Archaeology & History

Gigantic 1km-long megastructure discovered beneath the Baltic Sea

By T.K. Randall
February 13, 2024 ·  17 comments

Some of the stones that made up the Blinkerwall. Image Credit: Philipp Hoy Situated 21 meters beneath the surface of the Baltic, this previously undiscovered megastructure measures around 1km in length and is constructed from 1,673 individual stones.

Known as the Blinkerwall, it was thought to have been built 10,000 years ago at a time before its location in the Bay of Mecklenburg had been swallowed up by rising sea levels.

The region - known as Doggerland - was flooded around 8,2000 years ago.

According to archaeologists, the wall was likely built by hunter-gatherers as a way to redirect reindeer herds into a dead end so that they could easily be picked off."When you chase the animals, they follow these structures, they don't attempt to jump over them," said Jacob Geersen of the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research.

"The idea would be to create an artificial bottleneck with a second wall or with the lake shore."

So far a second wall has yet to be found, although it may still remain buried beneath the sediment.

Either way, researchers remain certain the Blinkerwall is not a natural formation.

"This puts the Blinkerwall into range of the oldest known examples of hunting architecture in the world and potentially makes it the oldest man-made megastructure in Europe," they wrote.

Source: The Guardian | Comments (17)

Tags: Blinkerwall, Megastructure