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A major tourism destination in western Nepal faces increased risk of natural disasters following a devastating flood last year, experts have warned.

Some houses have been deserted because the edges they stand on have been collapsing due to erosion; a few metres away, a highway that connects with a newly built road reaching the Tibet border is threatened.

"With the river having changed its course after last year's flood, several sections of the riverbanks that people thought were safe for human settlements earlier have now been eaten up by the river," said engineer Dhurbaraj Poudel, who heads the Nepali government's water-induced disaster management office in Pokhara.

Although the reason for the flood is still debated, some believe it was an avalanche-induced rock failure on the flanks of the Annapurna mountain, which in turn hit a temporary mud-dam 2,000 metres below.

They think the collapse of the dam formed by previous landslides caused the impounded water to burst out.

A number of villages and markets were wiped out as floodwaters hurtled towards Pokhara, sweeping away people and livestock.

The debris deposited by the flood is as high as 20 metres at places.

But people are now more concerned about monsoon-driven floods, rather than the kind of sudden flooding last year.

"That unusual flood set a dangerous stage like this," said Thakur Prasad Wagle, a local leader.

"These people had never imagined that the river that flowed on the other side of the basin would come to their doorstep one day."

Another local resident said she moves to a different house during monsoon and comes back when the rainy season is over.

"If I don't do that, any one of the nights during monsoon can sweep us away – because we did see water coming like that last rainy season."

Prof Krishna KC, who heads the geography department at the Prithvi Narayan Campus in Pokhara, agreed about the risks to settlements, but thinks that the main tourist centre in Pokhara does not face immediate threat because it is relatively far from the waterway.

"But if there is a really huge flood, then you never know, and I don't want to imagine that now."

Formation of this valley itself is linked to gravel deposition following outbursts of huge glacial lakes from this section of the Himalayas thousands of years ago.

The Himalayas are fragile mountains formed from the tussle of tectonic plates that make the region seismically active.

While earthquakes have often been blamed for rock failures and landslides on mountain slopes, scientists also point at global temperature rises for rapid thawing of snowfields and glacial melt that can disturb the flow of snow-fed rivers.

The Seti river brings down heavy sediment of limestone and has formed several gorges in and around Pokhara, making it even more vulnerable.

Mr Poudel said even the heart of Pokhara faces the threat in the wake of the changes in the river's waterway.

"There is at least one channel that flows out of the Seti river into the Phewa Lake (one of the prime attractions of Pokhara) and in case of a big flood that could invite disaster for the centre of the touristic spot."

The Phewa lake adjoins the main tourism area housing mainly hotels and restaurants.

Meanwhile, tourism activities including paragliding, zip-wire flying, restaurants and lodges are spreading in the outer areas of Pokhara as well.

Three Ukrainians were swept to death by the unusual flood last year when they were at a hot water spring along the Seti river some 20 kilometres north of Pokhara.

Tourism entrepreneur Basu Tripathy said the threat for their industry loomed large.

"We entrepreneurs along with the civil society have been requesting the government to take serious initiative in time."

But Poudel of the water-induced disaster management centre said he has been given $3,500 only despite his repeated request for a bigger budget.

"With that money, all we can do is wait for the disaster with gabion and wire only."

Twenty years ago when scientists at Cern created the first page for the World Wide Web no one could have imagined how easily it would transform the ability of humankind to have conversations around the globe.

Nor could they have predicted that a web-based debate would have explored the apparently outlandish idea of volunteers travelling on a one-way ticket to Mars and setting up a colony with no prospect of return – all on live television.

The technology for that kind of space travel didn't exist back then. The TV show Big Brother hadn't been invented. And the three letters "www" were known to only a handful of people.

But on Tuesday afternoon, in a Google "hangout" – the first of this type of web-based dialogue to be hosted by BBC News – contributors from as far afield as Arizona, Paris and Mumbai shared their thoughts with us in London on a plan for an outpost where people would live – and die – beyond Earth.

A Dutch organisation, Mars One, is seeking volunteers for a flight that would take them to the Red Planet and leave them there. The costs would be covered, it's hoped, by TV rights and corporate sponsorship.

