Traces of Ice Age hunters discovered in the Baltic Sea

A geology team discovered a 970-metre-long, regular stone structure in the Bay of Mecklenburg by chance during a research vessel cruise from Kiel University in 2021. This stone wall runs parallel to a lowland, presumably a former lake or bog. The Baltic Sea is now 21 metres deep at this point. The stone wall must therefore have been built before the water level rose sharply after the end of the last ice age. This last happened around 8,500 years ago. The only possible time for the construction of the stone wall is therefore after the end of the last ice age (around 12,000 years ago), when the landscape was not yet flooded by the Baltic Sea. It is assumed that no more than 5,000 people lived in the whole of northern Europe at this time. One of their staple foods was reindeer, which travelled in herds through the sparsely vegetated post-glacial landscape at seasonal intervals. The wall was probably used to corner the reindeer at the edge of a lake so that they could be killed by the Stone Age hunters with hunting weapons.

As the last reindeer disappeared from our latitudes around 11,000 years ago, when the climate became warmer and forests spread, the stone wall is unlikely to have been built after this time. This would make it the oldest human structure ever discovered in the Baltic Sea. Although numerous well-preserved archaeological sites from the Stone Age are known in Wismar Bay and along the coasts of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. These are located at much shallower water depths and mostly date back to the Middle and Neolithic periods (approx. 7,000 - 2,500 BC), reports the research team from the Kiel University (CAU), Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde (IOW), the CAU research focus Kiel Marine Science, the University of Rostock, the Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology (ZBSA, since 2024 part of the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology LEIZA), the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) as well as the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern state agency for culture and monument preservation (Landesamt für Kultur und Denkmalpflege Mecklenburg-Vorpommern LAKD M-V).

The stone wall and the surrounding seabed are now to be analysed even more closely using side-scan sonar, sediment echo sounder and multibeam echo sounder. The researchers also want to try to date the stone wall using luminescence methods, which can be used to determine when the surface of a stone was last exposed to sunlight. A detailed reconstruction of the surrounding landscape is also planned. Overall, the investigations can make a significant contribution to the understanding of early Stone Age prey groups and help to understand their way of life, organisation and hunting methods.

Further information can be found in this press release from CAU, IOW and the University of Rostock.