At a depth of 21 meters in the dark waters of the Baltic Sea is a Stone Age secret: the Blinkerwall, an ancient megastructure that runs almost one kilometer long. Chanced upon during a student excursion, the wall has surprised scholars with its complexity and sheer magnitude, which has caused a splash of excitement among archaeologists.
The Blinkerwall discovery was made as researchers ran a multibeam sonar system from a research ship off the coast of Germany’s Bay of Mecklenburg. The sonar indicated a complex structure made up of about 1,400 smaller stones bridging almost 300 massive boulders, many too heavy to be relocated by groups of people, indicating a purposeful construction process over 10,000 years ago.
Scientists such as Jacob Geersen of the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research in Warnemünde suggest the wall was a hunting megastructure. “When you chase the animals, they follow these structures, they don’t attempt to jump over them,” Geersen said, implying that it may have been an artificial bottleneck through which reindeer herds could be funneled toward the lake or shore where hunters could easily pick them off.
The Blinkerwall’s presence defies nature-based causes, like glacial movement or tsunamis, because of the deliberate positioning and orientation of the boulders. “Based on the information at hand,” the researchers conclude, “the most plausible functional interpretation for the Blinkerwall is that it was constructed and used as a hunting architecture for driving herds of large ungulates.”
Interestingly, this structure may have been part of an expansive network since there are signs of a potential second wall buried under the sea floor sediments. This speculation paves the way for an entirely new realm of exploration for the team, intrigued by discovering the full extent of the Blinkerwall and how it was used in the distant past.
The landscape of the region has shifted profoundly over thousands of years, with sea levels rising and flooding over the Blinkerwall approximately 8,500 years ago. Yet the flooded wall has remained extraordinarily well-preserved, providing an irreplaceable resource for learning about the lifeways and subsistence adaptations of early hunter-gatherer populations.
Geersen and his colleagues now intend to return to the site to restore the Stone Age landscape and look for other evidence, including animal remains and human objects, that may be buried in the surrounding sediments. Such evidence may shed light on the socioeconomic sophistication and territorial evolution of the Western Baltic Sea region during the Stone Age.
