12-meter-long man made monolith discovered off Italian coast

[Ichingcarpenter]

9. Ancient Monolith Suggests Humans Lived on Now-Underwater Archipelago

What's more, the monolith doesn't match the roughly 10-million-year-old rocks on the ocean floor; rather it has a composition similar to rocks from a ridge that are found in shallow marine area, the researchers wrote.

"This is one of the most important details in supporting the idea that the monolith is not made by nature or phenomena, but is man-made," Lodolo said.

Ancient archipelago

The researchers dated the stone in the monolith to the Late Pleistocene, about 40,000 years ago during the last ice age, by extracting several shell fragments from the rock and doing radiocarbon dating tests on it. It's unclear when people made the stone into a monolith, but the researchers say that varying sea levels offer a clue.


The Last Glacial Maximum began about 19,000 years ago, the researchers said. At that time, Europe was about 40 percent larger than it is now, but as the glaciers melted, sea levels rose about 410 feet (125 m) from then until present day, Lodolo told Live Science.

"This global event has led to the retreat of the coastlines, especially in lowland areas and shallow shelves, such as the Sicilian Channel," the researchers wrote in the study.

Before the sea level in the Mediterranean rose, an archipelago existed between Sicily and modern-day Tunisia. Perhaps people lived on these islands and constructed the monolith, Lodolo said.

"[The archipelago] was like a bridge between the European world and the African world," Lodolo said. "It's quite reasonable to think it was inhabited by some settlers."



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