These mysterious stone structures in Saudi Arabia are older than the pyramids

Thousands of monumental structures built from walls of rock in Saudi Arabia are older than Egypt's pyramids and the ancient stone circles of Britain, researchers say – making them perhaps the earliest ritual landscape ever identified.

A study published Thursday in the journal Antiquity shows that the mysterious structures dotted around the desert in northwestern Saudi Arabia – called "mustatils" from the Arabic word for "rectangle" – are about 7,000 years old. That’s much older than expected, and about 2,000 years older than either Stonehenge in England or the oldest Egyptian pyramid.

“We think of them as a monumental landscape,” said Melissa Kennedy, an archaeologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth and an author of the study. “We are talking about over 1,000 mustatils. These things are found over 200,000 square kilometers [77,000 square miles], and they’re all very similar in shape.

“They show that this part of the world is far from the eternal empty desert that people often imagine, but rather somewhere that remarkable human cultural developments have taken place” said archaeologist Huw Groucutt of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History at Jena in Germany.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/mysterious-stone-structures-saudi-arabia-are-older-pyramids-rcna805

Researchers are documenting the muscatils and other ancient rock constructions by satellite
photographs, helicopter reconnaissance and ground surveys.