SAUDI ARABIA: 8,000 YEAR OLD ROCK ART IS FIRST EVER DEPICTION OF DOGSAND HUMANS HAD THEM ON LEASHES [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

BY KASTALIA MEDRANO ON 11/17/17 AT 1:08 PM

Rock art discovered on the Arabian Peninsula depicts scenes of hunting dogs that were not just domesticated, but being walked on leashes. Some of the hunting scenes are now the region’s oldest known evidence of dogs, with or without leashes.

We already knew that pre-Neolithic humans used domesticated dogs for hunting purposes, but details about how exactly they went about this have remained unclear. The 147 hunting scenes the researchers have been studiously documenting at sites in Shuwaymis and Jubbah, in northwestern Saudi Arabia, show a range of possible roles. A paper detailing the research was published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

“When [corresponding author Maria Guagnin] came to me with the rock art photos and asked me if they meant anything, I about lost my mind,” co-author Angela Perri, who studies animal archaeology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told Science Magazine. “A million bones won’t tell me what these images are telling me,” she says. “It’s the closest thing you’re going to get to a YouTube video.”

More:
http://www.newsweek.com/saudi-arabia-8000-year-old-rock-art-first-ever-depiction-dogs-and-humans-had-715114?piano_t=1