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A narrated dive into the Pantelleria Bank in the Strait of Sicily, where a 12-meter carved stone column with three bored holes was found on the seafloor, possibly a human-made relic from a submerged l

Key Takeaways

  • Sea level rise after the last ice age submerged large coastal plains and human habitats in the Mediterranean.
  • A 12-meter stone column with regularly spaced holes was found on the Pantelleria Bank at about 40 meters depth.
  • Researchers consider the column likely human-made, though the interpretation remains debated and unconfirmed.
  • Underwater archaeology faces significant challenges and legal complexity in preserving submerged heritage.

What the video covers

  • The video frames the Mediterranean as a submerged archive of human history shaped by rising sea levels since the last ice age.
  • During the last glacial period, sea levels were roughly 120-130 meters lower, exposing plains and coastlines now under water, including the area of the Strait of Sicily.
  • The Pantelleria Bank is a submerged plateau around 40 meters deep that was once high ground when the region was dry land.
  • In 2015, a University of Catania survey led by geologist Emanuele Lodolo documented an isolated stone column lying on the seafloor.
  • The column is about 12 meters long, made of bioclastic calcarenite, broken into two sections, and has three evenly spaced holes bored through it.
  • Lodolo and Zvi Ben-Avraham published their findings in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, arguing the object was likely human-made.
  • The video notes that the object's regular holes and isolated position distinguish it from natural formations, though limited surface analysis leaves uncertainty.
  • The discussion covers possible purposes such as a ceremonial marker, landmark, or boundary stone.
  • Underwater cultural heritage is governed by patchwork national laws and the 2001 UNESCO convention, complicating investigation and protection.
  • The video compares the find to Neolithic sites like Atlit-Yam off Israel to illustrate how submerged settlements preserve traces of past environmental change.

Chapters

  1. 00:00Introduction: The Mediterranean as a Submerged Archive
  2. 00:12The Stone Column Discovery
  3. 00:25Geological Setting of the Pantelleria Bank
  4. 00:38Possible Origins and Fate of the Column
  5. 00:51Sea Level History and Human Presence
  6. 01:04The Researchers and Their Methods
  7. 01:31Evidence, Uncertainty, and Open Questions
  8. 02:11Legal Protection of Underwater Heritage
  9. 02:24Possible Cultural Functions of Standing Stones
  10. 02:37Comparisons with Submerged Neolithic Sites

Answers

Questions about this video

What was discovered on the Pantelleria Bank in 2015?

A research team found a stone column about 12 meters long lying on the seafloor at roughly 40 meters depth. It was broken into two sections and had three evenly spaced holes bored through it, features that suggested human construction rather than natural formation.

Why do the researchers think the column may be human-made?

The column is an isolated, elongated stone on a featureless sandy plain, with no nearby geological source, and it has three regular holes running through it. The researchers concluded this regularity is unlikely to arise from natural processes.

How did the Pantelleria Bank become submerged?

During the last ice age, sea levels were about 120-130 meters lower, exposing the area as land. As the ice melted over thousands of years, rising seas gradually flooded the region, leaving high points like the bank submerged under tens of meters of water.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

