In Jordan's spring desert bloom, hints of human history

Many carvings are in the ancient Safaitic script, an ancestor of modern Arabic, but others are more recent: a drawing of a long-haul truck and "1999" scrawled in Arabic.

Summer's heat will soon burn the spring colors away, and return the "qaa" or plains in Arabic to the basalt black, sandy brown sand and sky blue, says Yorke Rowan, an archaeologist who has spent the past seven years studying the dawn of human civilization in Wadi El-Qattafi, Jordan.

"There's a lot more going on in this desert region that looks like such a blasted, empty territory to our Western eyes, including archaeologists who should know better, that we're starting to discover," he said.