Submerged wall could be the largest Stone Age megastructure in Europe
A stone wall nearly a kilometre long found under the Baltic Sea may have been built by ancient hunters to channel deer into a confined space
By Michael Le Page
12 February 2024
Graphical reconstruction of the stone wall as a hunting structure in a glacial landscape
Michał Grabowski
A low stone wall nearly a kilometre long has been found 21 metres below the surface of the Baltic Sea off the German coast. The wall is thought to have been built around 11,000 years ago to channel reindeer into places where they could more easily be killed, and could be the largest Stone Age megastructure in Europe.
The discovery was made by chance. In 2021, students on a training exercise with geophysicist Jacob Geersen at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde in Germany used a multibeam sonar to map the seafloor 10 kilometres offshore from the town of Rerik.
The civilisation myth: How new discoveries are rewriting human history
In an evolutionary eyeblink, our species has gone from hunting and gathering to living in complex societies. We need to rethink the story of this monumental transition
Advertisement
“Afterwards, in the lab, we realised that there was this structure that looks not natural,” says Geersen.
So in 2022, he and his colleagues lowered a camera down to the structure, which revealed a row of stones. “It was only when we contacted the archaeologists that we understood it could be something significant,” says Geersen.
There’s no reason or evidence for a modern structure to have been built underwater at this site, says team member Marcel Bradtmöller, an archaeologist at the University of Rostock, Germany. Nor can the team think of any natural process that could create such a structure.
