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

Camel engravings reveal an early human presence in a once-verdant Nefud landscape

A rock face with life-size rock art engravings of camels found in the Arabian Desert with the silhouette of a woman overlayed on the image for scale.

Engravings at Jebel Misma were made by some of the first people to enter the region more than 12,000 years ago. The engravings are highlighted in color, and the figure of a woman is superimposed at left to show their scale.

Sahout Rock Art and Archaeology Project

By Tom Metcalfe

September 30, 2025 at 11:00 am

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 is 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.

Rock art has been found in Saudi Arabia before, but those petroglyphs date from the Neolithic period around 8,000 years ago. The engravings found at Jebel Misma, Jebel Arnaan and Jebel Mleiha — all rock outcrops in a remote part of the Nefud, near its southern edge — are much older. The engravings can be seen for miles and were probably intended to mark territory or indicate nearby sources of water, says Petraglia, the director of the Australian Research Center for Human Evolution at Griffith University in Brisbane.

The newly discovered rock art was found during research for one of Petraglia’s projects, called Green Arabia. The team recently published evidence that the region was lush and verdant at times over the last 8 million years, indicating that the Sahara and eastern desert regions were also wet.

Petraglia and his colleagues think the earliest rock engravings at Jebel Misma and the two other outcrops nearby were made by the first nomadic people to enter the region after the Last Glacial Maximum, which made the region arid but ended about 19,000 years ago. As the region became wetter, with more rain accumulating in temporary desert lakes or “playas,” wild animals such as camels, gazelles, aurochs and ibex arrived — followed by nomadic human hunters who relied on them for food.



Four images in a panel showing the rock art from different phases

Rock art at Jebel Arnaan shows the phases of engraving. Top left: phase 1 engravings (green) beneath phase 2 engravings (yellow); Top right: A naturalistic phase 3 camel engraving (white) underneath a “stylized” engraving from phase 4 (blue); Bottom left: An engraved ibex from phase 4 with “cartoonlike” eyes and horn (dark blue) above a phase 3 engraving of an auroch (light blue); Bottom right: An equid (probably a wild ass) and its young (blue) from phase 4.

Guagnin et al./Nature Communications 2025

More:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-rock-art-arabian-desert-wet