Monumental rock art: humans thrived in Arab. Desert during Pleistocene-Holocene
nature.com
nature.com
Why do we believe that what is now Saudi Arabia was a desert in 11,000 BCE?
But it was only partial: there was some desert area too. They were just not a large and mostly very dry desert like today.
The Arabian desert is technically considered to be part of the Sahara, climate-wise, and participes in the same cycle [2].
This article is about researching evidence for ehat those transitions looked like, focusing on evidence that dates around the end of that particular dry period, pre-Holocene.
> Prior to the onset of the Holocene humid period, little is known about the relatively arid period spanning the end of the Pleistocene and the earliest Holocene in Arabia. An absence of dated archaeological sites has led to a presumed absence of human occupation of the Arabian interior. However, superimpositions in the rock art record appear to show earlier phases of human activity, prior to the arrival of domesticated livestock25.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period
[2]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/green...
It spans huge across Africa. It's part of the same climate system and cycles as the Arab desert.
If an environmental feature leads to racial and species adaptations, you should note that its not some propaganda but an actual feature of physical reality that nature and mankind had to work around (and largely avoid).
You should also avoid assuming that everything is a conspiracy. Deserts are actually very harsh and deadly especially without motorized vehicles and modern infrastructure like paved roads and electricity.
They built canals for farming and understood how to use wild plants. Other cultures ( Akimel Oʼodham for one) are also interesting to read about how they lived.
As an anthropology aficionado, I’m supposed to say we don’t know the purpose of these artifacts and any attempt to guess would be cultural projection, but privately I’m taking some comfort in the human connection.
"A petroglyph is an image created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, or abrading, as a form of rock art."
Why not both? It's obvious some effort was put into carving the figures as they look pretty to me. I am sure some people were better than others at making rock carvings making them artists IMO.
That still fails to distinguish between "art" and "not-art". Your faulty assumption is that art can not serve a practical purpose.
— Rudyard Kipling, The Conundrum of the Workshops