One night, in the Bay of Mecklenburg, off the coast of northern Germany, the students fired up the echosounders and mapped a swath of seafloor. “The next day, we downloaded the data,” says Geersen. “And it was then when we were sitting together, we saw that there was something on the seafloor. It was something special.”
They didn’t know it at the time, but not quite 70 feet below the surface, they’d stumbled upon a stone wall more than half a mile long that dated back to the Stone Age — one of the oldest such megastructures on the planet. In research published in PNAS, Geersen and his colleagues say this piece of ancient hunting architecture may have been used to corral and hunt reindeer, adding a level of sophistication to the prehistoric hunter-gatherers who lived 10,000 to 11,000 years ago.
The Paper: