Archaeologists have identified what may be Europe’s oldest human-made megastructure, submerged 21 meters below the Baltic Sea in the Bay of Mecklenburg, Germany. This structure—which has been named the Blinkerwall—is a continuous low wall made from over 1,500 granite stones that runs for almost a kilometer. The evidence suggests it was constructed by Paleolithic people between 11,700 and 9,900 years ago, probably as an aid for hunting reindeer.
The archaeologists investigating the Bay of Mecklenburg used a range of submarine equipment, sampling methods and modeling techniques to reconstruct the ancient lake bed and its surrounding landscape. This revealed that the Blinkerwall stands on a ridge running east to west, with a 5km-wide lake basin a few meters below the ridge to the south.
The human, rather than natural, origin for the Blinkerwall was confirmed by an archaeological diving team who photographed sections of the wall. These show that it is made up of 288 very large boulders, which were probably dropped in that location by the retreating glacier, connected by 1,673 smaller stones.
These smaller stones appear to have been collected from the immediate vicinity, as the area just to the north of the wall has many fewer stones than the areas even further north. The resulting structure stands a little under a meter in height and up to two meters wide, with remarkable regularity over its 971-meter length.
A different landscape
At the time of its construction, the landscapes and seascapes of northwest Europe were very different from today. The climate was beginning to warm as the colder Pleistocene era ended and the warmer Holocene era began. Sea levels were much lower, and large glaciers sat over much of Fennoscandia.
The land around the Baltic Sea basin was rising rapidly, released from the weight of the retreating glaciers and transforming a brackish body of water known as the Yoldia sea into the freshwater Ancylus lake. Great Britain was a peninsula of the European continental landmass, with a vast lowland plain known as Doggerland stretching from Norfolk to the Netherlands. Herds of reindeer, European bison and wild horse migrated across its sparsely forested landscape.
In cultural terms, this period, known as the Late Upper Paleolithic, is marked by significant hallmarks in technological innovation by the people who lived at this time. Dogs had been recently domesticated; there are regionally distinct forms of stone projectile points; and there is frequent use of decorated bone and antler harpoons, as well as specialist hunting strategies employed to target migrating prey.
The identification of the Blinkerwall now demonstrates that Paleolithic hunters were managing their landscape to aid their hunting activities more deliberately than was previously thought.
Construction of walls and other features in the landscape is familiar to us, particularly in the context of land enclosure for farming. Both contemporary and ancient societies that have traditionally subsisted by hunting and gathering wild resources are also known to alter their environments by constructing features such as stone walls.