A remarkable 11,000-year-old megastructure, potentially the oldest known human-built structure in Europe, has been discovered beneath the Baltic Sea. Researchers stumbled upon the kilometre-long wall in Germany's Bay of Mecklenburg during a student trip, using multibeam sonar.
Analysis revealed that the structure, dubbed the Blinkerwall, consists of approximately 1,670 individual stones deliberately placed to connect around 300 larger boulders. Led by geophysicist Jacob Geerson of Kiel University, the team believes hunter-gatherers constructed the wall on land next to a lake or marsh during the Stone Age.
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The Blinkerwall likely served as a driving lane for reindeer, directing the animals into a bottleneck for easier hunting. Despite being submerged for approximately 8,500 years, the structure remains remarkably well-preserved, offering valuable insights into the subsistence patterns and socioeconomic complexity of early hunter-gatherer communities.
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"The site represents one of the oldest documented man-made hunting structures on Earth, and ranges among the largest known Stone Age structures in Europe," the researchers write in their paper.
"It will become important for understanding subsistence strategies, mobility patterns, and inspire discussions concerning the territorial development in the Western Baltic Sea region."
"Based on the information at hand," the researchers write, "the most plausible functional interpretation for the Blinkerwall is that it was constructed and used as a hunting architecture for driving herds of large ungulates." Those would have consisted, at the time, primarily of reindeer or bison.
