Today’s mystery
Tuesday, 10 November 2026
I was reading about mustatils today; they’re rectangular stone outlines, like low walls, that usually are very long and skinny. They date to the early Neolithic, were made by pastoralists/herders, and are found in northwest Saudi Arabia. The largest are huge, up to 600 meters long—that’s over a third of a mile. Mustatils have small areas sectioned off at each end, with different characteristics, so that researchers call them heads and bases. No one knows what they were for, and they seem to be associated with cattle, sheep/goats, and gazelles. They aren’t everywhere, and they are sometimes in clusters. To date, over 1600 have been found on satellite photos, and very few have been excavated and dated.