Saudi Arabia is a huge country, and until recently has seen little archaeological research in its vast deserts. However, experts have just found over 100 mysterious stone structures that are older than the pyramids.

Experts say they are some of the oldest artefacts of the ancient world ever found.

The structures were spotted from space, with satellite images put together by a team of Saudi experts, and international archaeologists. They used high-resolution photos as well as data from Google Earth to find the structures in the Nefud Desert, in the north of the country.

To find the structures, researches mapped the location of specific landmass features where they suspected ancient man would hang out (lakes, rivers, grasslands and the like) and marked them for study.

The structures themselves are unknown. Over 104 have currently been found.

Experts believe the stones might have been used as ‘kites’ – which were large stone structures that would funnel animals on migration for mass animal hunts.

However, many stone geoglyphs have also been spotted, which are referred to by the local Bedouins as ‘works of the old men’.

Researchers have dubbed these structures ‘mustatil’. They are rectangular, and measure over 100 meters long and 100 meters wide, and made of thousands of tons of stone.

Ccording to researchers quoted by The Holocene, the artefacts might have come from the Neolithic period of Arabia, when deserts were more grasslands between ten and six thousand years ago.

It’s something out of Indiana Jones, to be sure.

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