walls.

But is that how the people them would have hunted a herd? Try to chase it down at full speed?

Suppose instead that they were persistence hunters [2]. Persistence hunting takes advantage of two key differences between us and many herd animals.

• We are more effective at body cooling than they are.

• We can trot for a long time, even on a very hot day, at a speed that is too fast for the animal's efficient gaits, meaning it has to run to stay ahead.

A persistence hunter chases the animal just fast enough to make the animal run. The animal gets away, but its run is inefficient so it has to stop and rest. It also needs to cool down. The human just keeps coming, his more efficient body cooling allowing him to keep moving without overheating.

When the human gets close enough to force the animal to resume running, the animal is not fully recovered from the first round. It gets away again, but now is even more exhausted and overheated than it was the first time.

Repeat, and after a few hours of this the human can just walk right up and kill the animal, which is too tired to even try to further escape.

What it comes down to is humans are in fact one of the fastest land animals on the planet--over long distances. 100 meter race? We suck. 100 kilometer race? Bet on the human. Essentially persistence hunters make their prey engage in a long distance race with them.

This is quite effective, but it has an obvious drawback. You spend 4 or 5 hours chasing the animal away from your home. You are now several hours away from home, with a bunch of meat to carry back.

Perhaps the idea with these large fenced in areas is that you chase the herd in, but hang back far enough that when it gets to the far wall it thinks it has escaped pursuit and rests there instead of jumping. Then you circle around and come in from the back or the side, getting the herd to run across the field again, again timing it so that when it reaches another fence it stops.

Note that the fence does not have to tall enough or strong enough to stop the animals. It just has to be enough to make a tired animal that thinks it is now safe to rest decide that resting on this side is easier than resting on the other side.

You'll be giving the herd more rest time this way as opposed to with open field persistence hunting because of the extra time it takes to circle around the change direction, but that might be worth it because now you are chasing the herd back and forth instead of away. You'll have a much easier time hauling the meat back home.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/archaeologists-are-m...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

The strategy you've propose doesn't seem likely to me. It would take a lot of effort to steer them to the kite, only to have to chase them out again to repeat the process. I think it's far more likely that they herded/chased them toward the kite, and from far enough away to keep them from scattering, and jumping over the stone 'walls', and when the herd traversed the kite, it gradually bunched up as it got closer to the point of the kite. At the point would be the kill zone, with hunters waiting to slaughter as many as possible.

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