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taylorvich [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-stone-age-hunter-baltic-sea.html [phys.org]

In autumn 2021, geologists discovered an unusual row of stones, almost 1 km long, at the bottom of Mecklenburg Bight. The site is located around 10 kilometers off Rerik at a 21-meter water depth. The approximately 1,500 stones are aligned so regularly that a natural origin seems unlikely.

A team of researchers from different disciplines has now concluded that Stone Age hunter-gatherers likely built this structure around 11,000 years ago to hunt reindeer. The finding represents the first discovery of a Stone Age hunting structure in the Baltic Sea region.

The scientists present their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
...
Excluding natural processes and a modern origin, the stone wall could only have been formed after the end of the last ice age, when the landscape was not yet flooded by the Baltic Sea.

"At this time, the entire population across northern Europe was likely below 5,000 people. One of their main food sources were herds of 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," explains Marcel Bradtmöller from the University of Rostock.

Comparable prehistoric hunting structures have already been found in other parts of the world, for example, at the bottom of Lake Huron (Michigan) at a depth of 30 meters. Here, US archaeologists documented stone walls as well as hunting blinds constructed for hunting caribou, the North American equivalent of reindeer. The stone walls in Lake Huron and in Mecklenburg Bight share many characteristics such as a location on the flank of a topographic ridge, as well as a subparallel trending lakeshore on one side.

As the last reindeer herds disappeared from our latitudes around 11,000 years ago, when the climate became warmer and forests were spreading, the stone wall was most likely not built after this time. This would make it the oldest human structure ever discovered in the Baltic Sea.
Originally, a team of researchers and students from Kiel University (CAU) wanted to investigate manganese crusts on a ridge of basal till that forms the seafloor about 10 kilometers off Rerik in Mecklenburg Bight. During their survey, however, they discovered a 970-meter long regular row of stones.

The structure consists of around 1,500 stones, most some tens of centimeters in diameter, that connect several large meter-scale boulders. The researchers reported their discovery to the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state agency for culture and monument preservation (Landesamt für Kultur und Denkmalpflege Mecklenburg-Vorpommern LAKD M-V), which then coordinated further investigations.

The stone wall is located on the southwestern flank of a ridge of basal till trending roughly parallel to an adjacent basin in the South, presumably a former lake or bog. Today, the Baltic Sea is 21 meters deep at this location. Thus, the stone wall must have been built before the sea level rose significantly after the end of the last ice age, which happened around 8,500 years ago. Large parts of the previously accessible landscape ultimately flooded at that time.

Original Submission