11 August, 2015 – Italian researchers just announced an archaeological discovery that allows to significantly expand our understanding of the earliest civilizations in the Mediterranean Basin. A monolith of 12 meters, lying on the seabed at about 40 meters of depth was found by divers in the area of the Strait of Sicily thanks to evidence collected by geologists of the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics in Trieste (OGS). The discovery of the large stone block, which has regular holes on some of its sides and a hole passing through it in its entirety on one end, evidenced by the presence of ancient peoples in this part of the Mediterranean about 9500 years ago, when the global sea level was 40 meters lower. The site identified in the Strait of Sicily is one of the oldest submerged sites known so far, dating back to the Mesolithic age, much like the Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, the first known example of stone temple. Thanks to the studies led by the OGS, with the collaboration of the University of Tel Aviv, the Carabinieri and a group of professional divers of the Global Underwater Explorers, it was possible to reconstruct the history of this human settlement. “Through the analysis of the collected data (high-resolution bathymetry, sampling,as well as photographic and video observations) and the comparison with the fluctuation rates of the sea level, we were able to reconstruct the history of this site, which was abandoned around 9,500 years ago,” explains Emanuele Lodolo, OGS researcher and coordinator of the study. “The first observations date back to research activities in the Channel of Sicily that we started in 2009 with the OGS-Explora ship, but today we were able to reconstruct the history of this archaeological site” specifies Lodolo. The data, recently published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports show that already in the Mesolithic age some islands in the Strait of Sicily were inhabited up to about 9,000 years ago. The archipelago, which once stretched between the coasts of Sicily and the island of Pantelleria, was gradually swallowed up by rising sea following the dissolution of the ice sheet that covered much of present Northern Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum (about 18,000 years ago).
