Dog-Assisted Hunting Strategies in the Early Holocene Rock Art of Saudi Arabia

Summary

The UNESCO world heritage sites of Shuwaymis and Jubbah, in northwestern Saudi Arabia, are extremely rich in early Holocene rock art. Hunting scenes illustrate dog-assisted hunting strategies from the 7th and possibly the 8th millennium BC, predating the spread of pastoralism. The engravings represent the earliest evidence for dogs on the Arabian Peninsula. Though the depicted dogs are reminiscent of the modern Canaan dog, it is unclear if they were brought to the Arabian Peninsula from the Levant or represent an independent domestication of dogs from Arabian wolves.

A substantial dataset of 147 hunting scenes shows dogs partaking in a range of hunting strategies adapted to the environment and topography of each site. All depicted dogs appear to share the same phenotypic traits, and hunting scenes show up to 21 dogs in a single group. Particularly notable is the inclusion of leashes on some dogs, the earliest known evidence in prehistory. The leashing of dogs not only shows a high level of control over hunting dogs before the onset of the Neolithic, but also that some dogs performed different hunting tasks than others.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 19896