An 11,000-year-old stone wall stretching for almost 1km has been discovered beneath the Baltic Sea, the oldest-known human-built mega-structure ever discovered there – and scientists say they now understand its intended purpose.
The site was found at a depth of 21m in Mecklenburg Bight, some 10km off the north German town of Rerik, by Kiel University geologists who had gone to investigate manganese crusting on the seabed in the autumn of 2021.
What they found on a ridge was an unusually regular row of some 1,500 stones stretching over 970m and aligned too regularly for any natural origin to be possible. About three-quarters of the stones were roughly tennis-ball-sized, interspersed by football-sized boulders to form a low wall.
An interdisciplinary research team has now concluded that Stone Age hunter-gatherers likely built what has been dubbed the “Blinkerwall” as a means of guiding herds of reindeer into a deadly trap.
