The giant kilometer-long stone wall was probably built 11,000 years ago and was used for deer hunting.
In 2021, Jakob Geersen, a geophysicist at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research, took his students to study along the Baltic Sea coast. The team used a multi-beam sonar system to map the seafloor about 10 km offshore. Subsequently, while analyzing the images in the laboratory, Giersen noticed a strange structure that seemed to be created artificially.
Further research showed that the wall-like structure was built by people 11,000 years ago and was used for hunting deer (in fact, driving the herd to a dead end in this way).
Graphic reconstruction of a Stone Age wall that may have been used as a hunting structure in a glacial landscape.
According to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the wall is nicknamed the “Blinkerwall” and is likely Europe’s oldest megastructure.
As early as the 1920s, aerial photographs showed the presence of large megastructures in the form of stone walls in the deserts of Asia and the Middle East, which most archaeologists believe were used to corral and trap wild animals. As of 2018, more than 6,000 such structures have been identified, although only a few have been excavated.
According to Giersen, such megastructures are almost unknown in Europe because they simply did not survive the next millennia. Although the Baltic Sea basins, which include the Gulf of Mecklenburg, where the geophysicist made his important discovery, are known to contain a dense population of submerged archaeological sites that are extremely well preserved.
The shape of the ridge on which Blinkerwall is located.
3D images taken shortly after the discovery show a neat row of stones forming a wall less than 1 meter high. A dozen large boulders weighing several tons are located at regular intervals and connected by about 1,600 smaller ones, weighing 100 kilograms. The length of the wall is 971 meters.
3D model of the Blinkerwall area adjacent to the large boulder at the western end of the wall.
Given the careful placement of the stones, the researchers concluded that the wall was not formed by natural processes (such as glacier movement or tsunamis) – it was most likely built by humans approximately 11,000 years ago (although the lack of stone tools or other artifacts makes dating difficult) .
Giersen’s team concluded that the region may have been covered in ice and rising sea levels caused the structure to submerge.
Researchers suggest that the wall served the purpose of “desert kites” – man-made rocky structures that were used for mass hunting of herds of wild animals (similar to those found in Asia and the Middle East). Typically, the structure consists of two walls that form a V-shape – so it is likely that the second part of the Blinkerwall is hidden under the sediment on the seabed.
Source: Ars Technica