00:01
Speaker A
Hello there, and welcome to Life Beyond Scene, where the world just beneath the surface, whether that means the ocean floor or the quiet edge of what we think we know, turns out to hold far more than we ever expected. Imagine the Mediterranean for a moment. Not as a vacation destination, not as a body of water you trace on a map between Europe and Africa, but as something older and stranger than that.
00:14
Speaker A
Imagine it as a kind of living archive, a place where thousands of years of human memory have been pressed down layer by layer into the seafloor. Every civilization that ever rose along its shores left something behind, and not all of it stayed on land.
00:31
Speaker A
The sea has been rising slowly and steadily for a very long time. And as it rose, it swallowed coastlines, plains, valleys, and whatever people had built there. Most of what it took, we will never find. But occasionally, something remains. Something sits down there in the blue-green quiet, waiting.
00:47
Speaker A
Tonight, we are going to talk about one of those things. Before we get into it, I want to ask you something simple. Where are you right now as you listen to this? Are you in bed with the lights off? Somewhere between awake and asleep? Are you driving a long stretch of road with nothing but headlights ahead of you?
01:03
Speaker A
Maybe you are sitting by a window somewhere, and it is late, and the world outside is gone still. Whatever the answer is, I am glad you are here. This is the kind of story that feels right in the quiet. It does not need noise or urgency. It just needs a little patience and a willingness to sit with something genuinely unresolved.
01:18
Speaker A
If you enjoy what we do here on Life Beyond Scene, a like on this video and a subscription to the channel go a long way. It helps more people find their way to these stories, and it helps us keep making them. There is a subscribe button right below, and it only takes a moment.
01:26
Speaker A
Now, let us begin. The Mediterranean Sea, if you look at it from above, seems permanent. It looks like it has always been there in roughly that shape, that size, that depth. But that is an illusion of scale. We are used to thinking about geography as fixed, as something that simply exists and stays.
01:41
Speaker A
The truth is that the Mediterranean as we know it today is a relatively recent arrangement. Go back far enough, and the picture is completely different. During the last great ice age, when enormous ice sheets covered much of the Northern Hemisphere and locked vast quantities of water into glaciers that stretched across continents, global sea levels were dramatically lower than they are now.
01:48
Speaker A
We're talking about a difference of roughly 120 to 130 meters. That is not a small variation. That is the difference between open sea and dry, walkable land. In the central Mediterranean, that difference reshaped the geography in ways that are difficult to fully picture.
01:59
Speaker A
The Strait of Sicily, the relatively shallow channel that separates the island of Sicily from the coast of Tunisia, was not always a strait at all. In the deep past, it was a broad, low-lying plain, a landscape of coastal grasslands and river systems and shorelines that no longer exist. People lived there. Animals moved across it.
02:05
Speaker A
And then, over thousands of years, as the ice melted and the sea crept upward, all of it went under. What remained in some places were the high points. The ridges and plateaus that had once been elevated ground became submerged banks, rising up from the deeper seafloor but still covered by tens of meters of water.
02:19
Speaker A
One of those places is called the Pantelleria Bank. It sits in the Strait of Sicily, roughly between the southwestern tip of Sicily and the Tunisian coastline, not far from the volcanic island of Pantelleria, which is still active today.
02:36
Speaker A
The bank is a submerged plateau, relatively flat, rising to depths of around 40 meters in some areas. It is not a place most people have heard of. It does not appear in travel guides or history books. For most of modern history, it was simply a navigational feature on nautical charts, a place where the water was shallower than expected. That changed in 2015.
02:54
Speaker A
In the summer of that year, a research team from the University of Catania was conducting a survey of the seafloor in this region. The team was led by Emanuele Lodolo, a marine geologist with a long record of work in Mediterranean geology.
03:11
Speaker A
The survey was not specifically a search for archaeological objects. It was a broader scientific mapping effort, the kind of methodical, instrument-based work that geologists do to understand the structure and history of the seafloor beneath them. They were using acoustic survey equipment and remotely operated cameras to document what the bottom looked like in this area. Routine work, more or less.
03:26
Speaker A
And then the cameras found something that was not routine at all. On the flat, sandy bottom of the Pantelleria Bank, roughly 40 meters below the surface, there was a stone column, a single large piece of stone lying on the seafloor, broken into two sections.
03:41
Speaker A
It was not a small object. The column measured approximately 12 meters in total length, which is roughly the height of a four-story building laid on its side. It was made of a type of stone called bioclastic calcarenite, a sedimentary rock formed from compressed marine biological material, essentially a kind of limestone.
03:57
Speaker A
And it was resting there on the flat sand alone. No pile of rubble around it, no other large stones nearby, just this one long object, broken cleanly into two pieces, sitting in the quiet dark of the seafloor.
04:05
Speaker A
The team documented what they found. They photographed it. They filmed it. And they began asking the question that anyone would ask when they see something like this at the bottom of the sea. How did it get there?
04:20
Speaker A
It is worth pausing here for a moment, because the initial image of this thing is genuinely striking. When you look at the footage and the photographs from the survey, what you see is not ambiguous in its basic form. It looks like a column. It looks like something that was shaped. It is long and relatively uniform in its proportions, and it lies there on a featureless sandy plain with nothing around it to suggest how it might have arrived through natural processes.
04:30
Speaker A
The surrounding seafloor, from what the survey showed, does not contain similar rock formations. There is no nearby reef, no outcropping, no geological feature that would obviously produce a single elongated stone of this size in this location.
04:46
Speaker A
Now, that observation alone does not prove anything. Geology is full of surprises, and unusual natural formations do exist. The researchers knew that. But it was enough to make them look more carefully. And the more carefully they looked, the more interesting the object became, because it was not just the shape. It was three holes, drilled or bored or carved through the stone at what appeared to be regular intervals along its length.
05:02
Speaker A
Each hole was roughly the same size. Each one passed entirely through the column, and they were spaced in a way that did not look random. That detail, more than anything else about the object, is what pushed the research team toward a very specific and very significant conclusion.
05:15
Speaker A
Natural stone does not typically produce three evenly spaced holes of consistent diameter running through a single elongated form. That kind of regularity has a different kind of explanation.
05:32
Speaker A
Lodolo and his colleague, Israeli geophysicist Zvi Ben-Avraham, spent time analyzing what they had found. They looked at the stone type, the break pattern, the holes, the surrounding seafloor, and the broader geological and archaeological context of the region.
05:51
Speaker A
And in 2015, they published their findings in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, which is a peer-reviewed scientific publication.
06:09
Speaker A
Their conclusion was careful but clear. They believed the column was human-made. They believed it had been shaped and possibly transported by people who lived on the Pantelleria Bank when it was still above water. And based on the regional sea level history and t
06:23
Speaker A
initial image of this thing is genuinely striking. When you look at the footage and the photographs from the survey, what you see is not ambiguous in its basic form. It looks like a column. It looks like something that was shaped. It
06:37
Speaker A
is long and relatively uniform in its proportions, and it lies there on a featureless sandy plane with nothing around it to suggest how it might have arrived through natural processes. The surrounding sea floor from what the survey showed does not contain similar
06:52
Speaker A
rock formations. There is no nearby reef, no outcropping, no geological feature that would obviously produce a single elongated stone of this size in this location. Now that observation alone does not prove anything. Geology is full of surprises and unusual natural
07:11
Speaker A
formations do exist. The researchers knew that. But it was enough to make them look more carefully. And the more carefully they looked, the more interesting the object became because it was not just the shape. It was three holes drilled or bored or carved through
07:28
Speaker A
the stone at what appeared to be regular intervals along its length. Each hole was roughly the same size. Each one passed entirely through the column and they were spaced in a way that did not look random. That detail, more than
07:43
Speaker A
anything else about the object, is what pushed the research team toward a very specific and very significant conclusion.
07:52
Speaker A
Natural stone does not typically produce three evenly spaced holes of consistent diameter running through a single elongated form. That kind of regularity has a different kind of explanation.
08:06
Speaker A
Lollo and his colleague, Israeli geoysicist Zvie Ben Abraham spent time analyzing what they had found. They looked at the stone type, the break pattern, the holes, the surrounding seafloor, and the broader geological and archaeological context of the region.
08:26
Speaker A
And in 2015, they published their findings in the journal of archaeological science reports, which is a peer-reviewed scientific publication.
08:35
Speaker A
Their conclusion was careful but clear. They believed the column was humanmade. They believed it had been shaped and possibly transported by people who lived on the Pantaleria Veia bank when it was still above water. And based on the
08:49
Speaker A
regional sea level history and the sediment layers surrounding the object, they estimated that the structure had been placed there no later than approximately 9,350 years ago. Let that number settle for a moment. 9,350 years. that is older than the earliest
09:07
Speaker A
phases of Stonehenge by more than 6,000 years. It is roughly contemporary with the oldest layers of Gbeclete in what is now southeastern Turkey, which is currently considered one of the oldest known monumental structures on Earth. If Looo and Ben Abraham were right, the
09:23
Speaker A
column on the Pantaleria Veia Bank would be among the oldest humanmade monolithic objects ever found, not just in the Mediterranean anywhere. That is a significant claim and like all significant claims, it deserves to be looked at carefully from multiple angles
09:41
Speaker A
with patience and without rushing to either believe it or dismiss it. That is exactly what we're going to do tonight.
09:49
Speaker A
But before we get into the details of the stone itself, the geology, the debate, and what it would mean if the researchers were correct, it helps to understand a little more about where this place is and what it was.
10:04
Speaker A
The Pantaleria Veia Bank is not just a random patch of seafloor. It has a specific geological identity, a specific position in the history of the Mediterranean landscape, and a specific relationship to the story of rising seas and vanishing coastlines that makes this
10:22
Speaker A
discovery possible in the first place. Because the thing about the Mediterranean is that it has always been a crossroads. Long before the Greeks, long before the Phoenetians, long before any civilization that left written records, people were moving across this
10:37
Speaker A
region. They were fishing its waters, hunting along its coasts, and living on land that no longer exists above the water line.
10:46
Speaker A
The story of the Pantileria Veia Bank column is in a way the story of all of that. It is a story about a world that was submerged before anyone was writing anything down. A world we can only glimpse through the things that were
11:01
Speaker A
left behind and happened to survive. And surviving at the bottom of the Mediterranean in the dark and the cold and the slow accumulation of sediment is not easy. Most things do not make it.
11:14
Speaker A
Wood rots. Organic material breaks down. Even stone over millennia can be buried, scattered, or eroded beyond recognition.
11:26
Speaker A
The fact that this column is still there, still identifiable, still raising questions after 9,000 years of submersion is remarkable in itself.
11:36
Speaker A
Whatever it is, it has lasted. So, let us begin with the object itself. Because before we can talk about who might have made it or why or what it means, we need to understand exactly what was found on
11:48
Speaker A
that sandy seafloor in the straight of Sicily. The details matter here. They are the difference between a genuinely puzzling discovery and a misidentified rock. And as we will see, the details of this particular stone are not easy to
12:03
Speaker A
explain away. The column is approximately 12 m long. That is worth letting sit for a moment because 12 m is not a small thing. It is roughly the height of a four-story building laid on its side. If you stood at one end of it
12:19
Speaker A
and looked toward the other, it would stretch out further than most people's living rooms are wide by quite a margin.
12:25
Speaker A
It is a substantial object. And it is, as far as the researchers could determine from the survey data and the ROV footage, made from a single piece of stone, not assembled, not stacked, one continuous piece quarried or shaped from
12:40
Speaker A
a single source and now resting in two sections on the seafloor. Because at some point, whether through seismic activity or the gradual stress of submersion or something else entirely, it broke. The break itself is relatively clean. Not a crumbling, not a slow
12:57
Speaker A
erosion into fragments, but a break. The two pieces are close to one another, roughly aligned, as if the column simply fractured at one point, and the two halves settled where they fell. The stone type is bioalkalcaranite.
13:12
Speaker A
That is a sedimentary rock formed from the cemented remains of marine organisms, shells and fragments of coral and other biological material that accumulated over time and hardened into stone. It is a common enough material in the Mediterranean region found in
13:28
Speaker A
coastal and shallow water geological formations throughout Sicily, Tunisia, and the surrounding areas. But here is the thing that the researchers noted immediately. The bioalccarenite that makes up the column does not match the seafloor material at the site. The surrounding bottom is
13:47
Speaker A
sandy, fine grained and relatively uniform. There is no exposed bedrock nearby. There is no reef, no outcropping, no visible geological source that would explain the presence of a 12 m bioalkcarite column in this location.
14:06
Speaker A
The stone did not come from where it now rests. it came from somewhere else. That detail is easy to gloss over, but is actually one of the more significant observations in the original paper.
14:18
Speaker A
Natural geological processes can produce unusual shapes. They can crack rock into columns. They can erode formations into long ridges. They can deposit boulders far from their origin through glacial transport or underwater landslides.
14:33
Speaker A
But those processes leave evidence. They leave associated material, broken pieces, scattered fragments, a geological context that tells the story of how the object arrived. At the Panteleria Veia Bank site, that context is absent. The column sits on a flat
14:52
Speaker A
sandy bottom, isolated with nothing around it that suggests a natural delivery mechanism. The researchers looked at the surrounding seafloor carefully and found no other large stones, no debris field, no obvious parent formation, just the column alone on the sand in two pieces. The estimated
