A stone wall underneath the Baltic Sea may be the oldest known megastructure built by humans in Europe. It dates back about 11,000 years to the Stone Age, and was first discovered in 2021 about six miles off of Germany’s Baltic coast. The findings are described in a study published February 12 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
[Related: Neanderthals and modern humans intermingled in Europe 45,000 years ago.]
The Blinkerwall is about half a mile long along the Bay of Mecklenburg. It was initially spotted by accident when a team of scientists from Kiel University in Germany were using a multibeam sonar system from a research vessel to study the crust of the seafloor.
The team believes that Stone Age hunter-gatherers likely built it about 11,000 years ago to hunt reindeer. Hunting walls like this would catch herds of animals that are more likely to run parallel alongside obstacles instead of jumping over them.
The roughly 1,500 stones connected to nearly 300 bigger boulders that make up the Blinkerwall are aligned so regularly that the possibility that the arrangement of stones formed naturally along the seafloor seems unlikely.
Scientists from the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW), Kiel University, the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology, the German Aerospace Center, the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research and created a detailed 3D model of the wall. They also used modern geophysical models to reconstruct what the landscape would have looked like thousands of years ago. Sediment samples from the basin just to the south of the wall helps them narrow down the possible time period when the wall was built. It is the first known discovery of a Stone Age hunting structure in the Baltic Sea region.
“Our investigations indicate that a natural origin of the underwater stone wall as well as a construction in modern times, for…
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