Free Republic

The Guardian reports that a section of wall stretching for nearly one-half mile was found in the Bay of Mecklenburg, off the coast of Germany, during a survey conducted with a multibeam sonar system. Inspection of the wall revealed that it was made up of about 300 boulders connected with some 1,400 smaller stones. The structure is thought to have been constructed more than 10,000 years ago, near a lake or marsh. Jacob Geersen of the Leibniz Institute for Baltic Sea Research Warnemünde suggests that the wall may have been part of a driving lane used by hunters in pursuit...

Deep beneath the North Sea, scientists have discovered a fossilized forest that could hold traces of prehistoric early humans who lived there around 10,000 years ago, before the land slipped beneath the waves a few thousand years later. The discovery gives the researchers new hope in their search for "lost" Middle Stone Age — or Mesolithic — settlements of hunter-gatherers, because the find shows that they have found a particular type of exposed ancient landscape.

An enormous underwater landslide 60,000 years ago produced the longest flow of sand and mud yet found on Earth. The landslide off the coast of north-west Africa dumped 225 billion metric tonnes of sediment into the ocean in a matter of hours or days. The flow travelled 1,500km (932 miles) - the distance from London to Rome - before depositing its sediment. The work, by a British team of researchers has been published in the academic journal Nature. The massive surge put down the same amount of sediment that comes out of all the world's rivers combined over a period...