Ancient Architectural Drawings Reveal Construction Methods of Mysterious Megastructures

Large megastructures called as "desert kites" were fashioned into the stony terrain in the Middle Eastern deserts more than 8,000 years ago. Archaeologists just found the world's earliest architectural plans that explain how prehistoric people were able to build these enormous constructions.

Only in the 1920s, when aeroplanes were flying over the deserts, did they discover the existence of desert kites. Although the purpose of these structures has long baffled archaeologists, it is now thought that they were set up along migratory pathways as animal traps to capture herds of gazelle, antelope, and other game animals.

They are simply rock and dirt walls that can be up to 5 kilometres (3 miles) long. From the ground, they don't look like much, but from above, they take on the appearance of a massive pattern.

It was previously unknown how prehistoric humans planned and built the constructions without being able to view them from the air because of their magnitude. But this is being explained by the recent discovery of two engravings in Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Two 8,000+ -year old desert kites may be seen at Zebel az-Zilliyat in Saudi Arabia, which is located about 3.5 km (2 miles) apart. Additionally, 382 centimetres (nearly 150 inches) long engravings that appear to be scale designs of the desert kites have been discovered here by experts.

If this interpretation is accurate, the engravings represent the earliest scaled plans that have ever been discovered.

The development of organised civilizations and the development of agriculture during this period was a crucial turning point in the history of humanity. The finding of these architectural blueprints, according to the researchers, looks to be a turning point in human intelligence.

The engravings demonstrate that the construction of the desert kites was organised and required abstract thought and audacious imagination, as opposed to being a hasty blunder.

"These representations shed new light on the evolution of human discernment of space, communication, and communal activities in ancient times," the study's authors write in their report.

"Although human structures have altered natural areas for thousands of years, Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt's literate civilizations are the earliest known to have created blueprints or maps. One significant development in intelligent behaviour is the capacity to compress a huge space onto a constrained, two-dimensional surface.

Such constructions can only be viewed in their entirety from the air, but this necessitates the portrayal of space in a way that hasn't been done before, according to their statement.

These engravings are incredibly accurate renderings of nearby Neolithic desert kite structures, in contrast to previous evidence for generic and crude portrayals of such structures. As the entire construction arrangement is impossible to comprehend without seeing it from the air or without having built the desert kites themselves, such representations were unavoidably created by the constructors and/or users of the kites themselves.

They demonstrate a previously unrecognised level of precision in such an early chrono-cultural setting, a mental command of massive structures, human landscapes, and social places. These blueprints might have been utilised to improve group hunting tactics using these mega-traps.

These depictions provide fresh insight into how early humans saw space and engaged in social interactions and emphasise early forms of written communication that go beyond the simple representation of a large-scale structure in the mind.

By mastering the three-dimensional perception of space and turning it into an inscribed form of communication, these two major innovations—constructing what would later become the largest structures in human history and creating scaled maps—are closely related.

This keeps us from viewing the space as it is lived in, perceived, and dreamt, but rather as it is represented. The finding of these early examples of precise cartographic representations has significant ramifications for our comprehension of the development of human cognition.

A milestone in intelligent behaviour, gradually acquired from the earliest stages, is the translation of a mental conception of (a big, impossible- to grasp as a complete) space onto a two-dimensional (limited) surface inherent in these representations in the development of humans.