The findings are published in the Journal of Field Archaeology. This is the earliest evidence of a domesticated dog in the Arabian Peninsula by a margin of circa 1,000 years. 'AlUla is at a point where we're going to begin to realize how important it was to the development of humankind across the Middle East,' said the AAKSAU director, Hugh Thomas. To have that kind of memory, that people may have known for hundreds of years where their kin were buried - that's unheard of in this period in this region,' said Melissa Kennedy, assistant director of the Aerial Archaeology in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (AAKSAU) - AlUla project. 'What we are finding will revolutionize how we view periods like the Neolithic in the Middle East.

The researchers found the dog's bones in a burial site that is one of the earliest monumental tombs identified in the Arabian Peninsula, roughly contemporary with such tombs already dated further north in the Levant.Įvidence shows the earliest use of the tomb was circa 4300 BCE and received burials for at least 600 years during the Neolithic-Chalcolithic era - an indication that the inhabitants may have had a shared memory of people, places and the connection between them.

The discovery came from one of the projects in the large-scale archaeological surveys and excavations of the region commissioned by the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCU).

Domesticated richard francis