A study published earlier this month is sharing more on a megastructure found at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, which scientists believe to be from the Stone Age.
The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and has researchers rethinking what’s known about hunter-gatherers who lived 11,000 years ago.
Researchers from Kiel University in Germany were the first to come across the row of stones located 69 feet under the surface of the Baltic Sea about six miles off the German coast.
The structure was found in the fall of 2021, and researchers have since been investigating it, as the stones, connected by several large boulders, were aligned to a degree that could not have been natural.
The investigation sought to uncover how the structure came to be and how it ended up at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. The team inevitably discovered that it was likely built more than 10,000 years ago by Stone Age communities to assist in hunting reindeer.
“Our investigations indicate that a natural origin of the underwater stonewall, as well as a construction in modern times, for instance, in connection with submarine cable laying or stone harvesting, are not very likely. The methodical arrangement of the many small stones that connect the large, non-moveable boulders speaks against this,” Dr. Jacob Geersen, the lead author of the study, said in a statement.
Researchers used underwater vehicles to observe the structure, collecting sediment samples and scans to create a 3D model and virtual reconstruction of the landscape where it was initially built centuries ago.
Coauthor Dr. Marcel Bradtmöller said that the wall was most likely used to help trap the reindeer, which “migrated seasonally through the sparsely vegetated post-glacial landscape.”
“The wall was probably used to guide the reindeer into a bottleneck between the adjacent lakeshore and the wall, or even into the lake, where the Stone Age hunters could kill them more easily with their weapons,” Bradtmöller said, which included spears, bows, and arrows.
The study said that a second structure may have been used as well, but researchers haven’t found any evidence of it yet, Geersen said.
The discovery has changed the way researchers think about hunter-gatherers who lived centuries ago, as they were thought to be mobile, Bradtmöller said. But now, with evidence of a massive permanent structure, the groups could have been more territorial than previously believed.