New Delhi, India

An 'astonishing' discovery was made by an international team of researchers as they mapped a network of rivers and estuaries in 3D around the sunken but "beautifully preserved" landscape of a 7,000-year-old underwater city. 

Advertisment

The area was scanned after a Stone Age road, which was 13 feet beneath the Adriatic Sea, was found in last year's discovery. The road once connected the ancient city to the mainland.

The city, which is called Soline, was created on an artificial landmass by the ancient Hvar culture. However, the city slowly started sinking off the coast of what today is called Croatia as sea levels increased with the melting glaciers of the last Ice Age around 12,000 BC.

The researchers now hope that this discovery will help them strategise their deep-sea hunts to find ancient submerged sites and artefacts of the Hvar people. 

Advertisment

Also Read: Archaeologists discover ruins of 4,000-year-old ceremonial temple

The new project's lead investigator and geo-archaeologist Dr Simon Fitch said, "It's a more diverse landscape and it's better preserved than we expected." 

He said, "The results provided way more detail than we were expecting."

Advertisment

Scientists carry out first-ever seafloor scanning 

The scientists found the undersea landscape, where the Hvar culture once existed, near Croatia's second-largest Split where Dr Fitch had gone in March 2023 to start the first-ever seafloor scanning with the help of state-of-the-art underwater 3D seismic sensors.

"There are beautifully preserved rivers and estuaries buried beneath what is now the seafloor," explained Dr Fitch.

"The unique environment of the area around Split, which is quite sheltered, has preserved a lot of it," he added. 

The company's data was used by Dr Fitch and his team to map an ancient lost island in the North Sea, Doggerland, which once existed between Great Britain and the Netherlands.

Watch: India's first sunken museum opens at Humayun's Tomb site

"When we went in with our high-resolution sensors, we found more rivers, more water in the landscape and more environments," said Dr Fitch. 

"That's amazing, because it suggests it is more likely that people lived there. Our ultimate goal is to find human artefacts," Dr Fitch added and further noted, "and having this new understanding of the landscape makes that more likely." 

"Croatia is the gateway to Europe," he said and added, "so if you think about the advance of farming in Europe, it is and always has been a very important landscape." 

(With inputs from agencies)