The giant structure discovered by researchers from Kiel University in the depths of the Baltic Sea was not a natural formation, but human hands. The special discovery is a 971-metre-long wall, called the Blinkerwall.
The wall is located in Mecklenburg Bay, ten kilometers from the coast, at a depth of 21 meters below the surface of the earth, and was found by a sonar scanner. The wall, which is about one meter high, consists of 300 larger rocks, linked by 1,400 smaller stones placed between them. The total weight of the stones used is estimated at 142 tons.
The building was originally located on the shore of a lake or swamp and was used for hunting purposes.
When animals chase, they run next to the structure and do not try to jump over it. It works by narrowing your path with another wall or bank of water
– Jacob Jersen, an employee of the Leibniz Institute, who researches the Baltic Sea, explained to The Guardian.
The researchers also believe they have discovered traces of a parallel wall of wildlife beneath the seafloor sediments. Based on sediment depth analysis, Blenkerwall could have been built in the Stone Age, 10-11 thousand years ago, and later submerged with the Baltic Sea Basin sometime 5-7000 years ago.
Marcel Brandtmüller, a colleague at the University of Rostock, noted that at the time of the construction of the wall, Northern Europe had a completely different picture, because the Ice Age ended relatively late here, and representatives of the cold-adapted fauna still remained. They lived here in large numbers.
At that time, the total population of Europe was about 5,000 people. Their main food source was reindeer, which migrated seasonally into the sparsely vegetated area during the period following the Ice Age.
– Tell.
Walls of the same age and also used for reindeer herding were found at the bottom of Lake Huron in America in 2008. The Blinkerwall is currently the oldest and largest structure of its kind in Europe. Jacob Jersen and his colleagues continue to explore the history of the wall by searching for animal bones and stone tools used in hunting.
(archeology, Futurism, guardian)
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