Aarhus Bay, Denmark – Below the dark blue waters of Aarhus Bay in northern Denmark, archaeologists are searching for coastal settlements swallowed by rising sea levels more than 8,500 years ago.
This summer, divers descended about 26 feet below the waves near Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city, and collected evidence of a Stone Age settlement in the seafloor.
It’s part of a $15.5 million international project to map parts of the seabed in the Baltic and Northern Seas, funded by the European Union, which includes researchers from Aarhus as well as Britain’s University of Bradford and the Lower Saxony Institute for Historical Coastal Research in Germany.
The aim is to explore landscapes in Northern Europe and discover lost Mesolithic settlements as offshore wind farms and other marine infrastructure expand.
Søren Christian Bech / AP
So far, most evidence of these settlements has been found inland from the Stone Age coast, said underwater archaeologist Peter Moe Astrup, who leads underwater excavations in Denmark.
“Here we actually have an old coastline. We have a settlement that was positioned right on the coastline,” he said. “What we’re really trying to find out here is what life was like in a coastal colony.”
After the last ice age, huge ice sheets melted and global sea levels rose, subduing Stone Age settlements and forcing the hunter-gatherer human population inland.
About 8,500 years ago, sea levels rose about 6.5 feet per century, Moe Astrup said.
Moe Astrup and his colleagues at the Moesgaard Museum in Højbjerg, just outside Aarhus, excavated an area of about 430 square feet at the small settlement they discovered just off today’s coast.
Early dives uncovered animal bones, stone tools, arrowheads, a seal tooth and a small piece of worked wood, probably a simple tool. Researchers are combing the site’s meter by meter using a sort of underwater vacuum to collect material for future analysis.
James Brooks/AP 
They hope that further excavations will find harpoons, fish books or traces of fishing structures.
“It’s like a time capsule,” Moe Astrup said. “When sea levels rose, everything was kept in an oxygen-free environment… time stands still.”
“We find completely well-preserved wood,” he added. “We find hazelnuts. … Everything is well preserved.”
Excavations in the relatively calm and shallow Aarhus Bay and dives off the coast of Germany will be followed by later work at two locations in the more inhospitable North Sea.
Rising sea levels thousands of years ago submerged, among other things, a vast area known as Doggerland which connected Britain with mainland Europe and now lies beneath the South North Sea.
To build a picture of the rapid rise in water levels, Danish researchers use dendrochronology, the study of tree rings.
Submerged tree stumps preserved in mud and sediment can be precisely dated, revealing rising tides to drown coastal forests.
“We can tell very precisely when these trees died on the coasts,” said Moesgaard Museum dendrochronologist Jonas Ogdal Jensen, looking at a section of Stone Age trunk under a microscope.
“This tells us something about how sea levels have changed over time.”
As today’s world faces rising sea levels driven by climate change, researchers hope to shed light on how Stone Age societies adapted to shift coastlines more than eight millennia ago.
“It’s hard to answer exactly what that meant to people,” Moe Astrup said. “But it clearly had a huge long-term impact because it completely changed the landscape.”
Sea levels have risen by a global average of about 1.7 inches over the decade to 2023.
Denmark has seen several significant archaeological discoveries in recent years, including a metal detector Stunning find early last year from the gold ring Situated with a red semi-precious stone that researchers hoped would shed light on the country’s early medieval history.
Officials from the National Museum of Denmark announced that Found the After the Centuries, believed to be held by a member of the royal family around 1,400 years ago, was moved from another museum closer to the discovery site to the south, near the German border.
This discovery came a few weeks after archaeologists I found a small knife inscribed with runic letters dated to the first or second century AD, or almost 2,000 years ago. It was the oldest trace of writing ever found in Denmark, according to the Odense Museum.
Runes, or runic letters, are the oldest alphabet known to have been used in Scandinavia, having been used for around 1000 years until they were largely replaced by the Latin alphabet when Christians began to spread their belief system in the 10th century.
Earlier this year, officials announced that a piece of Fossilized vomit, Dating back to when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, was discovered in Denmark.
