Researchers have identified sketches of “desert kite” structures dating back up to 9,000 years, the oldest accurate maps yet. How they were created with the means of the time is a mystery.
The structures are gigantic and sophisticated. Walls stretch up to five kilometers through the desert and form a wide alley. At its end are walled enclosures larger than a football field today and lined with pits up to four meters deep. Many millennia ago, in the Neolithic period, people in the Middle East and western and central Asia, between the Arabian Peninsula and present-day Uzbekistan, built thousands of such structures to drive in wild animals and thus kill them en masse, rather than laboriously following the herds to chase.