Thursday, February 15, 2024

Can you call it a "dry stack stone wall" ...

... when it is under the ocean?

A prehistoric stone wall more than half a mile long has been discovered on the floor of the Baltic Sea in the Bay of Mecklenburg off the coast of Germany. Around 11,000 years old, it is the oldest human-made structure in the Baltic Sea and one of the documented human-made hunting structures in the world. More than a half mile long, it is also one the largest known Stone Age structure in Europe.

...

It was built by hunter-gatherers who inhabited the area and was likely a drive lane (a means to control the movement of animals to force them into a restricted space or, in this case, the lake itself) used to hunt migrating Eurasian reindeer. Prehistoric stone walls like these have been found elsewhere in the world (Jordan, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Greenland, the United States) but are all but unknown in Europe. The closest comparable example was found at the bottom of Lake Huron in Michigan where a stone wall was used to hunt migrating caribou 9,000 years ago. It is much shorter a wall than the Mecklenburg megastructure — 98 feet versus 3186 feet. 

That took a lot of work to build.  Maybe it was built over the course of decades, little by little?

5 comments:

Old NFO said...

Either way, it's going to be interesting to see how this gets researched.

Skyler the Weird said...

Those Neanderthals built just about the same amount of wall as Trump.

B said...

And yet, oddly enough, even that long ago the seas started rising and warming must have been happening...

Before the SUV's and such. Strange.

SiGraybeard said...

"... was likely a drive lane..." I thought that was left lane on the interstate where only cars with more than just one person were allows.

Pretty neat. Around 65 feet deep. My standard reply to "the sea levels are rising" is you better be thankful for that. They've been rising since the end of the last Ice Age. When they start going down, it means the next Ice Age has begun and the glaciers are coming back.

HMS Defiant said...

I don't know of anything built by man that can resist the battering of wind and wave and certainly not a neolithic dry wall. To survive that kind of fate it must have been inundated and them remained significantly below water for the rest of time. Kind of like the Roman materials found underwater at their favorite spa.