Europe’s oldest mega-structure may have been found under Germany
Beneath the Baltic Sea sits a 10,000 year old wall. And researchers think that this may be Europe’s ‘oldest megastructure’. This stone-age wall stretches for almost a kilometre, and is thought to once have stood near a lake. So, with all that in mind, what exactly is this structure?
What is this megastructure?
Named the Blinkerwall, this structure is nearly around one kilometer in length, and seems to be made up of 1,400 stones which appear to be connected to nearly 300 larger boulders. The researchers say many of these would have been too heavy for groups of humans to move. The researchers guess it weighs around 142 tons, and was constructed by Palaeolithic people between 11,700 and 9,900 years ago, probably as an aid for hunting reindeer
Where is Blinkerwall situated?
The structure sits just off the coast of Germany, and is covered by almost 21 metres of water in the Bay of Mecklenburg. Researchers reckon that it used to sit near a lake or a marsh. It’s thought that if it was an ancient hunting site, than it was probably built more than 10,000 years ago and later submerged with rising sea levels around 8,500 years ago
How was it found?
Like all things, by accident. During a student trip, scientists operated a multibeam sonar system from a research vessel about 10 km offshore. Then, archeologists who were investigating the Bay of Mecklenburg used a range of submarine equipment, sampling methods and modelling techniques to reconstruct the ancient lake bed and its surrounding landscape
What was the wall used for?
The researchers say the wall was built by humans, and this was confirmed by an archaeological diving team who photographed sections of the wall. It was thought to have been built for hunters to pursue reindeer or to force the animals into the nearby lake, slowing them down and making them prey for humans lying in wait in canoes armed with spears or bows and arrows
Dr Jacob Geersen at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research in Warnemünde, a German port town on the Baltic coast told The Guardian: ‘When you chase the animals, they follow these structures, they don’t attempt to jump over them. The idea would be to create an artificial bottleneck with a second wall or with the lake shore’
In their paper, which is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers wrote: ‘This puts the Blinkerwall into range of the oldest known examples of hunting architecture in the world and potentially makes it the oldest man-made megastructure in Europe. However, exact dating of such hunting structures is generally challenging as artifacts and carcasses are often missing in these settings due to ancient cleaning.’ However, now researchers want to revisit the site to reconstruct the landscape and even search for animal bones and human artefacts which may be buried in sediments around the wall
