In 2021, scientists aboard a research vessel noticed a submerged stone structure along the Baltic Sea coast of Germany. Research indicates that this may be the oldest known man-made megalithic structure in Europe: a stone wall constructed by Stone Age hunters to aid in capturing prey.

The stone wall is located approximately six miles off the German coast in the Bay of Mecklenburg in the Baltic Sea, submerged nearly 70 feet underwater. Stretching over half a mile, the wall rises up to 3 feet high and consists of more than 1,300 smaller stones and over 300 larger stones. Most of the stones are small enough to be carried and assembled by a single person.

Archaeologist Marcel Bradtmöller from the University of Rostock asserts that the stone wall is man-made, as natural events like glacial deposits or other land movements cannot explain the structure’s existence. He theorizes that hunters constructed the wall to guide and trap reindeer, as these animals tend to move along straight terrain features, such as cliff edges or streams.

Before this area was submerged 8,500 years ago, the stone wall was closely connected to the northern edge of a lake or marsh. Researchers hypothesize that large hoofed animals were driven into the narrow space between the stone wall and the lake, where they could be easily hunted by ambushing hunters. This structure is believed to date back at least 10,000 years to the Mesolithic era, during which Eurasian reindeer migrated northward as forests expanded. The wall predates the arrival of agriculture and permanent settlements in the region by several thousand years. Its builders must have been hunter-gatherers who roamed the area after the end of the last Ice Age, a group about whom little is known. However, the existence of this structure suggests connections between hunter-gatherer communities.

This discovery hints at the potential for more findings in the depths of the Baltic Sea, an area where evidence of human activity was previously thought to have either been lost or buried under thick layers of sediment.

Published Research Article:

J. Geersen, M. Bradtmöller, J. Schneider von Deimling, P. Feldens, J. Auer, P. Held, A. Lohrberg, R. Supka, J.J.L. Hoffmann, B.V. Eriksen, W. Rabbel, H. Karlsen, S. Krastel, D. Brandt, D. Heuskin, H. Lübke, A submerged Stone Age hunting architecture from the Western Baltic Sea, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.