15:13
Speaker A
weight is around 15 tons. Some sources round this slightly differently depending on how the density of the specific stone is calculated, but the general figure is in that range. 15 tons is again not a trivial amount. Moving a
15:28
Speaker A
stone of that size, even on land, requires either a very large number of people working together or some kind of mechanical advantage. Rollers, levers, sledges ropes.
15:41
Speaker A
The logistics of moving a 15 ton stone are not simple even today. The logistics of moving one in the Mesolithic or early Neolithic period without metal tools, without wheeled vehicles, without cranes are genuinely challenging to think through. And yet we know it was done
15:58
Speaker A
repeatedly in other parts of the world during roughly the same era. The builders of Gbecepe were moving large carved limestone pillars into position around 9,000 to 10,000 years ago. The earliest megalithic traditions in the western Mediterranean were already
16:15
Speaker A
emerging in this broad period. So the physical challenge is real, but it is not unprecedented.
16:21
Speaker A
People were doing difficult things with heavy stone during this era. That much is established. When the ROV cameras moved along the surface of the column, what they captured was a stone covered in the kind of biological accumulation you would expect from 9,000 years of
16:37
Speaker A
submersion. Marine growth, encrustation, the gradual layering of organisms that attach themselves to any hard surface in the sea. This bofouling makes detailed examination of the stone surface difficult. It obscures what might otherwise be visible tool marks or worked surfaces. The researchers
16:59
Speaker A
acknowledged this directly. A proper close-range examination of the stone surface, the kind that might reveal the traces of cutting or shaping, would require careful cleaning, which is itself a delicate and potentially destructive process if done incorrectly.
17:15
Speaker A
So what the camera showed was the general form of the object, its length, its proportions, its break, its position, and then the three holes. The holes are the part of this story that tends to make people stop and look
17:29
Speaker A
twice. Each one passes entirely through the column from one face to the other. They are roughly cylindrical in form, and they are of similar diameter to one another. The research team described them as being of comparable size, and
17:43
Speaker A
the photographs and footage from the survey show them clearly enough to confirm that they are not superficial indentations or partial cavities. They go all the way through the stone, and they are spaced at what appear to be regular intervals along the length of
17:57
Speaker A
the column. Not clustered at one end, not random in their placement, but distributed in a way that has a kind of deliberate rhythm to it. Now, if you try to picture what a naturally formed hole in a piece of marine limestone looks
18:11
Speaker A
like, the comparison is instructive. Boring organisms, which are a real and well doumented phenomenon, do create cylindrical cavities in soft limestone.
18:22
Speaker A
By valves like date muscles and certain species of sponges and worms are capable of boring into rock and they do leave holes, but those holes are typically small, often just a centimeter or two in diameter and they're usually found in
18:37
Speaker A
clusters or irregular patterns across the surface of the rock, not passing cleanly through a large stone at regular intervals.
18:45
Speaker A
The holes in the pantilaria veia bank column are considerably larger than what boring organisms typically produce. The exact diameter measurements were noted in the original paper. And while the bofouling made precise measurement difficult, the holes are clearly not the
19:02
Speaker A
work of small organisms going about their ordinary business. They're larger, more regular, and more deliberately positioned than that explanation would comfortably account for.
19:12
Speaker A
There is also the question of what naturally occurring geological processes could produce a 12 m single piece elongated stone with three through holes at regular intervals. Bioalcaranite does sometimes form in elongated shapes through natural cementation.
19:29
Speaker A
Concretions which are masses of mineral material that form around a nucleus in sedimentary deposits can take elongated forms. Column la jointing which is the process that produces the famous hexagonal bassalt columns at places like the Giants's causeway in Northern
19:43
Speaker A
Ireland creates regular geometric shapes in volcanic rock. But the Pantaleria Veia Bank column is not volcanic it is sedimentary.
19:53
Speaker A
And while natural sedimentary formations can be surprising, the combination of features here, the length, the single piece composition, the clean break, the three- holes of consistent diameter, regular spacing is not something that falls easily into any known category of
20:09
Speaker A
natural geological formation. Each individual feature taken alone might have a natural explanation. All of them together in the same object is where the explanation becomes harder to construct.
20:22
Speaker A
To understand what the divers and the ROV were looking at from a comparative perspective, it helps to think about what a naturally formed elongated bioalccarenite rock actually looks like.
20:34
Speaker A
In practice, natural rock formations in this material tend to be irregular. They have variable cross-sections, uneven surfaces, unpredictable fracture patterns. When they break, they do not usually break cleanly. When they have cavities, those cavities are usually irregular, branching, or surface level rather than
20:56
Speaker A
passing cleanly through the entire thickness of the stone. The column at Pantileria Veia Bank does not look like that. It has a consistency of form that is at minimum unusual for a natural object. That does not automatically mean
21:12
Speaker A
it is humanmade, but it does mean that the natural explanation requires some work to construct. And so far, no one has published a detailed geological account of how this specific object could have formed through natural processes alone. The flat sandy bottom
21:29
Speaker A
on which the column rests is also worth noting. The seafloor in this area of the Pantileria Veia Bank is not particularly dramatic in its topography. It is a relatively featureless plane, which is part of what made the column so
21:42
Speaker A
immediately visible and striking in the survey data. There was nothing else around it of comparable size or shape.
21:50
Speaker A
If this were a natural formation, you might expect to find associated material, other stones of similar composition nearby, remnants of the same geological event or process, evidence of the formation that produced it. The survey did not find that the column
22:06
Speaker A
appears to stand or rather lie alone. That isolation is one of the things that keeps the human construction hypothesis alive because it is consistent with what you would expect if someone had placed a single large stone object in a
22:21
Speaker A
particular location for a particular purpose. And everything else in the surrounding landscape had since been buried under centuries of sediment.
22:31
Speaker A
The break in the column raises its own questions. The two pieces are not dramatically separated. They're relatively close to one another and their alignment suggests that the column broke more or less where it lay rather than being transported in pieces and
22:46
Speaker A
deposited separately. Whether the break occurred during the original placement, during a seismic event at some later point or gradually through the stresses of submersion and the shifting of the seafloor over thousands of years is not known. The straight of Sicily and the surrounding
23:04
Speaker A
region are not geologically quiet. Pantaleria, the volcanic island nearby is an active volcano. There have been significant seismic events in this region throughout history. It is entirely plausible that a stone column, whether natural or humanmade, could have been fractured by seismic activity at
23:24
Speaker A
some point during its 9,000 years on the seafloor. The break does not tell us much about origin, but it does tell us that the column has been through a long and eventful history of its own since it first came to rest on that sandy plane.
23:40
Speaker A
What the ROV footage and the diver observations could not easily determine because of the bofouling and the limitations of the survey equipment was the precise surface texture of the stone. This is important because tool marks if they exist would be one of the
23:56
Speaker A
clearest indicators of human working. When prehistoric people shaped stone they left characteristic marks. Percussion marks from hammerstones. The smooth flat surfaces left by grinding.
24:09
Speaker A
The specific patterns of flaking that come from napping. On land, these marks can survive for thousands of years.
24:17
Speaker A
Underwater, they are much more difficult to preserve and identify because the biological growth that accumulates on submerged stone tends to fill in and obscure fine surface detail.
24:30
Speaker A
The researchers were honest about this limitation. They could not confirm the presence of tool marks from the survey data alone. But they also noted that the absence of confirmed tool marks is not the same as evidence of natural
24:43
Speaker A
formation. It simply means the question remains open, waiting for a closer examination than the survey was able to provide. Taken together, what the survey revealed was an object that is genuinely difficult to categorize. It is too regular in some of its features to sit
25:03
Speaker A
comfortably in the category of known natural formations. It is too isolated, too large, and too specifically configured to be easily dismissed. And the three holes, whatever their ultimate explanation, are the feature that most consistently resists a simple natural account. They are the
25:23
Speaker A
detail that made Lollo and Ben Abraham reach for a different kind of explanation. Not because they were looking for something dramatic, but because the object itself seemed to be asking for one. Before we can properly evaluate the argument they made, though, we need to
25:37
Speaker A
understand the landscape in which this object exists. Not just the seafloor as it is now, but the broader geological setting of the Pantaleria Veia Bank, the history of this particular patch of the Mediterranean, and why this shallow plateau matters so much to the story of
25:54
Speaker A
what might have been built here and when. Because the column does not exist in isolation from its geography. It sits in a specific place at a specific depth in a region with a specific geological character. And that character, as it
26:09
Speaker A
turns out, is central to the entire question of what this object is and how it came to be where it is.
26:16
Speaker A
The geology of the Straight of Sicily is not a simple or quiet thing, and understanding it is the next piece of the puzzle. The Straight of Sicily is one of those places that does not look remarkable on a modern map. It is simply
26:29
Speaker A
the gap between two land masses, the narrow channel that separates the island of Sicily from the coast of Tunisia, roughly 140 km at its narrowest point.
26:40
Speaker A
Ships pass through it constantly. It has been a transit corridor for trade, for migration, for military fleets, for fishing vessels for thousands of years.
26:51
Speaker A
To look at it on a satellite image is to see nothing unusual. Blue water, a few islands, the faint suggestion of continental shelves on either side. But the seafloor beneath that water tells a different story, and the Pantaleria Veia
27:06
Speaker A
Bank is one of the more interesting chapters of it. The bank itself is a submerged plateau, part of what geologists call the Sicilian Channel continental shelf. This is a broad, relatively shallow region of seafloor that extends across the central portion
27:22
Speaker A
of the strait. And it is shallow in a way that matters. In many parts of the open Mediterranean, the seafloor drops quickly to depths of several hundred or even several thousand m. The Sicilian channel is different. Large portions of
27:39
Speaker A
it sit at depths between 40 and 150 m, which is geologically speaking quite close to the surface. The Pantaleria Veia bank in particular rises to around 40 m in some areas which is a very modest depth. It is not a deep sea
27:56
Speaker A
feature. It is essentially a raised shelf, a kind of submerged plateau that sits well above the surrounding channel floor. The sediment on the bank is largely composed of bioalcarinite which is the same material the column is made of. That is worth noting though it
28:14
Speaker A
complicates the picture rather than simplifying it. Biocalcaranite is a sedimentary rock formed from the compressed remains of marine organisms, shells, coral fragments and similar biological material that accumulates over time and gradually cemented together under pressure. It is a
28:32
Speaker A
relatively soft limestone as limestones go and it forms naturally in shallow marine environments. The fact that the column is made of bioalkalcaranite means it is not made of some exotic imported material. It is in a broad sense a local stone.
28:49
Speaker A
But the researchers noted that the specific composition and characteristics of the column stone did not match the seafloor sediment immediately surrounding it which is one of the points they used to argue that the stone was not formed in place but was brought
29:02
Speaker A
from somewhere else. That argument is one we will come back to. For now, the important thing is that the bank is a shallow sedimentary shelf. Geologically speaking, a relatively quiet place, not a volcanic feature, not a sight of
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dramatic uplift or subsidance, just a broad flat plateau that happens to sit underwater. The island of Pantellaria, after which the bank is named, is a different matter entirely. Pantelia lies to the northwest of the bank, rising from the sea about
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100 km southwest of Sicily. It is a volcanic island and an active one. It sits above a complex system of faults and volcanic structures associated with the rift zone that runs through the central Mediterranean.
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The island has had eruptions throughout recorded history, and its volcanic character is visible in its landscape.
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Caleras, fummeralss, hot springs, black lava rock. It is the kind of place that makes the underlying geological activity of the region very legible at the surface. Pantelleria, the island, and Pantelleria Veia Bank. The submerged plateau are related in name and in their
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general geographic position, but they are not the same geological feature. The bank is not volcanic. It does not share the eruptive history of the island. They are neighbors in a geologically complex neighborhood, but they have different characters. That neighborhood though is
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important to understand. The central Mediterranean is not a tectonically stable region. The boundary between the African and Eurasian tectonic plates runs through this part of the world and the consequences of that boundary are felt across a wide area. Earthquakes are
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common. Volcanic activity is present not just at Pantaleria but at Etna on Sicily at the Aolon Islands to the north at Stromboli and in various submarine volcanic features scattered across the seafloor. The straight of Sicily itself is crossed by a series of fault systems
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that have been active throughout the quatinary period. Meaning the last 2 million years or so. This is a region that moves, shifts and occasionally shakes. That geological restlessness is relevant to the story of the column in several ways and we will return to it.
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But it is also relevant to understanding why the seafloor in this region looks the way it does with its varied topography, its submerged banks and channels, its shallow plateaus and deeper troughs. The Pantellaria Veia Bank sits within this active but not
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dramatically unstable zone. The bank itself has not been the site of significant volcanic events. It is not a seam mount, not lava field, not a hydrothermal feature. It is, as far as the geological surveys indicate, a relatively passive piece of continental
