Editor’s note: Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American and How It Works magazine. (CNN) — People who lived in the Arabian Peninsula thousands of years ago went underground when they wanted to beat the heat.
People who lived in the Arabian Peninsula thousands of years ago went underground when they wanted to beat the heat, new research shows.Researchers found rock art depicting cattle, sheep, goat and possibly ibex in and near the Umm Jirsan tunnel system in Saudi Arabia. Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American and How It Works magazine.thousands of years ago went underground when they wanted to beat the heat.
“However, we were not expecting to find evidence for human occupation in the form of rock art, lithic artefacts, stone structures, and pottery,” Stewart told CNN in an email. “People made use of and occupied these lava tubes over millennia. While most research in Arabia is focused on surface sites, underground settings such as at Umm Jirsan offer tremendous potential to fill in some of the gaps in the data.
Around this time, local people were settling around recently formed oases; the appearance of these desert refuges would shape human migration patterns in the region for millennia, he said via email.
Compared with other sites where humans once lived, the amount of archaeological material at Umm Jirsan was “quite scant,” suggesting that people were visiting the tunnels as temporary refuges rather than living there permanently, the study authors reported.In another tunnel near Umm Jirsan, the researchers found 16 panels of engraved rock art.
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