If this underwater wall may discuss, it would reveal that it as soon as helped Stone Age Europeans hunt reindeer.
Submerged about 20 meters under the floor of the Baltic Sea off the coast of Germany, the wall stretches for nearly a kilometer and incorporates almost 1,700 stones, making it among the many largest human-made megastructures in Northern Europe, scientists report February 12 within the Proceedings of the Nationwide Academy of Science.
The crew suspects it was used for searching massive prey, just like historical searching traps within the Center East and North America (SN: 5/17/23). In that case, it could be the primary recognized entice of its type within the southern Baltic area.
Researchers found the construction, dubbed the Blinkerwall, whereas mapping seafloor depths with sonar in 2021. The info revealed odd protrusions down under, so the crew returned with underwater cameras to get a greater look.
“After we discovered the rocks, I spotted it’s probably not a pure course of that put these rocks collectively,” says Jacob Geersen, a marine geologist on the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Analysis Warnemünde in Rostock, Germany.
It’s unlikely that tsunamis, glaciers, ice floes or development of close by underwater infrastructure may have positioned the rocks into their flattened S-like form, Geersen and colleagues say. The rocks appear to be deliberately positioned, with the biggest boulder (calculated to weigh over 11,000 kg, or the burden of seven mid-size automobiles) sitting within the center. A lot of the different rocks weigh lower than 100 kg — gentle sufficient to have been moved by individuals to attach the bigger rocks scattered alongside the wall’s size.
Radiocarbon courting of sediment cores taken from close to the Blinkerwall counsel {that a} lake bordered the construction round 10,000 years in the past, earlier than the Baltic Sea rose 8,500 years in the past and submerged the world. The wall most likely funneled Eurasian reindeer — which final occupied the world across the time the wall was constructed — in direction of the close by lake, the place the trapped prey may have been simply killed. At the moment, the one individuals within the area who may have constructed such a big wall had been nomadic hunter-gatherers, says examine coauthor Marcel Bradtmöller, a Stone Age archaeologist at Rostock College.
The wall offers insights into how individuals at the moment labored with the land and one another. It probably required a bunch of no less than 10 individuals to make use of the construction to hunt, says Bradtmöller.
Humankind has a protracted historical past of enhancing pure topography to acquire assets, says archaeologist Geoff Bailey of College of York in England. The crew’s interpretation of the findings “sounds, to me, to be very believable,” he says.
Now there’s extra work to do, Geersen says. He and colleagues plan to take extra sediment samples from underneath the rocks and seek for artifacts close to the wall, which may reveal clues in regards to the individuals who lived there.