There is something about Mars that catches the imagination – its bloody colour, its role in mythology, the terrible track record of attempts to land on its distant and dusty surface, and the prospects of finding forms of alien life.

I checked with Bas Lansdorp, boss of Mars One, for the latest number of people to sign up so far: 30,000 people had paid the 30 euro deposit by the end of last week – and that number is probably far higher now.

Applicants' videos on his website capture an extraordinary level of excitement about the chance of making the journey. So what is it that drives people to want to leave this planet and risk everything on another?

We discussed that question with Melissa Ede, who describes herself as a transgender woman, and has signed up as a contender to be selected for the Mars One mission – "failure isn't in my vocabulary", she told us before the webcast.

For her, it was about excitement and the need to explore. "How do we know it's not possible?" she asked.

That was in response to comments I'd made about the very high number of very large obstacles that need to be overcome before anyone's boots will scuff the soils of Mars.

For a start, space is difficult and expensive. There aren't colonies on the Moon or Mars right now for a reason: the challenges and costs are huge.

The preferred rocket, Falcon Heavy, has to yet to be tested by its makers, SpaceX, even though the Mars One plan calls for the first demonstration flight to land on Mars in 2016.

A satellite is due to be parked above Mars in the same year to act as a relay for live TV pictures. A British firm, Surrey Satellites, confirms to me that it has been approached by Mars One but says it needs to be paid before researching the proposal.

The Mars One plan has incredibly tight timings – possibly unrealistically tight. Various contributors agreed on the sheer scale of the technological difficulties, including Rajat Agrawal, a technology writer in Mumbai, and Amy Shira Teitel, a space historian in Phoenix.

Ms Shira Teital said: "What if one of their supplies ships doesn't make it and they lose food? What's going to happen when vital parts don't make it or survive the trip? Is the crew going to eat each other? How much are we willing to make it a 'Lord of the Flies'-type situation if it all goes terribly wrong?"

Meanwhile, another communications system only made possible by the Web – Twitter – focused on the apparently appealing notion of using Mars One to rid the Earth of various people – usually politicians. One said: "You would never have to hear Justin Bieber again."

Others asked about the practicalities, often the grim ones. "What happens to the corpses?" asked one woman in a Tweet. Fair question, and thought-provoking: colonies need cemeteries.

There's always massive interest in Nasa's rovers on Mars – and robots like Curiosity are a very efficient way to explore the solar system. But there's nothing like the prospect of humans venturing there to spark excitement.

The half hour hangout passed incredibly quickly. I was reminded – by an email – of an earlier venture, Mars Express, the European Space Agency's spacecraft sent to orbit Mars.

I witnessed its launch from Baikonur in Central Asia in June 2003 – almost 10 years ago. It was an uplifting sight watching the rocket blaze its way through space and the mission was a success.

But the craft was also carrying a tiny lander, the British Beagle-2, which was designed to touch down and search for signs of life. On Christmas Day, 2003, we waited for a signal – and waited and waited. The Beagle had crashed.

Imagine the risks of a manned mission to Mars, and the tension of a landing. If it gets off the ground – and it's a very big if – Mars One would provide irresistible viewing. And a lot more for us all to talk about.

A "big cat" was on the loose in the English countryside at the turn of the last century, scientists say.

They believe a Canadian lynx was prowling around the fields of the South West in 1903 before being shot after attacking two dogs in Devon.

Tests on the animal revealed it had probably spent some time in captivity before escaping or being set free.

The animal had been donated to Bristol Museum at the time of its death and kept in its stores for decades.

The scientists' findings are published in the journal Historical Biology.

Dr Ross Barnett, a molecular biologist from the University of Copenhagen and the University of Durham, said: "I've seen one of these cats in the wild.

"They are pretty impressive cats – they are a reasonable size, and they have lots of fluffy fur which makes them look even bigger. They have sharp claws, teeth and strong muscles."

From blurry photos of the Beast of Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, to reports of a lion on the loose in Essex in 2012, the UK has a long tradition of spotting big cats.

Most of these claims are dismissed as misidentifications, hoaxes or even hallucinations, but not in this case.

