Scientists have found what they say could be one of the oldest Stone Age megastructures in Europe: a giant stone wall on the floor of the Baltic Sea. They’ve dubbed it the “Blinkerwall.”
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Not quite 70 feet below the Baltic Sea, a stunning find has swum into view – a stone wall more than half a mile long that dates back to the Stone Age. It’s one of the oldest so-called megastructures on Earth. Science reporter Ari Daniel explains what it might have been used for.
ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: Finding that wall was an accident. It was 2021, and marine geologist Jacob Geersen was teaching a field course at the University of Kiel in northern Germany, a course conducted entirely aboard a research vessel on the Baltic Sea.
JACOB GEERSEN: During night, we were mapping the shape of the seafloor at highest resolution.
DANIEL: One night off the German coast, the students fired up the echo sounders and mapped a swath of seafloor.
GEERSEN: Then when we were sitting together, we saw that there was something special.
DANIEL: It was a ridge that ran for six-tenths of a mile. A year later, Geersen, his colleagues and a new batch of students lowered a camera down and confirmed this ridge was actually thousands of rocks lined up that formed a kind of wall, standing about 1.5 feet tall on average.
GEERSEN: It’s usually small stones, but then at some places where we have a large stone, the direction of the wall changes.
DANIEL: Geersen didn’t know how such a structure could have formed.
GEERSEN: It was only when we ran to the archaeologists that they said, you may have found something very significant.
BERIT ERIKSEN: I was probably the most skeptical of the entire team.
DANIEL: Berit Eriksen is a prehistoric archaeologist at the University of Kiel. When she examined this structure, a line from Sherlock Holmes came to mind.
ERIKSEN: If you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains must be the truth. Archaeologists…
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