Lungo il Baltico un muraglione di 11.000 anni fa!

[Liutprand]

Avrebbe la stessa età di Gobleki Tepe. Davvero bisogna riscrivere tutto!

https://video.repubblica.it/mondo/la-misteriosa-muraglia-del-baltico-scoperta-la-piu-antica-struttura-mai-costruita-in-europa/464161/465122?ref=RHRT-BG-P1-S1-T1

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La misteriosa muraglia del Baltico: scoperta la più antica struttura mai costruita in Europa

Nelle profondità del mare Baltico, non lontano dalle coste della Germania, è stata rinvenuta una struttura sorprendente: una muraglia che risale a circa 10mila anni fa e si estende per un chilometro. Questa costruzione, nota come Blinkerwall, è emersa a una profondità di 21 metri nel golfo di Meclemburgo. Lo studio, condotto dall'Università di Kiel, è pubblicato sulla rivista Pnas. 

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Scoperta una megastruttura di caccia di 10.000 anni fa lungo la costa del Mar Baltico

Archeologi scoprono una megastruttura di caccia di oltre 10.000 anni fa lungo la costa del Mar Baltico, una delle più antiche e grandi strutture dell’Età della Pietra in Europa.

Una sezione di una megastruttura dell’Età della Pietra nella Baia di Mecklenburg, Germania. (Philipp Hoy)

Lungo la costa torbida del Mar Baltico, gli archeologi hanno trovato le rovine sommerse di una megastruttura costruita oltre 10.000 anni fa. Misurando quasi 1 chilometro di lunghezza, l’immensa struttura è stata probabilmente creata da cacciatori affamati dell’Età della Pietra con gusto per la renna.

Se le ipotesi sono corrette, il sito sarebbe una delle più antiche strutture di caccia create dall’uomo sulla Terra, nonché una delle più grandi strutture dell’Età della Pietra conosciute in Europa.

Conosciuta come Blinkerwall, la struttura è stata recentemente scoperta nella Baia di Mecklenburg lungo la costa settentrionale della Germania da un team dell’Università di Kiel, dell’Università di Rostock e dall’Istituto Leibniz per la ricerca sul Mar Baltico.

Hanno utilizzato una combinazione di navi e droni sottomarini per esplorare l’area, raccogliendo dati sonar sulla forma e le dimensioni della struttura perduta da tempo.

Situato sulla riva ad una profondità di 21 metri (68 piedi), il Blinkerwall è composto da almeno 1.673 pietre individuali, la maggior parte delle quali è più corta di 1 metro (3 piedi), posizionate una accanto all’altra per una distanza di 971 metri (3.185 piedi). Il gran numero di rocce, così come il loro posizionamento organizzato, ha fatto capire ai ricercatori che la formazione non è stata creata da processi naturali.

Sebbene il Blinkerwall sia stato successivamente sommerso dal mare, il sito si trovava su terraferma circa 10.000 anni fa, dopo la fine dell’ultima era glaciale. Tuttavia, è stato sommerso a causa dell’innalzamento del livello del mare tra 8.600 e 8.000 anni fa.

Questo è stato un periodo in cui gran parte dell’Europa settentrionale è stata allagata dall’innalzamento del mare. Circa 8.200 anni fa, la massa di terra che collegava la Gran Bretagna all’Europa continentale, nota come Doggerland, fu sommersa dall’acqua a causa di uno tsunami causato da una frana sottomarina.

I ricercatori spiegano che l’interpretazione funzionale “più plausibile” per il Blinkerwall è che sia stato utilizzato come una gigantesca struttura per facilitare la caccia di grandi ungulati, principalmente le renne che vagavano nella regione in quel periodo.

L’orientamento topografico del muro suggerisce che avrebbe incrociato le rotte migratorie semestrali delle renne attraverso la Pianura Tedesca del Nord. Indirizzando le mandrie di bestie erranti in un vicolo cieco chiuso, sarebbero state prede facili per i cacciatori-raccoglitori neolitici che stavano imparando rapidamente a padroneggiare l’arte della caccia alle renne.

Strutture di caccia simili sono state trovate anche altrove nel mondo. Sotto il Lago Huron, uno dei cinque Grandi Laghi del Nord America, puoi trovare una struttura di caccia di 9.000 anni fa che guidava i caribù in un vicolo cieco formato dal pavimento naturale di ciottoli.

