Researchers say one of the oldest megastructures known to be built by humans in Europe has been discovered off Germany's Baltic coast.
The stone wall structure is nearly a kilometre long, and stretches across the seafloor in the Bay of Mecklenburg.
It was reportedly spotted by accident after scientists operated a multibeam sonar system from a research vessel on a student trip about 10km offshore, according to The Guardian.
The structure has since been named 'Blinkerwall', and has about 1400 small stones which have been positioned to connect nearly 300 larger boulders, which are reputedly too heavy for groups of humans to have moved.
Covered by 21m of water, the wall is believed to have been constructed more than 10,000 years ago by hunter gatherers next to a lake or marsh.
Scientists suspect it has acted as a driving lane for the hunters to track down reindeer, although the exact purpose was hard to prove.
It also could have forced some animals into the theorised nearby lake, making them move slower and become easier for humans armed with spears or bows to pick off.
A second wall that ran alongside the Blinkerwall may be buried in the seafloor sediments, the researchers wrote in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“When you chase the animals, they follow these structures, they don’t attempt to jump over them,” Jacob Geersen told The Guardian at the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research in Warnemünde, a German port town on the Baltic coast.
“The idea would be to create an artificial bottleneck with a second wall or with the lake shore,” he added.
Researchers believe the wall is unlikely to have formed through natural processes due to its shape and size. It is thought to weigh more than 142,000kg.
If it was a hunting lane, it is suspected to be about 10,000 years old, and have been submerged due to rising sea levels about 8,500 years ago.
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