Laas Geel means "the camel's well" in Somali, yet the animals crowding its ceilings are cattle — herd after herd of them, painted when this thorn scrub was green savanna. The site is a granite outcrop about 50 kilometres northeast of Hargeisa, standing where two seasonal riverbeds meet, and its overhangs shelter roughly twenty painted alcoves. Somali herders had always known the caves; the outside world learned of them only in December 2002, when a French team led by the archaeologist Xavier Gutherz came looking for buried Neolithic deposits and found the paintings above their heads instead. Radiocarbon dates from the digs put the painters here in the fourth and third millennia BC, which makes these cows some of the earliest evidence of cattle keeping anywhere in the Horn of Africa. They are unmistakable animals: white lyre-shaped horns, heavy udders, and broad rectangular necks striped in red and white, as if each cow were wearing a robe.
Walk in under the low granite ledge and the herd is at eye level, close enough to touch and guarded by nothing but the rule that you don't. The reds are iron oxide and have barely dimmed, because the overhanging rock has kept rain and direct sun off the pigment for five thousand years in very dry air. There is no glass, no railing and almost no one else: you come with a permit from Somaliland's Ministry of Tourism and, on the Berbera road, an armed police escort. The site will not appear on the World Heritage List — Somaliland is not a recognised state, so no nomination is possible — so it is looked after locally, with guards, fences at the most fragile panels and, since 2024, French development funding. Camels, the animal in the site's name, arrive only in the late, scratched-in engravings, after the grass was gone.