A submerged, 39-foot-long (12 m) monolith has been discovered in the waters off the coast of Sicily at a depth of about 130 feet (40 m).
Underwater composite photographs taken from divers, showing the discovered monolith and some details. Top: full lateral view. Bottom: full view from above. Image credit: Emanuele Lodolo / Zvi Ben-Avraham.
The man-made monolith is at least 9,350 years old. It weighs about 15 tons and is broken into two parts.
It has three regular holes of similar diameter: one that crosses it completely on its top, and another two at two sides of the monolith.
There are no reasonable known natural processes that may produce these elements, according to Dr Emanuele Lodolo from the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics in Italy and Dr Zvi Ben-Avraham from the University of Haifa and Tel Aviv University in Israel, who found the monolith.
“The monolith is made from stone other than those which constitute all the neighboring outcrops, and is quite isolated with respect to them,” the scientists said.
“It is composed of calcirudites of Late Pleistocene age, as determined from radiocarbon measurements conducted on several shell fragments extracted from the rock samples.”
The monolith was found on the Pantelleria Vecchia Bank, a former island of the Sicilian Channel.
The island, according to the archaeologists, was dramatically submerged during a flood around 9,300 years ago.
“The obtained age falls chronologically within the beginning of the Mesolithic period of the SE Europe and Middle East,” Dr Lodolo and Dr Ben-Avraham said.
Underwater composite photographs taken from divers, showing the discovered monolith and some details. Top: monolith’s end. Middle: partial lateral view. Bottom: partial view from above. Image credit: Emanuele Lodolo / Zvi Ben-Avraham.
“The discovery of the submerged site in the Sicilian Channel may significantly expand our knowledge of the earliest civilizations in the Mediterranean basin and our views on technological innovation and development achieved by the Mesolithic inhabitants.”
The monolith required a cutting, extraction, transportation and installation, which undoubtedly reveals important technical skills and great engineering.
“The belief that our ancestors lacked the knowledge, skill and technology to exploit marine resources or make sea crossings, must be progressively abandoned,” the archaeologists said.
“The recent findings of submerged archaeology have definitively removed the idea of technological primitivism often attributed to hunter-gatherers coastal settlers.”
The find is described in a paper published July 15 in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
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Emanuele Lodolo & Zvi Ben-Avraham. 2015. A submerged monolith in the Sicilian Channel (central Mediterranean Sea): Evidence for Mesolithic human activity. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, vol. 3, pp. 398-407; doi: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2015.07.003
