7,000-Year-Old Walls Discovered Off The Coast of France

A remarkable discovery off the coast of Brittany is rewriting the timeline of human innovation, casting doubt on agriculture being the sole definitive marker for this.

Recently uncovered megaliths and monoliths - though now lying submerged under 30 feet of sea water - once adorned a coastal landscape long before the spread of agriculture across Europe. This provides powerful new evidence of sophisticated human ingenuity preceding this traditional marker of civilizational development.

Archaeologists first spotted the extraordinary collection of prehistoric structures during a seabed mapping operation, and underwater exploration has revealed some colossal feats of engineering: a massive, 383-foot-long wall stretching across what was once a valley. This wall is composed of stacked granite blocks and reinforced by 60 towering monoliths, each over six feet high. Dating from between 5,800 and 5,300 BC, they lie nine meters underwater and were built at a time when sea levels were much lower than today.

By way of comparison, England's Stonehenge was built from 3,000 to 2,500 BC, roughly the same dates as Egypt's Pyramids of Giza.

These striking manmade structures are unique. Nothing similar from this historical period has ever been found in France and predate previously recorded megaliths by hundreds of years. This suggests they were constructed by a highly organized and sophisticated society whose existence was previously unknown.

Study authors confirmed that “these remains, unique at such depth, show Mesolithic human presence and advanced building skills, predating Neolithic megalithism in Brittany by 500 years.” They support a growing body of underwater evidence demonstrating that complex stone-building traditions existed among coastal hunter-gatherer groups long before agriculture spread across Europe - which casts doubt on agriculture being the sole definitive marker for human innovation.

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