At 21 meters of depth, in the turbid waters of the Baltic Sea, a secret from the Stone Age was hidden: the Blinkerwall, an ancient megastructure that reaches almost one kilometer in length. This wall surprised scholars with its complexity and sheer size after it was discovered by chance during a student trip and has caused a wave of excitement in the archaeological world.
The finding of the Blinkerwall came when scientists conducted a multibeam sonar from a research vessel off the coast of Germany’s Bay of Mecklenburg. The sonar revealed an elaborate structure consisting of roughly 1,400 smaller stones that connect almost 300 big boulders, many too heavy for groups of humans to move, indicating a deliberate construction effort over 10,000 years ago.
Scientists like Jacob Geersen from the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research in Warnemünde consider this wall a hunting megastructure. “When you chase the animals, they follow these structures, they don’t attempt to jump over them,” Geersen said, supposing it could have been used as an artificial bottleneck for the reindeer, driving them toward the lake or shore where hunters could easily target them.
The Blinkerwall could not have been created through natural causes, such as movement by glaciers or tsunamis, since the placement and angle of the stones involved are calculated. “Based on the information at hand,” the researchers state, “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.”
Curiously, this structure might have been part of a greater network because there is evidence that a possible second wall lies buried beneath the sea floor sediments. This opens up a whole new area of investigation for the team to understand the overall expanse of the Blinkerwall and its functions. This region has undergone changes in landscape over thousands of years; for example, the Blinkerwall was inundated by rising sea levels approximately 8,500 years ago.
The very well-preserved state of the submerged wall is an extremely valuable source for the reconstructions of the lifeways and subsistence patterns of early hunter-gatherer communities. Geersen and his colleagues would probably revisit the site and attempt to reconstruct an ancient landscape in search of other evidence that might have been buried in the surrounding sediments, such as animal bones or human artifacts. Such discoveries may show the level of socioeconomic complexity and territorial development in the region of the Western Baltic Sea during the Stone Age.