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shelf that has been sitting in roughly its current position for a very long time. What has changed around it dramatically is the water level above it. This is where the geography of the bank becomes essential to the larger
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argument. At 40 m depth, the Pantaleria Veia Bank is not deep. In the context of sea level history, 40 meters is a relatively modest submergence, and sea levels in the Mediterranean, as in the rest of the world, have not always been
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where they are today. During the coldest phases of the last ice age, global sea levels were dramatically lower than they are now because enormous quantities of water were locked up in continental ice sheets covering much of the northern
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hemisphere. At the last glacial maximum, roughly 20,000 years ago, sea levels globally were somewhere between 120 and 130 m lower than they are today. That is a staggering difference. Coastlines were in completely different positions. Land bridges existed where there is now open
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water. The geography of the world looked genuinely different from how it looks on any modern map. For the Pantaleria Veia Bank, this means something very specific. At 40 m depth today, the bank would have been exposed land during the
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last glacial maximum. Not barely exposed, not a marginal strip of beach, but comfortably above sea level. part of a broad coastal plane that extended across what is now the Straight of Sicily.
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The land connection between Sicily and North Africa during this period was not complete because the deeper parts of the straight would still have been underwater even at maximum ice age sea levels. But the shallow banks including the Pantaleria Veia bank would have been
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dry land part of a landscape a place where things could live grow and happen.
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The bethimemetry of the bank, meaning the detailed mapping of its underwater topography, gives some sense of what this landscape might have looked like.
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The bank has a relatively flat upper surface with gentle undulations, which is consistent with what you would expect from a former coastal plane or low-lying terrestrial landscape. There are no dramatic cliffs, no deep channels cutting across the surface. Nothing that
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suggests this was a dramatically rugged terrain. It reads more like a gentle land. The kind of flat or gently rolling ground that in many parts of the world would have been attractive to early human groups looking for places to live, hunt,
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or fish from the adjacent shoreline. The surrounding seafloor geology also shows evidence of what researchers call drowned river systems. ancient river beds and drainage channels that were carved when this land was above water and are now preserved under the sediment
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of the seafloor. These are not unusual features in the Strait of Sicily. The whole region has them preserved traces of a landscape that existed before the sea reclaimed it. They're a reminder that the seafloor here is not simply a
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featureless underwater plane, but a former terrestrial landscape frozen in time under the water and sediment that has accumulated since the flooding.
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The timing of that flooding is something the researchers who studied the column found very significant. Sea levels did not rise all at once after the last glacial maximum. The process was gradual, spread across thousands of years, driven by the slow melting of the
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great ice sheets of the northern hemisphere. The general trajectory was a rise from roughly -20 m at 20,000 years ago to roughly present levels by about 7,000 years ago. Though the rate of rise was not constant, there were periods of
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faster rise associated with pulses of glacial melt and periods of slower change. The Pantelleria Veia Bank sitting at 40 m depth would have been flooded somewhere in the middle of this process. Based on the sea level curves for the central Mediterranean, the bank
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would have been inundated approximately 9,000 to 10,000 years ago, give or take some uncertainty depending on local factors like sediment accumulation and minor tectonic adjustment. This is the number that matters most for the column.
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If the column is humanmade, it had to have been made when the bank was above water. And the bank was above water until roughly 9,000 to 10,000 years ago.
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That gives a construction date of at least that age, possibly older, but not dramatically older given what we know about the flooding timeline.
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The researchers used this sea level reconstruction combined with sediment core data from the surrounding seafloor to arrive at their estimate of approximately 9,350 years ago as the latest plausible date of construction. That is the number that appears in their published paper and it
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is the number that has drawn the most attention cuz 9,350 years ago is a very long time. It is older than most of what we think of as ancient civilization. It predates the earliest phases of writing, predates the
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earliest cities, predates even the earliest known large scale stone monuments in the western Mediterranean by a considerable margin.
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What is also worth understanding about this geological context is that the flooding of the bank was not a dramatic catastrophe from a geological standpoint. It was gradual. Over the course of centuries, the shoreline would have moved slowly in land across the
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plane. The bank would not have been swallowed by a sudden wave. It would have been nibbled at by a rising sea year by year, generation by generation.
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Low-lying areas would have become coastal wetlands, then shallow lagoons, then open water. The process would have been perceptible to people living on the plane only over long time scales. Though the cumulative effect over a few hundred years would have been striking. A
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landscape that had been dry and inhabited would have become slowly and then permanently the floor of a shallow sea. For the column, this gradual flooding matters because it means the stone was not necessarily carried away by a sudden flood. It could have been
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left in place as the water rose around it, eventually coming to rest on a seafloor that had once been dry ground.
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If it was a standing stone of some kind, it may have remained upright for some time as the water deepened before eventually falling or being knocked over by currents, wave action, or the kind of seismic event that the region's
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geological history makes quite plausible. the two-piece brake, the relatively close proximity of the two sections, the way they lie on the flat sandy bottom. All of this is consistent with an object that fell from an upright position at some point during or after
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the flooding rather than being deposited horizontally. None of this proves human construction. The geology and the sea level history established the conditions under which human construction would have been possible. And they set the timeline within which any human-made
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structure on this bank would have to have been built. They also explain why the object is where it is at the bottom of a sea that was once a landscape. But the question of whether the column is actually the product of human hands
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requires a different kind of argument. one that moves from the geological setting into the archaeological and scientific case that Lollo and his colleagues built in their published research. The context tells us what could have happened here. The research
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paper is where the argument about what did happen begins to take shape. To understand why the date of 9,350 years carries so much weight, it helps to spend a moment with what the world actually looked like at that time. Not
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the world in the broad sense, but this part of it, the central Mediterranean, the stretch of water and land between what is now Sicily and the North African coast in the period before that coast was fully separated from the island by
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open sea. Because the thing is when researchers talk about the Pantaleria Veia Bank being dry land during this period, they are not describing some remote or inhospitable wilderness. They are describing a place that by all reasonable measures would have been a
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fairly attractive piece of geography for people to live on or near. The last glacial maximum, the point of maximum ice coverage roughly 20,000 years ago, had left sea levels about 120 to 130 m below where they sit today. That is a
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staggering difference. The Mediterranean coastline during that period would have been almost unrecognizable compared to a modern map. Large areas of what is now open water were exposed land. The Adriatic Sea, for instance, was substantially reduced. Parts of the Aian
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were dry. The Straight of Sicily, already a relatively shallow section of the Mediterranean, would have seen enormous areas of its continental shelf exposed as broad coastal plains. The Pantaleria Veia Bank, sitting at only 40 m below today's surface, would have been
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well in land from the coastline of that period. It would not have been a coastal feature at all during the height of the ice age. It would have been part of a wide interior plane, probably some distance from the nearest shoreline. As
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the ice sheets began to melt and sea levels began their long, slow rise, that picture changed gradually.
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The coastlines crept inward. The plains that had been exposed began to shrink. The Pantelleria Veia Bank as the sea rose toward and pass the 40 m mark would have transitioned from inland plane to coastal lowland to shoreline to shallow
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coastal water to the open seafloor it is today. This transition happened over thousands of years. But it happened. And the period when the bank was at or near the shoreline, when it was a coastal landscape rather than a dry interior
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plane, was probably sometime in the range of 12,000 to 9,000 years ago based on how sea level curves for the central Mediterranean are reconstructed.
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The researchers involved in the 2015 study were particularly focused on a narrower window within that range. Using sediment core data from the surrounding seafloor and applying the regional sea level reconstruction for the straight of Sicily, they estimated that the
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Pantaleria Veia Bank would have been inundated, meaning fully submerged under open water by approximately 9,350 years ago. Their phrasing in the published paper is careful. They describe this as the latest possible date of construction. Meaning that if something was built on the bank by human
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hands, it had to have been built before that point. The structure could be older than 9,350 years. It cannot be younger if it was built on dry land.
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What makes this timeline particularly interesting is what was happening in the broader region during this window. The period from roughly 12,000 to 9,000 years ago corresponds to what archaeologists and prehistorians call the Mesolithic in most of the Mediterranean world with early Neolithic
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transitions beginning to appear in some areas by around 9,000 years ago. This was not a period of empty landscape.
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People had been living in and around the Mediterranean basin for tens of thousands of years. By the time the Pantaleria Veia Bank was approaching its final centuries above water, the Mediterranean world was inhabited by communities of hunter gatherers and in
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some areas early farming groups who were beginning to work with domesticated plants and animals brought from the near east. In Sicily itself, there is clear archaeological evidence of human habitation going back well before this period. The island shows signs of
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Mesolithic occupation in its caves and coastal sites. And by the early Neolithic, around 7,000 BCE, there are wellocumented settlements with pottery, domesticated animals, and cultivated grain. These were not isolated people.
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The Mediterranean, even at this early period, was a place of movement. Obsidian, the volcanic glass prized for making sharp cutting tools, was being moved across open water from the island of Pantileria and from the Leipari Islands to communities in Sicily,
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Sardinia, and the Italian mainland as early as 10,000 years ago. Moving obsidian across open water means boats.
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It means people who were comfortable at sea, who understood currents and wind and distance in a practical working way.
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The image of early Mediterranean people as purely landbound is simply not accurate. The North African coast on the other side of the straight of Sicily also has evidence of human habitation during this period. The Capsian culture, a messylithic tradition found across
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what is now Tunisia and Algeria was active in this region from roughly 10,000 to 6,000 years ago. These were sophisticated hunter gatherers who left behind mittens, hearths, art, and evidence of organized community life.
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They were not the kind of people who would have been incapable of moving large stones or of recognizing the practical and symbolic value of a prominent landmark on an open coastal plane. So when the research team argues that the Pantaleria Veia Bank was
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inhabited or at least visited and used by human groups during the period when it was above water, this is not a wild claim. The surrounding landscape was inhabited. The sea was being navigated.
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People were moving materials across open water. The idea that a broad flat coastal plane between two inhabited land masses with access to the sea and presumably to fresh water from the rivers whose channels are still visible in the seafloor sediment would have been
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unoccupied by human groups during this period would actually be the more surprising claim. What the sea level history gives us then is not proof of human construction but a coherent and plausible human context. It tells us that the bank was land when people were
