A Stone Age wall discovered beneath the waves on Germany's Baltic coast may be the oldest known megastructure built by humans in Europe, researchers say.
The wall stretches for about a kilometer along the sea floor of Mecklenburg Bay, and the scientists were operating a multibeam sonar system from a research vessel about 10 kilometers (6 miles) offshore during a student trip. was discovered by chance.
A closer look at the structure, dubbed the Brinker Wall, revealed about 1,400 small stones, thought to have been arranged to connect about 300 large rocks, many of which were made up of groups of humans. was too heavy to move.
Described as a “thrilling discovery”, the submerged wall, covered by 21 meters of water, was built by hunter-gatherers on land next to a lake or wetland more than 10,000 years ago, researchers believe. thinking.
The wall's purpose is difficult to prove, but scientists suspect it may have served as a travel lane for hunters chasing reindeer herds.
“When you chase animals, they chase these structures and don't try to jump over them,” said Jakob Gehrsen of the Leibniz Baltic Research Institute in the German port city of Warnemünde on the Baltic Sea coast.
“The idea would be to create an artificial bottleneck on a second wall or at the lakeshore,” he added.
A second wall that ran along the Brinker Wall may be buried under seafloor sediments, the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Alternatively, the wall may have forced the animals into a nearby lake, slowing them down and making them easier to capture by ambushing humans in canoes armed with spears and bows and arrows.
Based on the size and shape of the 971-meter-long wall, Gehrsen et al. I think it is unlikely that it was formed.
The angle of this wall, most less than a meter high, changes direction as it hits larger rocks, suggesting that piles of smaller stones were intentionally placed to connect them. . It is believed that the walls' stones weighed a total of over 142 tons.
If the wall was an ancient hunting trail, it was probably built more than 10,000 years ago and was submerged by rising sea levels about 8,500 years ago.
“This places the Brinker Wall within the range of the world's oldest known examples of hunting architecture, and potentially the oldest man-made megastructure in Europe,” the researchers said.
Geersen is currently revisiting the site to restore the ancient landscape and look for human artifacts, such as animal bones and projectiles used for hunting, that may be buried in the sediment around the wall. be enthusiastic about what they do.