In 1903, the unusual cat was donated to the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery. The museum's records state that it had been shot after attacking and killing two dogs close to Newton Abbot in Devon.

Unsure of exactly what it was, the exotic beast was stuffed, its skeleton preserved, and then the remains were tucked away in the museum's stores.

More than a century later, the cat was unearthed by a scientist who thought the find might be significant.

An analysis of the skeleton and mounted skin revealed that the animal was a Canadian lynx, which is about two to three times the size of a domestic cat and is usually found in Canada and the northern states of the US.

The researchers found that the animal's teeth were badly decayed.

Dr Barnett said: "We think it had probably been in captivity at some point in its life.

"It had lost all of its incisors, which would have been a pretty debilitating injury for a wild cat, but not a problem for one in captivity.

"It also had massive amounts of plaque on its molars, which are indication of it not having a wild diet – something with lots of wet cat food, essentially ready-processed meat like steaks."

The researchers believe that the lynx had been in captivity for some time, but they were unable to find any records of the cat's owner.

"Was it someone's pet? Was it part of a small menagerie that was travelling through the area? There aren't really any zoos nearby where it could have escaped from," Dr Barnett said.

The team is also unsure how long the animal had been at large in Devon before it was killed.

Its decayed teeth would have limited its chances in the wild, but the lynx is an adaptable animal, and may have been able to survive by preying on small mammals.

While many big cat sightings remain unverified, sometimes the rumours do turn out to be true, and the team believes that the Canadian lynx is the earliest recorded example of an exotic cat on the loose in the UK.

Another case relates to a live puma that was captured in Inverness-shire in 1980 and had been living in the wild for a long period of time. It was called Felicity, and placed in a zoo.

But Dr Barnett said that these cases were few and far between.

He said: "It's all very good saying you saw a lion in Essex or a tiger in Shropshire, or wherever. But it is very difficult to estimate size of a species from a distance – especially if you are unfamiliar with them.

"So I would argue for continued scepticism, unless you have a body or specimen you can analyse."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Batteries like the one that burned on a Boeing Co 787 Dreamliner in January can be made safer, but doing so can cut performance and raise costs, experts told U.S. safety investigators on Thursday.

The use of lithium-ion batteries has greatly expanded in the past decade, powering everything from Tesla cars to iPads, and the risk of fire is well-understood, experts said at a forum organized by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.

But even as participants praised the batteries as the most powerful and lightest available, they also said there was still no fool-proof way to predict or prevent internal short circuits implicated in the Dreamliner fire.

The fire in the battery compartment of a 787 parked on the ground in Boston in January, followed that same month by an in-flight battery malfunction over Japan, led to the grounding of the Dreamliner.

While the final cause of those incidents is still under investigation, Boeing has been allowed by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to conduct tests of a redesigned battery unit, part of the plane’s auxiliary power system.

The two-day NTSB meeting that began on Thursday is aimed at helping the safety agency gauge the risk of lithium-ion batteries as their use in planes and vehicles expands.

NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman said after Thursday’s session that the risks had to be addressed. “I think with lithium-ion batteries, the genie is out of the bottle,” Hersman said.

The number of lithium-ion cells made worldwide ballooned to 4.4 billion in 2012, from 800 million in 2002, according to the Portable Rechargeable Battery Association, a trade group of battery makers.

Boeing’s high-tech Dreamliner, that also makes extensive use of carbon fiber to cut weight, is the first commercial airplane to make extensive use of lithium-ion batteries.

“The growth in the mission of lithium-ion batteries is substantial,” said Glen Bowling, vice president of sales at Saft Specialty Battery Group, a producer of lithium ion batteries.

“It’s a stretching of the technology boundaries and we have to be professional when we do that.”

The understanding of what causes short circuits in lithium-ion batteries and how to prevent them remains murky.

Laurie Florence, principal engineer for the independent safety testing organization UL, said some cells in a battery can withstand a short circuit caused by a nail puncture, but not an internal flaw, perhaps caused by an impurity or other manufacturing issue.

SALES OVERESTIMATED

While consumer uses have soared, the high costs of lithium-ion of making battery technology safe have led to a slower-than-expected development of electric cars and other bigger applications.

Market predictions for those batteries made as recently as 2008 “were off by more than a factor of 10″ when compared with actual market size in 2011, said Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“This created a great deal of stress among those who manufacture batteries,” he told the NTSB forum. Some went out of business, mainly because the market for lithium-ion did not materialize.

Currently, there is enough idle lithium-ion battery capacity to power 400,000 Nissan Leaf electric cars, he said.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama proposed a federal budget that would increase the tax credit for buying an electric vehicle to $10,000 from $7,500 to help support sales.

SAFETY VS COST

About 25 percent of a typical lithium-ion battery cell is flammable liquid, which increases the risk of fire, Chiang said. But making a cell safer through additives reduces performance, experts said.

The difficulties of lithium-ion batteries have prompted some experts to rework older technologies or leap ahead to more advanced batteries in hopes of finding a safer, less costly solution for modern uses.

Boeing rival Airbus has dropped lithium-ion batteries from its forthcoming A350 jet, saying it wants let the technology mature and avoid any risk of delaying the jet’s development.

Better technology is needed to predict if a battery cell will experience an internal short due to a manufacturing defect, Daniel Doughty, president of Battery Safety Consulting, told the NTSB forum. He added new methods were also needed to prevent a cell fire from spreading to other cells in the battery pack.

The widespread use of lithium-ion batteries has also placed pressure on regulators to develop new ways to safely ship them.

“We all know lithium batteries are hazardous materials,” said Janet McLaughlin, deputy director of the Federal Aviation Administration’s hazardous materials safety programs.

In the past, the FAA has estimated the amount of hazardous materials on a given cargo plane to be about 5 percent. But now, that figure can be around 80 percent, with much of that related to batteries, McLaughlin said.

(Reporting by Deepa Seetharaman; Editing by Alwyn Scott, Jeffrey Benkoe and Tim Dobbyn)

LONDON (Reuters) – Governments on both sides of the Atlantic are placing big new bets on the future of brain science, just as much of the pharmaceutical industry retreats from the field.

Brain disorders ranging from depression to Alzheimer’s are extracting an ever greater social and economic cost across the globe. But while the United States and European Union are funding ambitious efforts in neuroscience, the private sector is often skeptical about the prospect of rapid breakthrough cures.

Many pharmaceutical companies harbor deep doubts about whether neuroscience is worth their investment dollars as a boom period for once highly profitable psychiatric medicines comes to an end and new drugs prove hard to find.

President Barack Obama unveiled a major initiative last week to map the individual cells and circuits that make up the human brain. That announcement followed a EU decision in January to award up to $1.3 billion to a Swiss-based project aiming to create a synthetic “computerized” brain.

The two programs – Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) and the Human Brain Project – have been compared with the Human Genome Project, the 13-year venture to map human DNA completed in 2003. In fact, they are even more ambitious, given their open-ended nature.

Yet it will be years, possibly decades, before the findings of these programs make any significant difference to the millions of people worldwide suffering from brain disorders – a challenge for both neuroscientists and industry.

Brain science may be on the cusp of a new era, but in the short term it is proving frustratingly hard to improve on the uneven effectiveness of existing drugs – such as the 25-year-old antidepressant Prozac – or to find new Alzheimer’s treatments.

HELP OR HYPE?

At a festival of neuroscience on the banks of London’s River Thames this week, 2,000 neuroscientists from all areas of the field tried to bring their work to life for the public.

Wearing blue badges saying “ask me about brains” enthusiasts from universities, charities and patient groups invited visitors to “knit a neuron” or stimulate their grey matter by interacting with a walking man-sized sponge brain.

In rooms set back from the fun, brain scientists presented data on the prefrontal cortex and decision making, and delivered lectures on neuropsychiatry in the 21st century.

Some were buoyed by the news that world leaders have finally begun to notice their field, and are stumping up serious cash, but there is also a fear the big brain projects may generate more hype than help.

“There’s going to be a lot of hype about this, just as there was at the beginning of the Human Genome Project,” said Stephen Rose, a professor of biology and neurobiology at the Open University and the University of London.

“(Obama’s BRAIN plan) will no doubt advance neuroscience, but whether it will advance patient care is a different question,” he said, confessing also to “considerable skepticism” about the European brain project. That, he said, would probably do more for computing than it would for brain science.

Moncef Slaoui, head of research at GlaxoSmithKline, knows the ups and downs or the neuroscience field.

His company is one of those that has cut back its research and development work in neuroscience areas such as pain and depression, although it is still investing in diseases such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Britain’s biggest drugmaker also has a new vision for treating disease by developing “bioelectronics” to target the electrical signals transmitted by nerves.

“With the investments that are being made now in brain mapping, I am very confident that major breakthroughs will come – I just don’t know when,” Slaoui told Reuters.

DEPRESSED SALES

Although the Western world is still popping plenty of pills for mental illness, patent expiries and tumbling prices as cheap generics hit the market mean industry profits are eroding fast.

Worldwide sales of antidepressants, which peaked at $15 billion in 2003, are set to fall to $5.4 billion 2018, while antipsychotics are expected to tumble from a record $21 billion in 2011 to $9.8 billion, according to consensus analyst forecasts compiled by Thomson Reuters Pharma.

Yet there is still a big unmet need, with depression alone expected to be the largest cause of disability worldwide by 2030, according to the World Health Organization.

The economic consequences are also huge, with the World Economic Forum estimating in 2011 that the cumulative global impact of mental disorders in terms of lost economic output would amount to $16 trillion by 2030.

Finding new drugs to treat brain disorders is notoriously tough. Early tests on animals are of limited value, since mice cannot tell scientists what they are feeling, and placebo drugs – or sugar pills – tend to have a major impact in human studies, making it very hard to know if a particular drug is working.

David Nutt, a professor of psychopharmacology at Imperial College London, also says restrictive rules on the drugs researchers can use to explore the brain are hindering progress.

“Most of the studies we do in animals that tell us about the brain use drugs which we cannot use in humans,” he told Reuters. “We need to have a toolbox for human use. We need to have them made available so that we can ask fundamental questions about human brains.”

THINNING FIELD

Companies that have cut back neuroscience work in recent years include GSK, Merck, Novartis and AstraZeneca, with the latter taking a further step to downgrade the area last month.

But not everyone is quitting. Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson still have major investments in neuroscience, while Roche – best known for cancer treatments – has recently increased its investment on brain disorders.

“It’s still early days but we believe there is a lot of potential in neuroscience,” said Roche CEO Severin Schwan.

The Swiss drugmaker has a new treatment for schizophrenia in final-stage Phase III trials, results of which are due in the first half of 2014. If it works, Deutsche Bank analysts believe bitopertin could be a $4 billion-a-year seller.

Other analysts are skeptical, especially since the success rate for brain drugs in Phase III is poor, averaging around 50 percent against 50-80 percent for other disease areas.

The general pullback by industry has thinned out the field, which could be good for those companies remaining – although it may not last.

“The big brain initiatives in both the U.S. and Europe are long-term. Ultimately, I wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up throwing up positive developments that prompt Big Pharma to re-enter the area,” said Anders Gersel Pedersen, research head at Danish neuroscience specialist Lundbeck.

(editing by David Stamp)

Here's something to inspire every late developer: Peter Higgs didn't win a prize for physics until he was 52.

BBC Scotland Investigates: Peter Higgs: Particle Man will be broadcast on BBC1 Scotland at 22:35 on Wednesday 17 April, and for a week later on the BBC iPlayer.

It was a cocktail party of a decidedly muted and academic sort.

Christine Hughey of James Madison University worked with a Danish beer maker called Mikkeller whose brewmaster, she said, "takes a very scientific approach to brewing".

He prepared a number of India pale ales, each using just one hop variety.

Dr Hughey created "molecular fingerprints" of the resulting beers, mapping out the masses of all the molecules within.

Surprisingly, there were marked variations even among 2010 and 2011 versions of the same beer with the same hop – making the technique almost forensic in its precision.

"We can use these molecular fingerprints to determine the year of production, to determine the source, for authentication," she told BBC News.

"I think especially with the craft beer movement, people want to know what they're drinking.

"We've developed 'class prediction models', so if you gave me an unknown [beer], I could say 'the hop used in this beer is East Kent and it was made in 2010'."