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around to use it. It tells us that those people were capable of movement, of seafaring, of working stone, and of organizing communities complex enough to leave archaeological traces across the wider region. It situates the column not in some impossibly remote prehistoric
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darkness, but in a period that while ancient, is not beyond the reach of what we know about early human capability.
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The flooding timeline also does something else that is worth pausing on. It explains why the column is where it is and why it has not been found before.
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The Mediterranean seafloor is not routinely surveyed at high resolution. The straight of Sicily is a busy shipping lane, not an archaeological zone. The water at 40 m depth is accessible, but not easily. And the seafloor in this region is covered in
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sediment that has accumulated over 9,000 years of deposition, bofouling, and the slow settling of marine snow. Objects on the seafloor do not announce themselves.
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They sit there quietly under the weight of time and water until someone happens to direct a sonar array or an ROV camera in exactly the right direction.
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The 2015 discovery was not the result of a targeted search for prehistoric structures. It came out of a broader oceanographic survey of the Strait of Sicily, one focused on mapping the seafloor geology of the region. The column appeared in the sonar data as an
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anomaly, something that did not match the surrounding seafloor texture. It was only when the team sent a remotely operated vehicle down to investigate that the shape of the thing became clear.
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A long stone form broken in two, lying on a flat sandy bottom with no obvious geological explanation.
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The discovery was in a sense accidental, which raises a quiet question about how many other things might be sitting on the seafloor of the Mediterranean, waiting for a sonar array to pass overhead at the right angle. The gradual
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nature of the flooding is also relevant to the physical condition of the column today. Because the bank was not suddenly submerged, the column was not subjected to the kind of violent hydrodnamic forces that a sudden inundation might produce. As the water rose slowly around
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it, the stone would have been exposed first to shallow coastal conditions, then to deeper water, transitioning gradually from a terrestrial object to a submerged one. If it was standing upright at any point, it may have remained so for some time after the
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water covered it before eventually falling. The two sections lie close to each other on the seafloor, which is consistent with a fall from an upright or near upright position rather than being transported or scattered by strong currents. The sediment around the base
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of the column, according to the research team's observations, shows no evidence of the kind of disturbance you would expect if the stone had been dragged or rolled into its current position.
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There is something almost meditative about this image if you let yourself sit with it for a moment.
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A stone column standing on a coastal plane, watching the sea rise around it over the course of generations.
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The people who made it, if people made it, would have been long gone by the time the water reached it. Or perhaps some of them were still there, watching the shoreline move closer, season by season, year by year. The column would
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have been a landmark first on dry land, then at the edge of the sea, then in shallow water, then in deeper water, until it finally toppled and came to rest on what had become the seafloor.
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9,000 years of stillness after that, the sediment settling around it, the marine organisms colonizing its surface, the fish moving past it in the dark water, and then one day in the early 21st century, a sonar signal bouncing off its
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shape and returning to a research vessel above, where a scientist noticed that something down there did not look quite right.
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The sea level history taken together with the geological setting described in the previous section establishes the framework within which the column has to be understood. The bank was land. People were in the region. The flooding happened gradually over centuries and
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ended roughly 9,350 years ago. The column, whatever it is, has been underwater since then. These are the conditions. They are not in dispute. What is in dispute is what the column actually is and whether the conditions that allowed for human
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construction were ever actually used. That question moves us from the geological record into the scientific argument that Lollo and his colleagues V. Ben Abraham made in their published paper where they lay out carefully and specifically the case for why they
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believe the column is not a natural formation but a human-made structure. Their argument rests on several distinct lines of evidence, each of which requires its own examination, and each of which has been met with its own set of questions and counterarguments from
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the broader scientific community. The paper itself is worth spending some time with because the argument Looo and Ben Abraham made is not a dramatic one.
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It is careful, measured, and built from specific observations rather than sweeping claims. They published their findings in the Journal of Archaeological Science reports in 2015, which is a peer-reviewed journal, not a French publication.
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The choice of venue matters because it means the paper went through a formal review process before it appeared in print. Whatever you think of their conclusions, the work was subjected to the kind of scrutiny that scientific publication requires. That does not make
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them right, but it does mean the argument deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms. Their core claim is straightforward, even if the implications are not. The column, they argue, is not a product of natural geological processes. It is a human-made
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structure quarried from stone, shaped to its current form, and placed deliberately on what was then a dry coastal plane. They arrive at this conclusion through several distinct lines of reasoning and it is worth walking through each of them in some
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detail because the argument is stronger in its combination than in any single piece of evidence alone. The first point concerns the stone itself. The column is made of bioalcarinite which is a type of sedimentary rock formed from the cemented remains of
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marine organisms, shells, coral fragments and similar material. It is common in the central Mediterranean and it has been used as a building material for thousands of years precisely because it is relatively workable, softer than granite or basaltt and available in large deposits
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throughout the region. The issue the research team identified is that the specific composition and texture of the column does not match the seafloor sediment surrounding it at the Pantaleria Veia Bank site. In other words, the stone does not appear to have
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come from the immediate area where it now rests. It was brought there from somewhere else. How far is not entirely clear, and the team acknowledged that a full isotopic analysis of the stone, which would allow a more precise
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identification of its origin, had not yet been completed at the time of publication. But the basic observation that the column and the surrounding seafloor are made of different material is a meaningful one. Natural geological processes do not generally produce large
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isolated stones that are compositionally distinct from their surroundings without some obvious mechanism of transport such as glacial erratics which are not relevant in this part of the Mediterranean.
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The second point is the shape. A 12 m column of stone roughly cylindrical with a relatively consistent diameter along its length is not a shape that bioalcarinite produces spontaneously.
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Natural formations in this type of rock tend to be irregular, layered or tabular, reflecting the bedded structure of the sediment from which the rock formed. A long roughly cylindrical form requires either an unusual combination of natural fracturing along multiple
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planes or it requires human shaping. The team examined the geometry of the column carefully and found that its proportions and form were inconsistent with the natural fracture patterns expected in bioalcarinite at this scale. They were careful not to overstate this, noting
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that natural processes can occasionally produce surprising shapes. But they argued that the specific combination of length, diameter, and relative regularity was difficult to explain without human intervention. Then there are the holes. This is the feature that has attracted the most attention, and
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for good reason. The column has three holes drilled through it, each of roughly similar diameter, spaced at intervals along its length. The team described them as cylindrical cavities, roughly circular in cross-section, passing through the full thickness of the stone. The regularity of their shape
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and spacing is the thing that is hardest to account for naturally. Boring organisms, which are marine animals that drill into soft limestone to create shelters, do produce cylindrical holes in bioalcarinite.
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This is a wellocumented phenomenon, but the holes produced by boring organisms are typically small, rarely exceeding a few cm in diameter, and they occur in clusters distributed more or less randomly across a surface rather than in a linear sequence of evenly spaced
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larger openings. The holes in the pantilary veia bank column are larger than what boring organisms typically produce and their spacing is too regular to suggest random biological activity.
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Looo and Ben Abraham argued that the most parimonious explanation for three holes of similar size arranged at intervals along a shaped stone column is that they were made deliberately by people with tools for a purpose. What that purpose might have been is a
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question the paper addresses carefully and without overcommitting to any single answer. The holes could have served as attachment points, allowing ropes or other materials to be threaded through the stone for transport, for raising the column into a vertical position or for
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securing it in place. They could have been structural elements if the column was part of a larger assembly, allowing it to be joined to other components.
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They could have had a symbolic or ritual function, though that is hard to assess from the physical evidence alone. The paper does not claim to know why the holes are there. It claims that they are there, that they are too regular to be
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natural, and that their presence strengthens the case for human manufacture. That is a more modest claim than it might first appear, and it is the kind of modesty that makes the argument worth taking seriously. The break in the
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column is also discussed. The stone is in two pieces and the brake appears relatively clean. The team noted that the fracture surface is consistent with mechanical stress applied to the stone rather than with the kind of gradual weathering or biological degradation
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that would produce a more irregular break over time. One interpretation is that the column broke during transport or during the process of being raised upright. Another is that it broke at some point after it was placed, perhaps when it eventually fell as the land
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beneath it was submerged. The clean nature of the break does not definitively establish either scenario, but it is one more feature that the team included in their overall argument.
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Taken individually, none of these observations is conclusive. a stone that differs slightly from its surroundings.
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A roughly cylindrical shape, three holes of uncertain origin, a clean break. Each of these could in isolation have an alternative explanation.
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But the research team's argument is that the combination of all these features occurring together in a single object is what makes the human construction hypothesis compelling. The probability that natural processes would produce all of these characteristics simultaneously in one stone on a flat sandy seafloor
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with no other large rocks nearby is low enough that the human explanation deserves serious consideration.
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This is a standard form of reasoning in archaeology where individual pieces of evidence are often ambiguous but their convergence points toward a conclusion.
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The dating argument is perhaps the most striking part of the paper and it is where the broader significance of the find comes into focus. The team did not directly date the column itself which would require either organic material
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embedded in the stone or a technique like optically stimulated luminescence applied to the sediment immediately surrounding it. What they did instead was use the regional sea level curve for the central Mediterranean to establish a maximum age for the structure. The
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reasoning is this. The column is sitting on the seafloor of a bank that was last above water roughly 9,350 years ago. If the column is humanmade, it must have been made while the bank was still dry land, which means it must
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be at least 9,350 years old. That is not a precise date. It is a minimum age, a floor beneath which the structures age cannot fall. If the human construction hypothesis is correct 9,350 years, it is worth letting that number
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sit for a moment. Stonehenge, which is probably the most famous megalithic structure in the world, began construction around 5,000 years ago, roughly 3,000 B.CE. Though the site was used in earlier forms going back somewhat further, the great megalithic
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temples of Malta, which include some of the oldest freestanding stone structures on Earth, date around 3,600 to 2,500 B.CE. The megaliths of Britany and northwestern France, including the famous alignments at Carac, date to roughly 4,500 B.CE. or somewhat earlier
