Jacob Geersen, Marcel Bradtmöller, Jens Schneider von Deimling, and Harald Lübke et al. 2023, '
A submerged Stone Age hunting architecture from the Western Baltic Sea' PNAS
February 12, 2024
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2312008121
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| artist's impression of the wall when it was built |
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 on dry land within the densely populated Central European subcontinent. They are however preserved underwater, the paper discuses a Stone Age megastructure that has preserved under water in the Western Baltic Sea. It seems to have been 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 its pristine preservation.
The Blinkerwall is a submerged stone structure located on the floor of the Baltic Sea, off the coast of northern Germany near the town of Rerik. Discovered in 2021 during a sonar-mapping training exercise conducted by the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde, the feature has since been identified as a deliberately constructed hunting installation dating to the early Holocene. Current evidence suggests that it represents the oldest known man-made megastructure in Europe, significantly predating the emergence of agriculture and permanent settlement in the region.
The structure lies at a depth of approximately 21 metres and extends for nearly one kilometre. It is composed of several large stones forming a continuous linear alignment, linked and stabilised by more than 1,500 smaller stones. Although the wall is relatively low—generally less than one metre in height—the regularity of its construction strongly indicates human agency. The stones are arranged in a consistent and organised manner that cannot be readily explained by natural geological processes, such as glacial deposition or post-depositional movement on the seabed.
Chronologically, the Blinkerwall is dated to more than 8,500 years ago, with some estimates placing its construction over 10,000 years before present. At the time of its use, the area was not submerged but formed part of a terrestrial landscape inhabited by Mesolithic hunter-gatherer communities. Following the end of the last Ice Age, rising sea levels associated with glacial meltwater progressively inundated the Baltic basin, eventually submerging the structure and preserving it beneath marine sediments. The wall therefore provides rare physical evidence of human activity within a landscape that has since been largely erased by post-glacial environmental change.
Functional interpretations of the Blinkerwall suggest that it served as a large-scale hunting aid. Comparable stone alignments are known from other prehistoric and ethnographic contexts, where they are understood as drive walls used to manipulate the movement of herd animals. Such structures exploit the tendency of animals to move parallel to obstacles rather than cross them, allowing hunters to channel herds toward ambush zones, natural bottlenecks, or killing areas. In the early Holocene, reindeer occupied northern Germany and the southern Baltic region, making them the most plausible target species for this installation.
If this interpretation is correct, the Blinkerwall has important implications for understanding social organisation and subsistence strategies among European Mesolithic groups. The construction of a kilometre-long stone feature would have required coordinated labour, planning, and detailed knowledge of both animal behaviour and local topography. This challenges persistent assumptions that hunter-gatherer societies were limited to small-scale, opportunistic interventions in their environments. Instead, the Blinkerwall points to a capacity for long-term landscape modification in support of communal hunting practices.
Beyond its immediate archaeological significance, the Blinkerwall highlights the broader research potential of submerged prehistoric landscapes. Large areas of northern Europe that were once inhabited during the Late Pleistocene and early Holocene are now underwater, particularly around the Baltic and North Sea basins. The identification of this structure through remote-sensing techniques demonstrates the value of systematic seabed mapping for detecting traces of early human activity. As such, the Blinkerwall not only contributes to debates about the complexity of Mesolithic societies, but also underscores the likelihood that further large-scale prehistoric constructions remain undiscovered beneath Europe’s coastal waters.
