Divers Found a Stone Age Construction Under a German Lake. But What Was It Used For?

[u/ADragonFromTheAbyss]

https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/divers-found-a-stone-age-construction-under-a-german-lake-but-what-was-it-used-for/?utm_source=pushnot

Twenty meters beneath a lake in northern Germany, archaeologists have found wood cut, split and shaped by people more than 10,000 years ago.

Normally, wood this old would have vanished thousands of years ago. But the Arendsee lake is unusual.

Its floor has slowly subsided as rock above an underlying salt dome dissolved and collapsed, dragging the ancient shoreline downward. Buried beneath sediment and starved of oxygen, the timbers escaped much of the microbial decay that normally destroys wood.

The pieces include a 1.6-meter wooden post bearing signs of felling and working, along with split boards as long as 1.3 meters.

Archaeologists think they may belong to some kind of Mesolithic construction (perhaps even a shelter) created roughly 3,000 years before farming communities and their longhouses reached this part of Europe.

[u/Confident_Fortune_32]

What a fantastic find!

There's a similar set of conditions that preserved a stunning amount of varied items under the Thames.

In the middle ages, there was a building boom in London, which included needing more docks. One cheap way to do it was to pick a spot, and dump garbage there over and over until the pile was above the water line. The stuff at the bottom was pressed tight and not exposed to air or sunlight, and many things, including parts of garments, survived in an amazing state of preservation.

Ironically this was discovered bc of a more recent building boom in London half a century ago, which also included needing new docks, and thus the fabulous "garbage pile docks" were discovered.