The bottom of the Mediterranean Sea hosts extremely fascinating mysteries. A team of researchers bumped into a Stonehenge resembling monolith structure and they believe that the man-made limestone structure was built by the Mesolithic people who lived in the islands that were once in the channel between Sicily and Tunisia. A strange monolith found off the coast of Sicily speaks tons about the capacities of our kind to envision larger than life structures.
It is believed that the Monolith’s subaquatic existence started 9350 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age. The study analysis of the area was performed and written by Zvi Ben Avraham, from Tel Aviv University and Emanuele Lodolo, member the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics, in Trieste.
The monolith structure previously belonged to the Pantelleria Vecchia Bank, one of the presently submerged Sicilian Channel islands, where ancient Mediterranean civilizations flourished.
According to the research paper, the new discovery provides strong evidence of a significant Mesolithic human activity in the Sicilian Channel area. Sicily was most probably first settled between 17.000 and 27.000 years ago when a land bridge tied it to the Italian territories.
In terms of further details, experts note that there are no reasonable known natural processes that could make these elements take shape the way they do. However, people of the past were highly innovative and had all the necessary tools to develop these kinds of masterpieces. Experts still don’t know about their organizational and technical skills which enabled those people to build such steady and advanced structures.
The only known details provide us with information regarded to the people who inhabited the areas and were supposedly forced to go inland when melting glaciers caused sea levels to rise higher, starting 9.500 years ago. Everything happened after the Last Glacial Maximum, the last period in the climate history of our planet, when the ice sheets were at their peak of expansion.
Monolithic structures are still a mystery for us but they speak a lot about our capacity to envision larger than life buildings. The 10.000 year old monolith measures no less than 40 feet in length and it is immersed in about 130 feet below the surface of the sea. It is presently broken in two and rests on its side. Researchers declared that it would have likely stood upright, rising over 40 feet in height.
People in the area might have traded fish with the communities nearby so rumor has it that the structure may have been used as a light house or a local beacon for the seafarers. Also, it could have been used to serve as a place to anchor boats.
Image Source: benchmarkreporter.com
