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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9992791/amp/Life-size-camel-carvings-Saudi-Arabia-TWICE-age-Stonehenge.html

I wonder if these camel/horse/equid structures are somehow connected? Seems to be that scientists think they are.

Perhaps it all was about hunting? The chambers just butchering houses? Seems probable.

Any clues what their religion was like?

Those are some good ideas. Thanks

I don't know how in depth it has to be, but it might be fun to compare UK policy in China during the Opium Wars vs. US policy in Japan and how they shaped each other.

You could also do a compare and contrast of US and UK policy in some other colonial context like Liberia vs. Sierra Leone and how UK emancipation differed from US emancipation and colonization scheme.

This is the most common suggestion we get. Definitely not pens. The long walls are often not high. Some mustatil have gaps in the walls. Others run up the side of volcanos or steep hill. The entrance into the structures are tiny, most people would need to walk through sideways. Basically, we are positive that they couldn’t hold animals. We also have animal pens from later periods(and perhaps some now from same time) and they are very different. We have excavated 5 mustatil now, of a few different types. Other teams in the region have collectively excavated 4 and we compare results. We have also visited or photographed hundreds more. So we can be really certain about the ritual function. But you are right- the people who made these were shepherds. Moving around the area to take advantage of available grasslands etc. very similar to some of the Bedouin still today. Thanks for the question.

Thank you so much for your detailed response! If it is alright, I do have one last question.

It's wildly known that the Job market for both Academic and non-academic historians (amongst many other humanities) is unfortunately abysmal. Can the same be said for academic Geography? In other words, which field, the history of Geography, has the better academic job outlook?

Thanks again; I really appreciate it!

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I think this is probably one of those things where it appears something is the case b/c attention is focused there rather than somewhere else. LA has a big media industry and people looking for stories. So, there's a lot of resources already looking for something novel. On top of that people who are looking for attention purposely go there b/c of the potential of gaining that attention. None of that is going on in rural Utah. But anyone who's been out to rural Utah can tell you it's full of all sorts of weird off shoots of the LDS/Mormons.

And if your cult is doing something like having child brides/polygamy/something else of questionable legality, you probably don't want people to notice or be a member.

So, this may just be a perception and not have any basis of fact.

Also, b/c a cult isn't really an objective thing, mostly just a pejorative term used for groups that are found to be weird, it's incredibly hard to quantify.

But I would think, just based on what I've seen, is that there are more cults in places like Utah, where a religion is fairly new and has a culture of "prophets" that allow lots of splits, or places like West Virginia where specific communities are fairly isolated geographically and can develop in idiosyncratic ways b/c of that isolation.

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France occurred to me too: we tend not to recall what a close-run thing it (repeatedly) was. Germany (like Italy) seems a bit well-trodden, but could be interesting with a non-Prussia (or non-Piedmont) focus. Austria/Austria-Hungary's always fascinating, and this period encompasses the whole 1804-1918 empire. Spain & Portugal would be a bit more "out there" and are quite a challenge, but they're potentially rewarding and less vast than Russia's rise at the other end of the continent. And of course there's always the familiar rise of representative government in Britain and national aspiration in Ireland as in Poland or the Balkan lands.

Further afield, it's the "crisis" of the Chinese empire - but how much of it was home-grown, how much exogenous? It's the period of British supremacy in India and the first stirrings of modern nationalism. For Latin America it's the era of independence, export-led development and the rise of US hemispheric power. In Africa it's the period from the end of the Atlantic slave trade to the start of the full-scale colonial scramble: how were they linked, and what happened in between? Globally the century sees perhaps thirtyfold growth in international trade and the rise of gold to monetary hegemony (and the first signs that it may not have been such a brilliant idea after all). And it's the great age of European industrial & population growth and emigration (the last however mostly from the 1840s) - though others too were on the move. And of course it sees the rise of secularism, science and challenges on class, race and gender, though these were all foreshadowed in the 18th century and sometimes the 17th.

A fascinating century, then, with considerable unity but in some respects marked by a new dynamism from around 1850, yet it's arguable that we didn't truly emerge from its shadow until a century later - but that's anther story lying outside the chronological range.

Could have been the same civilisation, Thamud were very advanced. I can't say.

Sodom and Gomorrah are indeed by the dead sea, and it's amazing that they still are there with dead bones and the sulphur pebbles that destroyed them are still there too.

https://youtu.be/jQl4KaRtef8

Excerpt from the linked summary^1 by Dyani Lewis, about research^2 by Hongru Wang et al.:

>The Tibetan Plateau extends from the northern edge of the Himalayas across 2.5 million square kilometres. It is a high-altitude, dry and cold region.

>Despite its inhospitable environment, humans have been present on the plateau since prehistoric times. Denisovans, extinct hominins that interbred with both Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans, lived on the northeastern edge of the plateau 160,000 years ago.

>Stone tools made 30,000–40,000 years ago are further signs of an early human presence in the region.

>But when people established a permanent presence on the plateau — and where they came from — has been a matter of debate, says Qiaomei Fu, an evolutionary geneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, who led the study.

> 

>Fu and her team sequenced ancient genomes from the remains of 89 individuals, dated to 5,100–100 years ago, unearthed from 29 archaeological sites.

>Their study confirms that permanent occupation of the region pre-dates historical records.

>It also paints a complex picture of where early Tibetans migrated from, and how their interactions in the region and with their lowland neighbours shaped their heritage.

>Analysis of the genomes reveals that the ancient occupants of the Tibetan Plateau have strong genetic links to the Tibetan, Sherpa and Qiang ethnic groups that live on or near the plateau today.

>Comparisons of the oldest genomes with ancient and living people across Asia suggest that the ancestors of modern Tibetans arrived on the plateau from the east.

>By contrast, India and the rest of the Asian subcontinent were populated by immigrants from eastern Eurasia and central Asia.

^1 Dyani Lewis, Nature, 17 Mar. 2023, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00742-6

^2 Hongru Wang et al. Human genetic history on the Tibetan Plateau in the past 5100 years. Science Advances 9, eadd5582 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.add5582

It runs in the family, his Dad ate rocks thinking it was a baby

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Is it possible they were just shepherds and the mustatils the pen’s where they would keep their animals safe and together. Of course sacrifices will have been made to some gods. What other indications are found to suggest these were used for a gathering of a religious nature?

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So we have performed Carbon 14 testing on the animal remains and charcoal present inside. They all came back around 5300–4900 BCE- so roughly 7000 years ago. We have also done a technique called OSL- which is where you can test the last time a grain of sand saw sunlight. So you get sediment from under the structure, that was trapped when it was built- and determine the age pretty accurately.

So these structures wee first identified in the 70s. They weren’t studied until 2008 but that was just people taking photos. The first one was excavated in 2018. It’s a big world. There is a lot out there that is still to be found.

I actually think the mustatil have changed my view of world archaeology. These are 7000 years old. They cover an area of 350,000 square kilometres(at present). Some are made of over 12,000 tonnes of stone. This suggests a Neolithic period that is so much more complex than I ever imagined. Shared culture, language, and more over such a massive area. Blows my mind.

Yep, cattle cults are common around the world. You can see them in places like Yemen or the corbeilles in Saharan Africa. All I can say is we know one of the horns appears to have burning inside- almost like it was a torch. But we also find little hearths inside the mustatil, so that could be why. Unfortunately, we can’t answer the question as to whether the horns were used elsewhere first. I’d doubt it but you can’t discount it. We just gotta dig more!!!

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Do you think there will ever come a point when we stop finding big deal structures like this? Like there can only be a finite number of them to find.

Also, what was a discovery that made you really change your view of history in some way?

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