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in their oldest phases. All of these are extraordinary achievements and all of them are younger than the estimated age of the Pantileria Veia Bank column if the dating is correct. The comparison that comes closest is Gbecepe, the remarkable site in southeastern
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Turkey where elaborate stone enclosures with carved pillars were constructed beginning around 9,500 to 9,000 B.CE. Gbecepe has fundamentally changed the way archaeologists think about the organizational and cognitive capacity of pre-aggricultural or early agricultural peoples because it demonstrated that people were capable of
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large scale coordinated stone construction much earlier than previously assumed. The Pantileria Veia Bank column, if it is indeed humanmade, and if the sea level dating is accurate, falls into roughly the same period as the later phases of Gbeclete,
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it would not be an isolated anomaly in human prehistory. It would be one more piece of evidence that the people of this era across a wide geographic range were doing things with stone that we're only beginning to understand. What makes
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the Mediterranean context particularly interesting is that this region was during the period in question a landscape undergoing profound change.
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The sea was rising. Coastlines were moving. Communities that had lived on low coastal plains for generations were being pushed back inland or to higher ground as the water advanced. In this context, large stone structures on the landscape take on a different kind of
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significance. They are not just practical objects. They are markers, monuments, things that declare a human presence on a particular piece of ground. Whether the Pantelleria Veia Bank column was built for practical reasons, ritual reasons, or some combination that we no longer have the
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cultural framework to interpret, its existence on that coastal plane would have been a statement of some kind.
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Something was here. Something was done here. The stone was brought from somewhere else and shaped and placed which means someone decided it was worth the effort. The research team was careful not to overclaim on this point.
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They did not identify the builders. They did not assign the column to a specific archaeological culture. They did not speculate extensively about its function or meaning. They presented the physical evidence, made the argument for human construction, established the dating
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framework, and left the broader interpretation open. This restraint is actually one of the more admirable aspects of the paper. It would have been easy and perhaps more attention-grabbing to make larger claims. They chose not to.
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Ben Abraham is worth noting as a geoysicist at Tel Aviv University with a long career in Mediterranean seafloor research. Lollo is a geologist at the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geoysics in Trieste. These are not people with a professional interest
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in sensationalizing prehistoric mysteries. They are researchers who found something unusual in the course of their work and published what they observed. The paper is about 30 pages long with detailed figures, baometric maps, photographs from the ROV survey, and a careful discussion of the
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geological and archaeological context. It is a technical document, not a popular account. The reception of the paper was mixed, which is probably the most honest way to describe it. Some archaeologists and geologists found the argument persuasive or at least
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compelling enough to warrant further investigation. Others were skeptical and their skepticism was not without basis. The counterarguments that emerged in response to the paper are worth examining in some detail because they reveal something important about the difficulty of doing archaeology
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underwater and about the genuine uncertainty that surrounds this object. The debate that followed the 2015 publication is not a simple story of believers versus dismissers. It is a more complicated conversation about evidence, method, and the limits of what
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can be established from a single object examined at depth without full excavation. Before moving into those counterarguments though, it is worth pausing on one more thing the paper establishes, which is the broader archaeological landscape of the region during the proposed construction period.
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Because the column does not exist in isolation, even if it sits alone on a flat sea floor, it exists in a time and a place. And that time and place had people in it. People who were doing things with stone and with the landscape
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around them. people whose lives and capabilities set the context within which any claim about this object has to be evaluated. Understanding who those people were and what they were capable of is essential to understanding whether the argument for human construction is
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plausible at all or whether it asks us to believe something that the broader archaeological record simply cannot support. So who were these people and what were they doing in the central Mediterranean 9 or 10,000 years ago?
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This is a question that deserves more than a quick answer. It is easy to say Messylithic hunter gatherers and leave it at that. As if those three words explain something, but they are really just a label. And behind the label is a
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much richer and more complicated picture of human life during one of the most dynamic periods in prehistory. The term measolithic, which roughly means middle stone age, refers to a broad cultural period in Europe and the Mediterranean that falls between the end of the last
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ice age around 12,000 years ago and the arrival of farming which reached different parts of the Mediterranean at different times. In some regions, the Neolithic or New Stone Age, characterized by settled agriculture and domesticated animals, was already beginning to take hold by around 9,000
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years ago. In others, particularly along coastlines and in areas rich with wild food sources, mealithic lifeways persisted for considerably longer. The central Mediterranean, including the area around what is now Sicily and the North African coast, sat at an
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interesting crossroads during this period because it was close enough to the Near East where agriculture developed earliest in this part of the world to be touched by those new ideas, but also rich enough in wild resources that the transition was probably slow
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and uneven. What we know about the people who lived in this region during the proposed construction window comes from a scattered but growing body of archaeological evidence. Caves and rock shelters in Sicily have produced stone tool assemblages dating back tens of
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thousands of years and the record continues through the Mesolithic into the early Neolithic. The tools from this period include finely made microliths, small geometric blades that were hafted into composite weapons and cutting tools as well as larger scrapers, borers and
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points. These are not crude implements. The people who made them had a sophisticated understanding of how stone fractures, how to control a flake, how to shape a blade edge for a specific task.
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Stonework at this level of skill requires years of practice and knowledge passed down through communities over generations.
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Some of the most compelling evidence for what these communities were capable of comes not from Sicily itself, but from the broader Mediterranean region during the same period. One of the most striking examples is the evidence for open water seafaring.
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By around 10,000 years ago, people in the Mediterranean were crossing significant stretches of open water. We know this primarily because of obsidian, a volcanic glass that was highly prized for making sharp tools, and that occurs naturally only in a few specific
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locations. One of the most important obsidian sources in the central Mediterranean is the island of Pantilaria itself. The same volcanic island that gives the Pantilaria Veia Bank its name. Another major source is the island of Leiperi in the Aolon Islands north of Sicily.
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Obsidian from these sources has been found at archaeological sites spread across the central and western Mediterranean, including sites in North Africa, Sardinia, and the Italian mainland in layers dating to well before the Neolithic transition. This matters quite a bit for the question of who
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built the column because it tells us something concrete and verifiable about the capabilities of the people living in this region at the relevant time. They were not landlocked. They were not confined to small isolated territories.
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They were moving across open water, trading or exchanging goods over distances of hundreds of kilome. And they had the boats, the navigation knowledge, and the social networks to make that possible. A community capable of organizing open water voyages to
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obtain and distribute volcanic glass is a community with significant logistical capacity. They could plan, coordinate, and execute complex tasks that required cooperation across groups and over time.
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The Obsidian trade routes are well documented enough that researchers have been able to trace individual artifacts back to their source islands using geocchemical analysis. A blade found in a cave in Tunisia can be matched to the specific obsidian flow on Pantilaria
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from which it was napped. This kind of precision in the archaeological record is relatively unusual and it gives us a unusually clear window into the movement of people and materials across the central Mediterranean during exactly the period we're talking about. The sea, in
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other words, was not a barrier to these communities. It was a highway. Evidence of early Neolithic settlement in Sicily begins appearing in the archaeological record from roughly 7,000 to 8,000 years ago. And these early farming communities show clear connections to the broader
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spread of agriculture from the near east through the Mediterranean. But the transition was not clean or sudden. There were people living in Sicily and along the North African coast well before the Neolithic arrived. And those people left traces of their
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presence in the form of shell middens, hearths, tool caches, and in some cases burial sites. The picture that emerges is of a populated landscape, not a wilderness. The coastal plains and river valleys of this region supported human communities throughout the Mesolithic
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and the Pantaleria Veia Bank, which during this period was a broad, flat, low-lying coastal plane, would have been an attractive place to live. It was close to the sea, probably rich in marine resources and connected by land to both the Sicilian coast to the north
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and the North African coast to the south. It is worth pausing on that geography for a moment because it is easy to forget how different the landscape looked 9 or 10,000 years ago. The straight of Sicily today is a
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significant stretch of open water, roughly 140 km wide at its narrowest point. But during the period when the Pantellora Veia bank was exposed, the geography was fundamentally different.
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The bank itself formed part of a broad land bridge or at least a significantly narrowed straight between Sicily and what is now Tunisia.
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Some researchers have suggested that this region may have been one of the key corridors through which people and animals moved between Europe and Africa during the late plea scene and early holysine. If so, the area would have been not just inhabited but traversed a
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crossroads in the most literal geographic sense. Communities living on a low coastal plane in this kind of position at the intersection of land roots and sea routes with access to both terrestrial and marine food sources would have had reasons to invest in
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their landscape. They would have had reasons to mark places, to build structures, to establish visible indicators of territory or significance.
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This does not tell us what the column was for, but it does help explain why the idea of someone building something large and permanent on that plane is not inherently implausible. It fits within a broader pattern of human behavior that
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we see in many other parts of the world during the same period. The question of how they would have done it is worth thinking about carefully because it is one of the places where skeptics often push back hardest. Moving a 15 ton stone
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is not a casual undertaking. It requires either a large number of people working together or some combination of mechanical advantage like levers and rollers and careful planning.
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But here is the thing. We know from the broader archaeological record that people during this period were doing exactly this kind of thing in other locations. Gobeci already mentioned involved the quarrying, transport, and erection of T-shaped limestone pillars weighing
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between 10 and 20 tons by communities that were by most assessments still primarily hunter gatherers or at most in the very earlier stages of agriculture.
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The pillars at Gobeclete were carved with elaborate relief images of animals and abstract symbols which adds another layer of complexity to the undertaking.
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The people who built Gobeclete were not a civilization in the way we usually use that word. They did not have cities or writing or metal tools, but they clearly had the organizational capacity to mobilize large groups of people for a
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sustained coordinated construction project. The same general point applies to the early megalithic traditions of the western Mediterranean.
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The oldest megaliths in Britany date to around 5,000 BCE, which is later than our window, but there are earlier stone structures in other parts of the western Mediterranean and the tradition of working with very large stones has deep
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roots in this region. Malta, which is relatively close to the Pantileria Veia Bank in Mediterranean terms, has some of the oldest freestanding stone temples in the world, dating to around 3,600 B.CE.
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And the island shows signs of human habitation going back considerably further. The broader cultural landscape of the Mediterranean during the Mesolithic and early Neolithic was one in which stone as a material was deeply important not just for tools but for
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building, for marking, for making things that were meant to last. There is also something worth noting about the specific location of the bank in relation to known patterns of messylithic resource use. Coastal and near coastal environments were among the
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most productive and densely inhabited landscapes during the Mesolithic in many parts of the world. The combination of terrestrial hunting, plant gathering, fishing, and shellfish collection available in coastal zones supported larger and more stable communities than purely inland environments. In many
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cases, communities living on the Pantaleria Veia Bank plane with access to the sea on multiple sides and to the resources of a broad coastal plane may have been among the more substantial and settled Mesolithic communities in the region. Even if they did not practice
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agriculture in any formal sense, a more settled and larger community would have had more capacity to undertake large construction projects and more reason to invest in permanent structures that mark their presence on the landscape. None of this proves that the column is
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humanmade. It is important to be clear about that. What it does is establish that the human construction hypothesis is not asking us to believe in something impossible or even particularly unlikely given what we know about the broader context. The people who lived in this
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region during the proposed construction period were capable of open water navigation, long-d distanceance trade, sophisticated stonework, and based on evidence from other parts of the Mediterranean and the Near East, large-scale cooperative construction.
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They were not primitive in any meaningful sense. They were doing complex things with the tools and knowledge available to them. And some of those things have survived in the archaeological record in ways that continue to surprise researchers. What
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makes the Pantelleria Veia Bank column different from other evidence of Messylithic capability is not the capability itself. It is the setting. It is the fact that whatever was built on the coastal plane is now sitting under 40 m of water. which means it was never
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found by later agricultural communities who might have reused the stone, never excavated by 19th century antiquarians, never surveyed by early 20th century archaeologists. It sat on the seafloor largely undisturbed while the rest of human history happened above it. That
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isolation is partly why it is so difficult to study and partly why it is so interesting. The seafloor preserved something that land would probably have erased. The people who may have built it watched the sea rise around them, not
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all at once, but gradually, year by year, generation by generation. The coastline they knew would have moved. The plane they lived on would have shrunk. At some point the water would have reached whatever structure they had built and eventually covered it
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entirely. Whether they understood what was happening in any systematic way, whether they had explanations for it that we would recognize is impossible to know. But the physical experience of watching familiar land disappear beneath water is not something that requires a
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sophisticated cosmology to feel. It is just loss, slow and steady and inexurable. That human dimension of the story, the people who lived on this plane and eventually lost it to the sea is something that tends to get overlooked in the technical debates
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about whether the column is natural or humanmade. The debates are important and we will get to them. But before we do, it is worth holding on to the image for a moment. A coastal plane, a large stone. People who knew this landscape
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the way you know a place you have lived your whole life. and the water rising slowly in the distance. The column, if it is what Lollo and Ben Abraham think it is, was not built by an abstraction.
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It was built by specific people in a specific place for reasons that made sense to them at the time. That is what makes the debate about its origins more than just an academic question about geology and archaeology. It is a
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question about what those people knew and what they did with what they knew and how much of that we're still capable of seeing from where we stand now. With that picture in mind, the skeptical arguments that followed the 2015 paper
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become easier to understand, not as dismissals, but as part of the same larger effort to figure out what this object actually is. So, let us talk about the holes of everything that has been written about the Pantaleria Veia
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bank column. The three holes are the feature that generates the most discussion and probably the most disagreement. They are not the largest part of the object. They are not the most visually dramatic thing about it when you look at the photographs from
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the ROV survey, but they are the thing that is hardest to explain away and the thing that keeps pulling researchers back to the question of whether this stone was shaped by human hands. Each of the three holes is
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roughly the same diameter. The published descriptions place them at approximately 35 to 37 mm across, which is not enormous, but it is not trivial either.
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More importantly, they are spaced at what appear to be regular intervals along the length of the column. They pass completely through the stone, or at least penetrate deeply enough that they function as through holes rather than surface markings. And they are
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cylindrical in form, meaning they have consistent diameter along their depth rather than tapering or widening irregularly the way a natural cavity tends to do. That last point matters more than it might initially seem. When stone develops natural cavities, whether
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through chemical dissolution, the activity of boring organisms, or simple fracturing, the resulting shapes tend to be irregular. They taper. They widen unexpectedly.
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They follow the path of least resistance through the material which means they follow the grain of the stone. The distribution of softer minerals, the existing microractures.
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A naturally formed hole in limestone or bioalcarinite is almost never a clean cylinder. It is usually a rough pocket, an irregular channel, something that looks improvised by the material itself rather than imposed on it from outside. The holes in
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the Pantaleria Vekia bank column based on what the survey team was able to observe do not look like that. They look deliberate, which is of course exactly what the skeptics dispute, and we'll get to their argument shortly.
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But it is worth sitting with the visual for a moment before moving into the technical debate. Three holes similar in size spaced along a 12 m stone in a location where no other large stones exist on the surrounding seafloor. If
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you encountered that on land in a field somewhere in Sardinia or Malta or the south of France, you would not hesitate very long before calling it a worked stone. The question of how those holes were made, if they were made by people,
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is genuinely interesting and genuinely difficult. Drilling or carving through stone to any significant depth is not a simple task, even with metal tools.
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Doing it in the Mesolithic or early Neolithic period with tools made of flint, bone, antler, and wood requires a specific set of techniques that we know prehistoric people used, but that still demanded real skill and sustained effort. The most common method for
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drilling stone in prehistoric contexts is what archaeologists call rotary drilling, which involves using a pointed tool, often a flint or obsidian bit rotated repeatedly against the stone surface while applying downward pressure. The rotation could be achieved by hand or by using a bow drill, which
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is a length of cord wrapped around a shaft that is pulled back and forth to spin the bit much faster than hand rotation alone could manage. Bow drills appear in the archaeological record across a wide range of prehistoric
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cultures and they're effective enough that experimental archaeologists have used them to drill through hard stone in reasonable amounts of time. For softer stones, including bioalcarinite, which is a relatively soft sedimentary limestone formed from cemented marine shell fragments, the process is
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considerably easier than drilling through granite or bazalt. Bioalcarinite can be worked with antler tools shaped with flint blades and drilled with relatively modest equipment by the standards of the period. This is actually part of why the stone type is
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significant to the debate. If you were a messylithic or early Neolithic person selecting a large stone to work with, bioalcaranite would be a sensible choice. It is heavy enough to be a substantial monument but workable enough to shape with the tools available to
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you. The diameter of the holes, roughly 35 mm, is consistent with what a bow drill with a stone or bone bit could produce over time. It is not an impossibly precise measurement for the period. There are examples of
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prehistoric stone beads and pendants with drilled holes of similar or smaller diameter. Produced using comparable techniques from sites across the Mediterranean and the Near East, the technology, in other words, was available. The question is whether it was applied here on a 12 m column in
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what would have been a significant and deliberate construction effort. What the holes might have been used for is a separate question and one that the research team was careful not to answer too definitively. Several possibilities have been discussed. One is that the
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holes served as attachment points for ropes which could have been used during the transport and erection of the column. Large prehistoric stones are often moved using combinations of sledges, rollers, levers, and ropes. And having fixed points on the stone where
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ropes could be securely tied would make the process considerably more manageable. If you're moving a 15 ton stone any significant distance, having reliable anchor points for your rigging is not a luxury. It is a practical necessity. Another possibility is that
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the holes were structural joints, points where the column connected to other elements of a larger structure. If the column was part of a building or a platform rather than a freestanding monolith, holes of this type could have held wooden beams or posts in place,
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functioning something like mortise joints and carpentry. This would be consistent with construction techniques seen in other prehistoric stone structures where wood and stone were combined in ways that left the stone intact, but the wood long since rotted away. A third possibility
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is that the holes were symbolic or ritual in function, marks of significance rather than structural elements. This is hard to evaluate because symbolic meaning leaves almost no physical trace. But it is worth noting that holes and perforations appear frequently in prehistoric ritual
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objects across many cultures. From carved stone plaques to decorated cave walls. The act of drilling through a large stone could itself have carried meaning, marking the object as something set apart from ordinary material.
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There is also the straightforward possibility that the hold served a practical function related to whatever the column was used for in its original setting. A moing point, a tether for animals, a fixed anchor for a net or a
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wear, something utilitarian that we cannot reconstruct without knowing more about the surrounding landscape and the activities of the people who lived there. A coastal community would have had many practical reasons to want a large fixed stone with reliable
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attachment points. We tend to reach for ceremonial explanations when we encounter prehistoric structures. Perhaps because ceremony feels more monumentw worthy, but practical explanations are often just as plausible. The difficulty with all of these interpretations is the same. The
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column has not been closely enough examined to say which, if any, of them is correct. And the reason for that is one of the more frustrating aspects of the whole story.
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The stone is covered in bofouling. That is the term for the encrustation of marine organisms that accumulates on any hard surface submerged in seawater over a long period. After roughly 9,000 years on the seafloor, the column is coated in
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layers of algae, barnacles, tubeworms, sponges, and calcium carbonate deposits from generations of encrusting invertebrates.
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This coating is not decorative. It is thick enough in places to obscure the surface of the stone entirely, which means that even if tool marks were present on the column, they would be invisible to cameras and difficult to
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detect without physical contact. Identifying tool marks on stone is not always straightforward, even under ideal conditions. What you're looking for are striations percussion scars edge removal patterns, and surface textures that differ from natural weathering or fracturing in specific ways. On a stone
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that has been underwater for millennia and is now covered in marine growth, detecting those features requires physical cleaning of the surface, close examination under magnification, and ideally some form of imaging technology that can see through or beneath the
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biological crust. None of that has been done comprehensively on this column. This is where the absence of evidence argument becomes important to handle carefully. Some commentators have pointed to the lack of confirmed tool marks as evidence against human
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construction. But that reasoning has a problem. The absence of visible tool marks on a bofoul, poorly illuminated, difficult to access underwater stone is not the same as the absence of tool marks. It means we have not been able to look properly.
