2024-02-13 19:31:33
At the bottom of the Baltic Sea, regarding ten kilometers from the coast of the German town of Rerik (Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania), scientists have discovered a wall 960 meters long. This one, more than 10,000 years old, would have been built at the time by a group of hunter-gatherers. Never before has such an ancient human structure been discovered in the Baltic Sea, researchers say.
The wall was built when the region was not yet flooded, with the aim of trapping the reindeer, the team of researchers writes in the journal PNAS. “It is assumed that at that time, Northern Europe had no more than 5,000 inhabitants,” explains Marcel Bradtmöller of the University of Rostock. “Reindeer were their staple diet. Animals moved in herds across the vegetation-poor landscape of the postglacial era. The wall was probably used to corner reindeer at the edge of a lake so that Stone Age hunters might kill them using hunting weapons. Evidence of this hunting technique has already been found elsewhere in the world.”
The structure, made up of regularly juxtaposed stones, was found at a depth of 21 meters. A total of 1,500 stones were found, most of them no smaller than tennis balls or larger than soccer balls. The wall is two meters wide and one meter high.
It is unlikely that the work was created by natural causes, such as a tsunami, retreating glacier, or underwater currents. Other human interventions are also not credible.
The Rerik region was only flooded at the end of the last ice age, more than 8,500 years ago.
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