A 10.000 anni, il Blinkerwall è un millennio più vecchio e rappresenta probabilmente una delle più antiche strutture di caccia create dall’uomo al mondo. Inoltre, ci sono appena altre strutture simili associate all’Europa dell’Età della Pietra, rendendo la recente scoperta ancora più eccezionale.

https://www.scienzenotizie.it/2024/02/13/scoperta-una-megastruttura-di-caccia-di-10-000-anni-fa-lungo-la-costa-del-mar-baltico-0080008

 

A submerged Stone Age hunting architecture from the Western Baltic Sea

Significance

Structures from the Stone Age can provide unique insights into Late Glacial and Mesolithic cultures around the Baltic Sea. Such structures, however, usually did not survive within the densely populated Central European subcontinent. Here, we explore a Stone Age megastructure, that has preserved under water in the Western Baltic Sea. It was likely constructed by hunter–gatherer groups more than 10000 y ago and ultimately drowned during the Littorina transgression at 8500 y B.P. Since then, it remained hidden at the seafloor, leading to a pristine preservation that will inspire research on the lifestyle and territorial development in the larger area.

Abstract

The Baltic Sea basins, some of which only submerged in the mid-Holocene, preserve Stone Age structures that did not survive on land. 

[ARES III]

Yet, the discovery of these features is challenging and requires cross-disciplinary approaches between archeology and marine geosciences. Here, we combine shipborne and autonomousunderwater vehicle hydroacoustic data with up to a centimeter range resolution, sedimentological samples, and optical images to explore a Stone Age megastructure located in 21 m water depth in the Bay of Mecklenburg, Germany.

The structure is made of 1,673 individual stones which are usually less than 1 m in height, placed side by side over a distance of 971 m in a way that argues against a natural origin by glacial transport or ice push ridges. Running adjacent to the sunken shoreline of a paleolake (or bog), whose youngest phase was dated to 9,143 ±36 ka B.P., the stonewall was likely used for hunting the Eurasian reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) during the Younger Dryas or early Pre-Boreal.

It was built by hunter–gatherer groups that roamed the region after the retreat of the Weichselian Ice Sheet. Comparable Stone Age megastructures have become known worldwide in recent times but are almost unknown in Europe. The site represents one of the oldest documented man-made hunting structures on Earth, and ranges among the largest known Stone Age structure in Europe. It will become important for understanding subsistence strategies, mobility patterns, and inspire discussions concerning the

territorial development in the Western Baltic Sea region.

The seafloor is shaped by geologic, biologic, and anthropogenic processes. The resulting morphologies are manifold, and their description and quantification can teach us about the underlying processes (1, 2). Yet the seafloor is veiled from our eyes, and we rely on geophysical and underwater visual studies. For many decades, it has been possible to resolve seafloor features on a scale of meters to tens of meters (depending on water depth) using ship-borne multibeam echosounder systems. 

Many smaller structures have, however, simply not been discovered to date. We applied state-of-the-art hydrographic and geophysical instruments and processing, as well as archaeological diving techniques to investigate a remarkable morphologic feature consisting of thousands of aligned stones that we discovered in the Baltic Sea at a water depth of about 21 m. The structure is located in the Bay of Mecklenburg, about 10 km northwest off Rerik, in Germany (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

The study area in the Baltic Sea. Location and relative ages of submerged archeological sites are taken from http://www.splashcos.org. (A) Overview map of the Western Baltic Sea. Bathymetric data were taken from the Global Multi-Resolution Topography (GMRT) synthesis (3). (B) Detailed structure of the Bay of Mecklenburg including the location of the Blinkerwall. Bathymetric data from The Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency Bundesamt für Seeschifffahrt und Hydrographie (BSH).

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The Bay of Mecklenburg is located in the southwestern part of the Baltic Sea (Fig. 1A) and was mainly shaped by the Weichselian glaciation (4). The sea level in this region since the Weichselian glaciation was governed by glacio-isostatic rebound and climatically controlled by ice coverage. Transgression and regression phases have led to at least four evolutionary stages of the Baltic Sea during the Holocene where alternating fresh, brackish, and marine water conditions occurred due to the opening and

closure of drainage channels to the North Sea. As a result, rapid sea-level fluctuations occurred along the present-day coast of the Baltic Sea (5). Stattegger and Leszczyńska (6) provide evidence that the sea level in the Western Baltic Sea rose from −28 to −10 m below the mean relative sea level during the Littorina transgression between 8.57 and 8.0 ka B.P. Schwarzer et al. (7) report on a sea-level rise from −40 to −20 m between 13.3 and 12.7 ka B.P. The Bay of Mecklenburg has a maximum water depth of about 28 m. Shallow sedimentary strata are characterized

by Holocene sandy mud that gets progressively sandier toward the coast. The surficial sediments are deposited on a basal till which is occasionally exposed on the seafloor.