Wine has perhaps the most established credentials as a lush mixture of flavours both delicate and bold – mixtures of extraordinary variety, if critiques are anything to go by.

Andreas Dunkel of the Technical University of Munich deconstructed the molecules present in a high-value Italian wine, finding some 82 taste-active compounds that were responsible for the wine's distinctive taste.

But analysis has shown that just 35 of those compounds in varying proportions could be used to effectively reconstruct the taste of any one of the wines Mr Dunkel's team has studied.

It is not about artificially creating a given wine, he said – it is more about quality control and consistency.

"If I know which tastants are really relevant for the final product, I can start breeding studies to increase or decrease certain tastants in the plant or the fruit," he told BBC News.

"Later I can use these results to optimise my production technology – controlling the ageing process in the barrel, for example. The most important thing for a producer of wine is… to have a characteristic quality you have every year."

But then there's the morning after – a topic covered in gruesomely chemical detail by Alyson Mitchell of the University of California Davis in her presentation Chemistry and Anatomy of a Hangover.

The hangover is an astonishingly complex physiological phenomenon, with dozens of symptoms and relatively little human trial data – rats and a few undergraduates are the preferred model for much of the relevant research.

Regrettably, although much is known about the chemistry of how the body processes alcohol – and how that can have effects on everything from our digestion to our immune systems – the scientific literature is mute on a cure.

As Prof Mitchell described typical gastrointestinal effects, a groan went up.

"It's not pretty, but we've all been there," Prof Mitchell admonished.

And we have. To those with the notion that scientists are not just like the rest of the population, know this: many from the capacity crowd at Prof Mitchell's talk put their new-found chemical perspectives to use in New Orleans' famed French Quarter on Tuesday night.

A $2bn experiment on the space station has made observations that could prove to be the first signs of dark matter, a mysterious component of the Universe.

"It took us 18 years to do this experiment and we want to do it very carefully," he told a seminar at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (Cern) in Geneva.

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., March 9 – An asteroid as big as a city block shot relatively close by the Earth on Saturday, the latest in a series of visiting celestial objects including an asteroid the size of a bus that exploded over Russia last month, injuring 1,500.

Discovered just six days ago, the 460-foot long (140-meter) Asteroid 2013 ET passed about 600,000 miles from Earth at 3:30 p.m. EST. That’s about 2-1/2 times as far as the moon, fairly close on a cosmic yardstick.

“The scary part of this one is that it’s something we didn’t even know about,” Patrick Paolucci, president of Slooh Space Camera, said during a webcast featuring live images of the asteroid from a telescope in the Canary Islands.

Moving at a speed of about 26,000 miles per hour, the asteroid could have wiped out a large city if it had impacted the Earth, added Slooh telescope engineer Paul Cox.

Asteroid 2013 ET is nearly eight times larger than the bus-sized asteroid that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on February 15. The force of the explosion, equivalent to about 440 kilotons of dynamite, created a shock wave that shattered windows and damaged buildings, injuring more than 1,5000 people.

Later that day, another small asteroid, known as DA14, passed about 17,200 miles from Earth, closer than the orbiting networks of communications and weather satellites.

“One of the reasons why we’re finding more of these objects is that there are more people looking,” Cox said.

Two other small asteroids, both about the size of the Russian meteor, will also be in Earth’s neighborhood this weekend. Asteroid 2013 EC 20 passed just 93,000 miles away on Saturday – “a stone’s thrown,” said Cox.

On Sunday, Asteroid 2013 EN 20 will fly about 279,000 miles from Earth. Both were discovered just three days ago. “We know that the solar system is a busy place,” said Cox.

“We’re not sitting here on our pale, blue dot on our own in nice safety … This should be a wakeup call to governments.”

NASA has been tasked by the U.S. Congress to find and track all near-Earth objects 0.62 miles or larger in diameter, and estimates about 95 percent have been identified.

However, only about 10 percent of smaller asteroids have been discovered, NASA scientists have said.

The effort is intended to give scientists and engineers as much time as possible to learn if an asteroid or comet is on a collision course with Earth, in hopes of sending up a spacecraft or taking other measures to avert catastrophe.

