A dozen life-size stone camels discovered in the Saudi desert were carved 8,000 years ago, archaeologists now say. That would put the date of carving firmly in the Stone Age, rather than later. When the group of French and Saudi scientists excavating in the Al Jouf province found the carvings, in 2018, they dated them to 2,000 years ago because they were similar findings to those found at Petra, in what is now Jordan.

However, using more cutting-edge dating techniques (including portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry) in conjunction with analyzing tool marks and assessing erosion patterns led the archaeologists to revise their estimate of the age of the carvings, to the Neolithic Period, or New Stone Age. Such carvings predate the construction of Stonehenge and the Pyramids at Giza.

The carvings also predate the domestication of camels. The people living in the area at the time herded cattle, goats, and sheep, but camels roamed wild. The landscape at the time would have been very different from today as well, with camels roaming wild over plains of grass and stopping occasionally to drink at lakes.

The archaeologists further concluded that the people who made the carvings would have had to have used scaffolding of some sort, given the height of the carvings, and that the carvers would have used tools made from a stone called chert, which is not found within 9 miles of the rocks in which the carvings were made.

Carrying out the new studies were researchers from France's Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Germany's Max Plank Institute for the Science of Human History, and Saudi Arabia's Ministry of Culture and King Saud University.

The original excavations were part of a joint effort between the French National Center for Scientific Research and the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage.