Carving introduces African art at show for National Geographic

WASHINGTON -- About 7,000 years ago an unknown artist in what is now the African republic of Niger was so impressed with the local giraffes that he or she chiseled a life-size sculpture of a pair of them onto a stone outcropping in the desert.

The original couldn't be taken away when it was found in 1997. So the National Geographic Society has an aluminum cast of the 18-foot work, one of the biggest ever discovered. It introduce a new exhibit called "Artist as Explorer" at the society's headquarters.

Rock carvings and paintings, some of them 12,000 years old, have been found on every continent except Antarctica, but there appear to be more in Africa than anywhere else. Some are only a few inches long. Thousands have been mapped from Morocco in the north to the Drakenberg mountains of eastern South Africa. The giraffes are only the most impressive of about 450 carvings on the outcrop in Niger.

The outcrop is near a tourist road running through the desert, which must have been fertile land at one time.