A team of archaeologists from Germany has discovered a submerged Stone Age megastructure in the Western Baltic Sea off the coast of Rerik, Germany at a water depth of about 21 m.
Key points
- It may represent one of the oldest known hunting structures used in the Stone Age — and could change what’s known about how hunter-gatherers lived around 11,000 years ago.
- The Stone Age megastructure was discovered in the Bay of Mecklenburg, about 10 km northwest off Rerik, Germany.
- The discovery revealed a wall made of 1,670 stones that stretched for more than half a mile (1 kilometer).
- Dubbed Blinkerwall, it was built by hunter-gatherers that roamed the region after the retreat of the Weichselian Ice Sheet.
- The stones, which connected several large boulders, were almost perfectly aligned, making it seem unlikely that nature had shaped the structure.
- The research team determined that the wall was likely built by Stone Age communities to hunt reindeer more than 10,000 years ago.
- The discovery marks the first Stone Age hunting structure in the Baltic Sea region.
