Over the last few centuries, not much has changed in the village of Shuwaymis, which lies 400 miles and a dusty seven-hour drive north of Jeddah. But in 2001, a Bedouin told local teacher Mahboub Habbas al-Rasheedi that he’d found an undiscovered cache of rock art while grazing his camels. Mahboub spent the next several days searching for the site and eventually found hundreds of petroglyphs emblazoned on a honey-hued escarpment, including depictions of oryx, ostriches, leopards, cheetahs, and lions.
Not only did the discovery uncover the region’s largest collection of ancient rock art, dating back at least to the Bronze Age, but it added to scientists’ understanding of the ecological history of the Arabian peninsula. They already knew that creatures like lions and the Arabian leopard had roamed the area before being killed off by overhunting in the last century, but they now recognized that these animals had inhabited the region as far back as 3,000 BCE.