About 100 tons of material from space hit Earth every day. Astronomers currently expect an object about the size of what hit Russia to strike the planet about every 100 years.

(Editing by Tom Brown and Todd Eastham)

Recent archaeological discoveries on the Arabian Peninsula have uncovered evidence of a previously unknown civilisation based in the now arid areas in the middle of the desert.

According to Ali bin Ibrahim Al Ghabban, vice-president of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities, DNA and carbon-14 (radiocarbon) tests are continuing. But initial evidence suggests that the artefacts date back 9,000 years.

"These discoveries reflect the importance of the site as a centre of civilisation," he told BBC News.

"It could possibly be the birthplace of an advanced prehistoric civilisation that witnessed the domestication of animals, particularly the horse, for the first time during the Neolithic period."

The crucial find is that of a large sculptural fragment that appears to show the head, muzzle, shoulder and withers of an animal that bears a distinct resemblance to a horse.

The piece is unique in terms of its size, weighing more than 135kg.

Moreover, further discoveries on the same site of smaller, horse-like sculptures, also with bands across their shoulders, have opened the possibility that an advanced civilisation here may already have been using the accessories of domestication – tack – in order to control horses.

While archaeologists and other experts have held that horses were first tamed and exploited by man some 6,000 years ago in west Kazakhstan, experts are now starting to consider whether both location and date should be revised in light of these remarkable finds.

Whether yoking man and animal together in this way is supported by evidence is one of the many questions that face an international scientific team brought together to examine the finds.

Selected from a wide background of specialisations, their unique expertise is expected to paint a picture of life in the area during pre-historic times.

Michael Petraglia, professor of human evolution and prehistory at the University of Oxford has been working on the radiocarbon dating at Al Magar.

He says that the site dates back even further than first thought and can reveal much about the fluctuations between wet and dry periods in the Arabian Peninsula. He adds that the horse fragment dating links with the peninsula going through a wet phase.

"This is a crucial piece of information about an area that is now hyper arid but in the past must have been a lush river valley," he explains. "It confirms that there were savannahs and grassland in the vicinity," he explains.

Traces of other stone tools such as scrapers have been estimated as dating back more than 50,000 years. They were found at the site and suggest that Al Magar was a hospitable place for humans to settle in over thousands of years. In part this is due to its topography, or terrain.

Michael Petraglia says that in the past, the spot must have been a lush river valley: "There is a major valley across the area which once was a river running westward forming waterfalls and taking water to the low fertile lands west of Al-Magar," he explains.

"Al Magar was situated on both banks of the river. Man lived in this area before the last desertification or before the drastic climatic changes ended with the hot dry conditions and development of deserts."

The name Al Magar means gathering or meeting place. Juris Zarins, who worked in the early days of archaeology in Saudi Arabia and found tethering stones dating back to the Neolithic period, claims that the site is within an archaeological hot bed.

"There has not been enough exploration carried out," he says. "Discoveries like this could change things."

And indeed the finds have had a huge impact, sparking intense interest in Arabia's prehistory. Other finds made beyond the large and well-preserved Al Magar dovetail with current Arabian passions. Of particular interest are canine remains that resemble one of the oldest known domesticated dog breeds, the desert saluki, as well as traces of a dagger.

Abdullah Al Sharekh, an archaeologist at King Sa'ud University in Riyadh, and a pioneer of the Al Magar site, found statues within the precinct of a building. This, he says, may reveal vital clues about trade, migration and ritual. "The variety of the finds can tell us about social life and culture," he explains.

"This will take time but all the evidence is here."

The discovery of the large horse sculpture fragment has naturally awakened regional interest. This in turn has compounded curiosity about other important Arabian finds.

"It is an amazing discovery that raises all sorts of questions about when man stopped tracking down wild horses and began taming and exploiting them for transport," Mr Al Ghabban says.

"On this site there are very important symbols of authentic Arabian culture – equestrianism, falconry, the saluki hunting dog and wearing of the dagger."

More excavations are planned of yet other sites which have never been surveyed, and further studies are expected to unveil more important information on the Al Magar civilisation along with its impact on the history of Saudi Arabia.