Mysterious desert lines were animal traps

[Bianca Markos]

Mysterious desert lines were animal traps
Walls formed large funnels to direct gazelle and other large game animals


A desert kite, as seen in southeast Sinai. Scientists believe these long, low walls served to funnel wild game into ancient hunters' targets.
 View related photos
Ben Gurion / University Eilat

By Larry O'Hanlon
updated 12:39 p.m. CT, Tues., April 20, 2010

British RAF pilots in the early 20th century were the first to spot the strange kite-like lines on the deserts of Israel, Jordan and Egypt from the air and wonder about their origins. The lines are low, stone walls, usually found as angled pairs, that begin far apart and converge at circular pits. In some places in Jordan the lines formed chains up to 40 miles long.

Were they made by some weird kind of fault? Ancient astronauts?

A new study of 16 of what are called desert kites in the eastern Sinai Desert confirms what many researchers have long suspected: The walls form large funnels to direct gazelle and other large game animals into killing pits. What's more, the kites are between 2,300 and 2,400-years-old, were abandoned about 2,200 years ago and are just the right size to have worked on local gazelles and other hooved game.
   

[Bianca Markos]

"The research shows that the construction of the kite was actually more sophisticated than it seemed before, their use was more diverse than we thought, and the ancients' knowledge of animal ethology was deeper and more intimate than one would think," said Uzi Avner of Ben-Gurion University-Eilat, in Israel.

"We have no doubt at all that the kites were built for hunting, not for any other suggested function."

Avner is a co-author of a paper on the new research which will appear in the July 2010 issue of the Journal of Arid Environments.

For a time, many researchers suspected the kites might be corrals for protecting domesticated animals, but that idea has fallen out of favor as more research has been done.

"The hunting theory is the most accepted, and it appears that for most kites this was indeed the use," said Dani Nadel, another kite researcher from the University of Haifa, Israel. "There are similar structures, either from wood or from stone, on most continents."

Interestingly, the walls of the kites are not high enough to actually block the animals. Rather, they just seem to channel herds in the right direction. Modern wildlife managers in the same region have used a similar approach by laying pipes on the ground to direct gazelles into a corral, Avner reports.

[Bianca Markos]

A careful examination of not just the kites but their locations in relation to pastures and migration routes makes it very clear that desert kites were specialized for specific types of animals. Before the 20th century the region was home to several different species of gazelle, wild asses, hartebeests, oryxes, ibexes, dorcas and onagers.

Some kites cleverly exploited low spots in the landscape to lure animals into the unseen killing pit.

"Indeed, the pit would have appeared to the animals in the funnel as an opening in the boundary walls of the kite through which they could flee," Avner reports.

[Bianca Markos]

Another sort of kite was found on steep slopes or ridges below a plateau or shoulder of a hill so that animals driven over the ridge would suddenly be confronted by the installation before and below them, Avner explained.

As for why the kites fell out of use, it's still a bit of a mystery, says Nadel.

"They were abandoned, in several south-Negev cases, by the beginning of the middle Bronze age," said Nadel. "This may suggest a climatic change and or a shift in subsistence strategies."
© 2010 Discovery Channel

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36668401/ns/technology_and_science-science/

[Keith Ranville]

Mysterious desert lines were animal traps
Walls formed large funnels to direct gazelle and other large game animals


A desert kite, as seen in southeast Sinai. Scientists believe these long, low walls served to funnel wild game into ancient hunters' targets.
 View related photos
Ben Gurion / University Eilat

By Larry O'Hanlon
updated 12:39 p.m. CT, Tues., April 20, 2010

British RAF pilots in the early 20th century were the first to spot the strange kite-like lines on the deserts of Israel, Jordan and Egypt from the air and wonder about their origins. The lines are low, stone walls, usually found as angled pairs, that begin far apart and converge at circular pits. In some places in Jordan the lines formed chains up to 40 miles long.

Were they made by some weird kind of fault? Ancient astronauts?

A new study of 16 of what are called desert kites in the eastern Sinai Desert confirms what many researchers have long suspected: The walls form large funnels to direct gazelle and other large game animals into killing pits. What's more, the kites are between 2,300 and 2,400-years-old, were abandoned about 2,200 years ago and are just the right size to have worked on local gazelles and other hooved game.
   

Could the american street map of washington d.c hold a clue to the mysterious desert lines in the middle east? after all some sites in d.c that maybe encrypted in lines throughout the city? 



 - there is a resemblance to ancient egypt sites? And the freemasons is longed believed to be carriers of ancient knowledge derived from the ancient middle east?


Keith,

[mdsungate]

   You missed the posts of KTCat a few years back, Keith.  She attracted a lot of angry come backs when she asserted that Washington, DC was dedicated to the devil.  The Mason's mark is certainly there in that city however, as any knowledgeable historian would attest to.  But as Dan Brown points out in the Da Vinci Code, the pentagram is a very ancient symbol that predates Christianity’s attempt to associate it with the devil, or even magic.  It is a symbol of the sacred feminine.  And as such it has everything to do with the “ley lines” and is not so mysterious in the desert or in a city.  The symbol itself adheres to “sacred” angles.
 
Mike