
Hundreds of Mysterious Stone ‘Gates’ Found in Saudi Arabia’s Desert - QAPereo
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/science/saudi-arabia-gates-google-earth.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
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ppod
Their spirit is entombed in the stone. It lies upon the land with the same
weight and the same ubiquity. For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides
has joined his spirit to the primal mud with scarcely a cry. But who builds in
stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe and so it was with these
masons however primitive their works may seem to us.

Cormac McCarthy

~~~
nnq
Wow. Where is that from?

~~~
Sangermaine
It's a passage from Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

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fuball63
Earthworks are facinating to me. In Ohio there is the serpent mound, which
aligns with star patterns during the solstice. Nearby is a native american
fortress on a hilltop, with earthen walls and "doorways". What I always take
away visiting these sites is how at one point, these people realized that they
could actually change their environment to suit them. They no longer had to
wait for nature to provide, they could be proactive. Seems for granted now but
at the time, what power they must have felt.

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dogruck
I think it's frustrating that when you google for additional information:

1\. Search results are a long list of extremely similar popular science
summaries, in various publications

2\. Each article is essentially an advertisement for the paper "due to be
published next month" \-- I'd prefer to simply read the original paper!

~~~
eternauta3k
You can set up a Google Scholar alert

[https://googlesystem.blogspot.com.ar/2010/05/email-alerts-
fo...](https://googlesystem.blogspot.com.ar/2010/05/email-alerts-for-google-
scholar.html)

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vslira
Sorry to go off topic, but I've been waiting a thread about weird stuff found
on gmaps for a long time.

Does anyone know what is this geological formation (26.621298, 55.490281) and
why it looks like a crater? Didn't find any reference to it (there could be
something in Farsi, though)

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AHASIC
I get a forest on google maps with these coordinates.

~~~
Mithaldu
He means the circular dark area you see when you zoom out.

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z3t4
most likely used for farming, you keep removing stones from the fields ...
Landscapes can change fast, from grassland to desert and back to grassland in
just a few hundred years.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
In the other comment thread [0] there are links [1] to a piece describing the
finding of "thousands of discarded foot bones of butchered antelopes unearthed
at the site".

Prior to reading that I was also highly skeptical that it was used for
capturing wild antelope. Assuming it's truthful it seems pretty strong
evidence though.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15525409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15525409)
[1] [https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/desert-kites-
out...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/desert-kites-out-of-eden-
walk-uzbekistan-iron-age-saiga/)

~~~
danielvf
This is talking about the “kites” though, not the “gates”.

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lsaac
The Bible mentions Jacob placing rocks in formation around his head before
going to sleep in the wilderness. The assumption there is that he did this to
protect himself from wild animals.

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goosh453
so we have another proof that stargates exist and ancient aliens were here? ;)

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TuringNYC
I tried to find it on Google Earth but could not. Sadly the article doesnt
note the coordinates. Reminds me quite a bit of the Gates described in the
tales of Gog and Magog.

~~~
pizza
Whenever I hear Gog and Magog it reminds me of how W invoked it to justify his
wars... (from wikipedia)

> Some Post–Cold War millenarians still identify Gog with Russia, but they now
> tend to stress its allies among Islamic nations, especially Iran. For the
> most fervent, the countdown to Armageddon began with the return of the Jews
> to Israel, followed quickly by further signs pointing to the nearness of the
> final battle—nuclear weapons, European integration, Israel's seizure of
> Jerusalem, and America's wars in Afghanistan and the Gulf. In the prelude to
> the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, President George W. Bush told Jacques Chirac,
> "Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East". "This confrontation", he
> urged the French leader, "is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict
> to erase His people's enemies before a new age begins". Chirac consulted a
> professor at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Lausanne to
> explain Bush's reference.

..

~~~
mmjaa
And people think the current president is insane, sheesh. Where was the uproar
when Bush said such idiotic things?

~~~
jacobush
There is a difference between a set of internally consistent beliefs executed
upon in good faith (no pun intended) and someone looking for the spotlight and
mirror to reflect his ego in. You can work with and negotiate with someone who
is thinking, however far from your own beliefs - an attention seeker can only
be manipulated or you may find yourself manipulated by him.

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mozumder
Animal pens.

~~~
Someone
_”The longest gate he had identified was more than 1,600 feet long, though
most were between 160 and 500 feet long. Sometimes the posts were as thick as
30 feet”_

1,600 feet is a _big_ pen, and 30 feet thick seems overkill for a holding pen.

~~~
killerpopiller
meter please

~~~
DanBC
1600 feet is roughly 490 meters.

30 feet is roughly 9 meters.

(I understand the "just google it" response, but just giving the numbers saves
a few moments of work for many people.)

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tzs
There's also an article on Ars Technica [1] about this.

The Desert Team is skeptical of the idea that they were used for trapping
animals for slaughter:

> One hypothesis about the kites is that hunters herded animals into them for
> easy slaughter, but the Desert Team notes that the walls would have been too
> low to fence the animals in.

That makes sense if you are imagining that they chase the animals into the
structure and then keep chasing them at full speed, so that the animals are
running when they encounter the walls.

But is that how the people them would have hunted a herd? Try to chase it down
at full speed?

Suppose instead that they were persistence hunters [2]. Persistence hunting
takes advantage of two key differences between us and many herd animals.

• We are more effective at body cooling than they are.

• We can trot for a long time, even on a very hot day, at a speed that is too
fast for the animal's efficient gaits, meaning it has to run to stay ahead.

A persistence hunter chases the animal just fast enough to make the animal
run. The animal gets away, but its run is inefficient so it has to stop and
rest. It also needs to cool down. The human just keeps coming, his more
efficient body cooling allowing him to keep moving without overheating.

When the human gets close enough to force the animal to resume running, the
animal is not fully recovered from the first round. It gets away again, but
now is even more exhausted and overheated than it was the first time.

Repeat, and after a few hours of this the human can just walk right up and
kill the animal, which is too tired to even try to further escape.

What it comes down to is humans are in fact one of the fastest land animals on
the planet--over long distances. 100 meter race? We suck. 100 kilometer race?
Bet on the human. Essentially persistence hunters make their prey engage in a
long distance race with them.

This is quite effective, but it has an obvious drawback. You spend 4 or 5
hours chasing the animal _away_ from your home. You are now several hours away
from home, with a bunch of meat to carry back.

Perhaps the idea with these large fenced in areas is that you chase the herd
in, but hang back far enough that when it gets to the far wall it thinks it
has escaped pursuit and rests there instead of jumping. Then you circle around
and come in from the back or the side, getting the herd to run across the
field again, again timing it so that when it reaches another fence it stops.

Note that the fence does not have to tall enough or strong enough to stop the
animals. It just has to be enough to make a tired animal that thinks it is now
safe to rest decide that resting on this side is easier than resting on the
other side.

You'll be giving the herd more rest time this way as opposed to with open
field persistence hunting because of the extra time it takes to circle around
the change direction, but that might be worth it because now you are chasing
the herd back and forth instead of away. You'll have a much easier time
hauling the meat back home.

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/archaeologists-
are-m...](https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/archaeologists-are-
mystified-by-ancient-gates-in-saudi-lava-fields/)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting)

~~~
CryptoPunk
The strategy you've propose doesn't seem likely to me. It would take a lot of
effort to steer them to the kite, only to have to chase them out again to
repeat the process. I think it's far more likely that they herded/chased them
toward the kite, and from far enough away to keep them from scattering, and
jumping over the stone 'walls', and when the herd traversed the kite, it
gradually bunched up as it got closer to the point of the kite. At the point
would be the kill zone, with hunters waiting to slaughter as many as possible.

