Archeologists Discover Stone Wall Made and Used by Palaeolithic Hunters

People living 10,000 years ago constructed what may be the new oldest 'megastructure' in Germany for hunting, but now it lies near the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

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Archeologists used to be limited in their explorations to reasonably accessible places, but that’s changing thanks to technological advancements. Now, experts can scan an entire landscape of dense vegetation from the air using LiDAR to reveal structures hidden beneath, and they’re increasingly able to venture away from land.

Sonar and other technology allow researchers to scan the bottom of oceans and seas to reveal what lies in their depths. As a result, the number of archeological finds is booming, and what they’re finding rapidly alters our knowledge of the past, like today’s topic. A megastructure found by accident has changed known history by showing us that (surprise, surprise) Palaeolithic humans were more intelligent than we gave them credit for.

The Discovery

While now at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research in Germany, marine geologist Jacob Geersen taught a short one-week field course for the University of Kiel back in 2021, also in Germany, but this course wasn’t in a classroom.

Geersen prefers to teach outdoors. In this case, his classroom was aboard a research vessel in the Baltic Sea. Geersen explained to Ari Daniel of NPR that every evening, students on the night shift map the seafloor and often “find something interesting.”

It was business as usual in the Fall of 2021 as Geersen’s night shift students got to work mapping a patch of the Bay of Mecklenburg off the coast of northern Germany. But everything changed the following morning when they downloaded the data. Geersen told Daniel,

"And it was then when we were sitting together, we saw that there was something on the seafloor. It was something special."

Geersen said he’s used to readings showing large stones and rocks scattered across the Baltic Sea. Most were lodged in glaciers that covered northern Europe thousands of years ago and left behind when those glaciers melted.

But something was different about the stones and rocks almost 70 feet (21 meters) below the surface on the scan that Fall morning. Geersen told Daniel:

"You saw there is something that kind of meanders through the map. I thought it's very likely that these are rocks, one next to the other, lined up."

The meandering line of rocks stretched on for over half of a mile (almost a kilometer). So, Geersen and his colleagues returned to the site for the following year’s class with a new group of students. This time, the students lowered a camera and confirmed over a thousand rocks were used to construct a wall that currently stands a mere foot-and-a-half tall on average.