Imagine you discovered an ancient wall, 120 meters (394 feet) long, two meters (6.6 feet) tall, and averaging 20 meters (66 feet) wide? That's an enormous construction. On top of that, you found it nine meters (30 feet) underwater! That would be the only way it could have escaped detection all those years. How many years? Somewhere between 7300 and 7800 years. That makes it older than Stonehenge.
The wall was found with LIDAR technology off the coast of France. Closer exploration found that the wall was built with 60 huge granite stones set into the bedrock in pairs, filled in with smaller stones between them. This all raises questions about how and why it was built. The sea level was lower then, so the wall now called TAF1 could have been a seawall, or possibly a fish catching device, depending on what conditions were like at the time. There is speculation that it could be a remnant of the legendary sunken city of Ys. The stories of Ys are fantastical, involving star-crossed lovers, supernatural floodgates, and even a mermaid. But that doesn't mean it wasn't based on some ancient event. Read about the Mesolithic underwater wall at Big Think. -via Real Clear Science
(Image credit: Yves Fouquet, et. al./International Journal of Nautical Archaeology)