The region is well known for its high density of submerged archeological sites, most of them documented by Lübke (8) and during the following SINCOS project between 2002 and 2009 (9–11). With a scientific focus on the post-Littorina transgression period, 23 submerged sites were uncovered in water depths of eleven

to two meters, dating from 8500 to 5000 y B.P., shedding light on the continued settlement activities and the resilience of these societies. While older submerged sites are known from Scandinavia and the Eastern Baltic (12–14), older sites in Northern Germany are currently only known from the hinterland. Examples are the late glacial hunting spots at the Saaler Bodden (15) or the Ahrensburger Tunneltal (16), as well as the early Holocene camp sites at Hohen Viecheln at Lake Schwerin (17, 18) or ancient Lake Duvensee (19–21). Located in a water

depth of about 21 m, the newly discovered stonewall likely predates the Littorina transgression, representing possibly the first known submerged Paleolithic archeological site in the German section of the Baltic Sea. With frequent outcrops of basal till in water depths ranging from the present coastline to more than 20 m (22) and given the abovementioned advances in resolution of shallow water hydroacoustic data, it seems likely, however, that similar yet undiscovered sites can be found elsewhere.

Results

The seafloor structure and basin-wide morphology in the Bay of Mecklenburg have been investigated by means of hydroacoustic data during numerous research campaigns over the last decades. However, it was only in September 2021, that we detected a spatially continuous, almost 1-km long, and usually <1 m high morphologic feature in high-resolution shipborne multibeam echosounder data. This elongated structure, that we hereafter refer to as the Blinkerwall, is located on the southern

(landward) facing site of a northeast–southwest trending bathymetric ridge (Figs. 1 and 2). On its northeastern site, the ridge is connected to a concentric mound that elevates to a water depth of 13.5 m (Fig. 2A). The Blinkerwall extends over a longitudinal distance of 971 m between water depth of 21 m in the east and 21.5 m in the west. Toward the southeast (i.e., toward the present-day coastline), the two topographic elevations connect to shallower waters via a 300-m-wide ridge located in a water depth of about 19 m (Fig. 1).

Fig. 2.

Morphology of the southwest–northeast trending ridge that hosts the Blinkerwall and the adjacent mound. (A) Multibeam bathymetry collected with RV ALKOR (2021) and FK Littorina (2023). (B) Multibeam bathymetry collected with the AUV. (C) Side-scan image (bright colors = high backscatter) collected with RV Elisabeth Mann Borgese in 2020. White arrows point at the Blinkerwall

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The Blinkerwall is typically less than 1 m high (Figs. 2 and 3). Video observations from different sections along the wall, recorded by scientific divers, verified that the Blinkerwall is formed by a succession of individual stones (Fig. 4). The vast majority of the stones are also well resolved in the multibeam bathymetric data collected with the AUV (autonomousunderwater vehicle) at a range of about 2 m (Fig. 3). We used the high-resolution near-range AUV multibeam data to semiautomatically map the individual stones in order to evaluate

their sizes and quantities. From the semiautomatic mapping approach, we counted 1,673 stones with a cumulative volume of 52.75 m3 and a cumulated weight of 142,437 kg. The latter has been calculated by multiplying the volume with the density of granite of about 2,700 kg/m2. While most stones weigh clearly below 100 kg, we also identified 288 heavier stones as part of the structure. The largest stone, located in the central section of the wall, has a calculated weight of 11,389 kg (Figs. 2B and 3C). Interestingly, it marks a sharp

change from an east–west trending course of the stonewall to the west to a southwest–northeast trending course farther east. The second, third, and fourth largest stones, with weights of 2,083, 2,506, and 5,792 kg, are located at the western end of the wall, with the latter marking the termination of the wall (Figs. 2B and 3A). Overall, the ten heaviest stones are all located within regions where the stonewall changes its strike direction (Fig. 2B).

Fig. 3.

AUV multibeam data from sections along the Blinkerwall. Please consider (Fig. 2B) for the locations of the different maps

Fig. 4.

3D model of a section of the Blinkerwall adjacent to the large boulder at the western end of the wall. Photographs were taken by Philipp Hoy, Rostock University. The model was created using Agisoft Metashape by J. Auer, LAKD M-V. The scale bar at the Top-Right edge of the image is 50 cm

[ARES III]

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2312008121