快猫短视频

Stone Age hunters living in what is now South Africa built long rock walls that acted as traps, funnelling fleeing prey animals into kill zones where they could be easily dispatched.

While these 鈥渄esert kites鈥� are common in the Middle East, it was thought that southern African hunter-gatherers didn鈥檛 build them and instead left little or no mark on the landscape.

鈥淚 predict that there may be many more kite sites in southern Africa,鈥� says Marlize Lombard at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. 鈥淏ut they are very difficult to find because of both location and lack of visibility on the landscape.鈥�

A desert kite is a rock wall built in the shape of a U or V, with a wide opening and a narrow tip tens of metres beyond the mouth. Hunters pursuing large and fast prey, such as springboks, would chase them into the wide opening.聽As the animals fled into the kite, they would find themselves trapped in the narrow space between the walls, where the hunters could easily kill them with weapons like spears.

Thousands of desert kites are known in the Middle East, especially in Jordan, Israel and Egypt鈥檚 Sinai peninsula. But they are hard to find at ground level, because they are made from local rocks, often abutting natural outcrops. They are best seen from the air or in satellite images, such as those on Google Earth.

Read more: Arabian cult may have built 1000 monuments older than Stonehenge

In 2016, Lombard and her team discovered two sets of desert kites, with five and seven funnels respectively, near the town of Keimoes in north-west South Africa. In 2018, they found a third site with 14 funnels dotted around a small hill.

Then in 2019, they flew a small aeroplane over the area and used lidar, a kind of laser scanning, to measure the surface accurately. In the process, as they now report, they discovered two new kite sites. One has just one funnel, while the other has three.

In this region of South Africa, desert kites are common though not ubiquitous. 鈥淭he structures are closely related to certain landscape types, so that they were probably only built where the landscape was 鈥榬ight鈥�,鈥� says Lombard.

The team suspects that the kites were built within the past 2000 years, at the very end of the African Stone Age. Lombard says the builders were probably hunter-gatherers, but could also have been herders who occasionally hunted.

鈥淢any of the people living in the Keimoes area today are [descendants] of the original Khoisan populations, who lived there by, and long before, 2000 years ago,鈥� says Lombard.

Sign up to Our Human Story, a free monthly newsletter on the revolution in archaeology and human evolution