A six-year $15.5 million international research project has discovered a Stone Age settlement deep beneath the Bay of Aarhus near northern Demark, the Associated Press reported Tuesday.
The project, funded by the European Union, has been mapping the seabed across the Baltic and North Seas, as countries continue to build offshore wind farms in the area.
Led by researchers at Aarhus’s Moesgaard Museum, the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom, and the Lower Saxony Institute for Historical Coastal Research in Germany, the project has sought to discover ancient settlements swallowed by sea rise caused by the last ice age 8,500 years ago.
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So far, divers have used a kind of underwater vacuum cleaner to recover animal bones, stone and wooden tools, arrowheads, and seal tooth 26 feet felow the surface. Peter Moe Astrup of Moesgaard, who has led the excavations, told the AP that they hope to find fishing equipment next.
“It’s like a time capsule,” Astrup said. “When sea level rose, everything was preserved in an oxygen-free environment … time just stops.”
To date the settlements—and to understand the sea rise—researchers have relied on studying the rings of submerged trees, which have been preserved in the seabed for thousands of years.
“We can say very precisely when these trees died at the coastlines,” Jonas Ogdal Jensen, also of Mosgaard, said. “That tells us something about how the sea level changed through time.”
Researchers told the AP that they hope studying sea rise from 8,500 years ago will reveal how Stone Age peoples adapted. At the time, sea levels rose 6.5 feet per century.
By comparison, sea levels rose on average around 1.7 inches from 2013 to 2023 across the globe. If that rate continues, they will rise around 1.7 feet in the next century.