Laas Geel is a granite outcrop in Somaliland, an hour northeast of Hargeisa, and about twenty alcoves under its overhangs carry cattle painted five thousand years ago. The reds and whites have barely dimmed. You duck in under a low ledge and straighten up into a herd standing at your eye level, close enough to touch, though the unwritten rule is nobody does. Taken one at a time, the animals turn out to be marked differently from one another — the detail that convinced archaeologists these were tended, valued beasts rather than hunted game. They all wear the same strange thing: a broad, squared neck filled with bands of red and white. It has been read as a ceremonial robe, as decoration on a prized animal, and as nothing more than the local style. Nobody can say. The cows are humpless too, an old African breed, not the zebu Somali herders keep today.
The paintings are still here because of the shape of the stone. An overhanging granite lip has thrown the sun off them for fifty centuries, in a place where rain hardly falls anyway. Along the drip line you can see the paintings stop exactly where the shelter does. The French team that recorded them in December 2002 had come to test shelter floors for buried layers, not to look up. The herders sheltering here knew the cows all along. You come up above the alcoves to a plain flat to the horizon, two dry watercourses meeting below the granite. Water sits near the surface here even when the beds look empty, so animals have been brought to this spot for millennia; the name means the camel's well. World Heritage nominations come from recognised states, and Somaliland is not one, so the best-preserved rock art in Africa has no route onto that list, or the money. What it has is a fence and a few guards. Among the cattle stand much smaller human figures, arms flung wide, some holding a stick or a bow. They are easy to miss. The painters drew themselves as the smaller party.