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It is a gap in the investigation, not a finding. Absence of evidence is only meaningful evidence of absence. when the investigation has been thorough enough to reasonably expect that evidence would have been found if it existed. In this
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case, the investigation has not been thorough enough to meet that standard. This is not a criticism of Lollo and his team. They worked with what was available to them, which was ROV footage and sonar data and a limited amount of
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direct observation. What they found was enough to publish a paper and raise serious questions. What they did not have was the time, the equipment, or the funding to conduct the kind of detailed surface analysis that would either confirm or rule out tool marks with any
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confidence. That kind of work is still waiting to be done. The bofouling also complicates the interpretation of the holes themselves. The walls of the holes, as seen in the survey footage, are not perfectly clean. There is marine growth inside them as well, which makes
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it difficult to assess their precise shape and regularity from camera images alone. The measurements that have been reported are estimates based on what could be observed rather than precise physical measurements taken with instruments in direct contact with the
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stone. This is not a reason to dismiss the measurements, but it is a reason to hold them with appropriate uncertainty.
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What is not in doubt is that the holes are there and that they are roughly cylindrical and that they appear to be of similar diameter. Those are observable facts from the survey data.
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What remains uncertain is how precisely regular they are, how deep they penetrate, and what their internal geometry looks like in detail. Those are the questions that a proper close examination of the stone would need to answer. It is also worth mentioning what
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is not present on the column or at least what has not been reported. There are no inscriptions, no carved images, no surface decorations of any kind that have been identified. This is not surprising.
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Mesolithic and early Neolithic stone structures rarely have surface decoration of the kind we associate with later prehistoric periods. The carved spirals of New Graange and Ireland, the cup marks of the British megalithic tradition, the geometric designs of Maltese temple art. These belong to
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later periods and different cultural contexts. A messylithic stone column in the central Mediterranean from roughly 9,000 years ago would not necessarily carry any surface markings at all, even if it was deliberately constructed. The absence of decoration is again not
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evidence against human origin. There is one more aspect of the holes worth considering which is their placement along the length of the column. If the holes were made by boring organisms, which is one of the skeptical arguments we will examine more closely
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in the next part of this story, you would expect them to appear somewhat randomly distributed across the surface of the stone, reflecting the feeding behavior of the organisms rather than any planned arrangement.
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Boring organisms do not space their burrows at regular intervals. They go where the stone is softest, where the surface conditions are most favorable, where they happen to settle as lavi.
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A regular spaced arrangement of holes is not what you would predict from biological boring activity. If the holes were made by people, on the other hand, a regular spacing would make sense for almost any of the functional purposes we
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have discussed. Rope attachment points work better when they are distributed along the length of the object rather than clustered at one end.
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Structural joints for beams or posts would be placed according to the geometry of the structure being built.
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Even symbolic markings tend to follow some principle of arrangement, a rhythm or a pattern rather than random placement.
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The regularity of the spacing is therefore one of the more suggestive features of the holes, even accounting for the uncertainty in the measurements.
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It is the kind of thing that is easy to wave away in a brief description but becomes harder to dismiss when you think about what natural processes would actually produce and whether any of them reliably generate that kind of
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arrangement. None of this is proof. It is a cluster of observations that taken together are more consistent with human workmanship than with natural formation.
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That is the honest way to characterize where the evidence stands. The holes are suggestive. They are not conclusive. And the reason they are not conclusive is that the investigation has not yet reached the point where any conclusion could be made with confidence. That is
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the state of things with the most distinctive feature of the most discussed underwater monolith in the Mediterranean.
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Three holes roughly the same size spaced along a 12 m stone on the floor of a sea that was once a coastal plane. Whether they were drilled by a person holding a bow drill 9,000 years ago or formed by
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some natural process we have not yet fully accounted for is a question that is still genuinely open. And it is a question that brings us directly to the other side of the debate because not everyone who looked at the 2015 paper
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came away thinking that human construction was the most likely explanation. The skeptical responses were pointed and in some cases quite specific and they deserve the same careful attention we've given to the case for human origin. So let us look at those skeptical responses
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now because they are worth taking seriously and because the scientists who raised them were not dismissing the discovery out of hand. They were doing what scientists are supposed to do, which is ask whether the most dramatic interpretation is actually the most
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necessary one. The first and most substantial objection concerns the stone itself. The column is made of bioalcarinite, which is a type of sedimentary rock formed from the cemented remains of marine organisms, shell fragments, coral debris, tiny skeletal pieces of sea life that
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accumulated on the seafloor and gradually hardened into stone over long periods of time. It is a relatively soft rock by geological standards, which is part of why it preserves the shapes of the organisms that formed it. And here
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is the thing about bioalcarinite that the skeptics pointed out. It does not always form in shapeless lumps. Under certain conditions, it can form in elongated roughly columnous shapes.
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Particularly when cementation occurs around a central axis of harder material or when it forms along a crack or joint in an existing rock layer, filling the gap and hardening into something that can look at least superficially like a
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shaped object. This is a legitimate geological process. It is not invented to explain away the monolith. Elongated calcaranite formations have been documented in coastal and shallow marine environments in various parts of the Mediterranean.
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So the question is not whether this process exists because it does. The question is whether it can produce something like what was found on the Pantaleria Vekia bank. Specifically something 12 m long. with a relatively uniform cross-section resting on a flat
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sandy bottom with no other large stones nearby and with three roughly cylindrical cavities penetrating its surface. That is where the skeptical argument runs into some difficulty. The natural cementation process that produces elongated biocalcaranite forms tends to produce objects that are
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irregular in cross-section, tapered unevenly, and typically found in association with the substrate they formed within or alongside. A freestanding 12 m column lying on an open sandy bottom is not the typical context for this kind of formation. Most
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naturally formed calccarenite structures of any significant size are part of a larger reef or rocky outcrop embedded in the surrounding geology in a way that reflects how they grew. The Pantaleria Veia bank column is isolated. That isolation is one of the things that
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makes it unusual and it is something the natural cementation argument does not address particularly well. The second major skeptical argument concerns the holes and it is the one that has generated the most back and forth in the literature. The argument is that the
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cylindrical cavities in the column could be the work of marine boring organisms specifically by valves of the family commonly known as pitex or the by valve lithophagara sometimes called the date muscle. These are real animals and they're genuinely remarkable. Pitex and
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date muscles burrow into soft rock by rotating their shells against the stone surface, gradually excavating a cylindrical burrow that they then live inside. They are found throughout the Mediterranean and they are known to bore into bioalccarenite specifically because
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it is soft enough for them to work through. The burrows they leave behind are cylindrical, smoothwalled, and roughly consistent in diameter because the diameter is determined by the size of the animal doing the boring. So at first glance, the idea that boring
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organisms could produce cylindrical holes in a bioalcarinite column seems plausible. The holes are cylindrical.
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The stone is the right type. The organisms are present in the region. The argument has a surface logic to it, but then you look at the details and the argument becomes harder to sustain.
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The holes in the Pantaleria Veia Bank column have been estimated at a diameter of roughly 30 to 40 cm based on the survey data. Though, as we noted earlier, these measurements carry some uncertainty. Lithophaga and pidok burrows are typically between 1 and 5 cm
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in diameter corresponding to the size of the animals themselves. The largest known boring by valves in the Mediterranean produce burrows of perhaps 5 to 8 cm at most. A 30 cm hole is not something a boring by valve produces. It
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is simply too large by an order of magnitude. Now, the skeptics who raised the boring organism argument were not necessarily claiming that a single date muscle made a 30 cm hole. One version of the argument is that clusters of boring
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organisms working in close proximity over a long period could coalesce their burrows into a larger cavity. This is theoretically possible. Boring organisms do sometimes cluster in areas of favorable stone and their burrows can intersect and merge. But the result of
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this process is typically an irregular rough-edged cavity with an uneven shape, not a clean cylindrical hole with consistent walls. The geometry of merged burrows reflects the chaotic distribution of the individual animals, not a unified circular form. The regularity of the holes, even accounting
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for the measurement uncertainty, is the sticking point. A single boring organism produces a clean cylinder because it is a single animal rotating symmetrically.
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A cluster of boring organisms produces something messier because they are not coordinating their activity. If the holes in the column are as regular as the survey data suggests, the boring organism explanation requires a degree of coincidental geometric regularity.
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That is to put it gently not what you would expect from a biological process with no organizing principle. There is also the question of depth. Boring organisms tend to work from the surface of the stone inward creating burrows
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that are open at one end and closed at the other. The holes in the column appear to penetrate through the stone or at least to a significant depth based on what the ROV cameras recorded. through holes as opposed to closed end burrows
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are not what boring buy valves typically produce. They go in, they stop, they live at the end of their burrow. They do not drill all the way through. If the holes in the column are true through holes, that would be difficult to
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explain through boring organism activity alone. Some researchers have also pointed out that the spacing of the holes is inconsistent with what you would expect from boring organisms colonizing a stone surface. Boring organisms settle where conditions are favorable, which typically means they
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cluster in patches rather than spacing themselves evenly along the length of an object. The reported spacing of the three holes distributed along the column rather than clustered is more consistent with intentional placement than with biological colonization patterns. None
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of this definitively rules out a natural explanation. It narrows the range of plausible natural explanations, but it does not eliminate them entirely. There could be processes at work here that are not well documented in the existing literature on marine geology and
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biology. The seafloor environment at 40 m depth in the straight of Sicily is not a perfectly understood system and there is always the possibility that unusual local conditions produced an unusual result. Science is comfortable with that kind of uncertainty, or at least it
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should be. What the skeptical arguments do accomplish, even where they fall short of providing a convincing alternative explanation, is to establish a standard of evidence. They remind us that extraordinary claims require more than suggestive data. The shape of the
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column, the isolation of the object, the apparent regularity of the holes, the absence of similar formations nearby.
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All of these are consistent with human construction. But consistency is not proof. To move from consistent with to confirmed as you need the kind of physical analysis that has not yet been done on this object. There is also a
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broader methodological point worth making here. When a new discovery is published and it challenges existing frameworks, the skeptical response often focuses on whether each individual feature of the discovery could be explained naturally. Could the shape be natural? Possibly. Could the holes be
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natural? Perhaps. Could the isolation be natural? Maybe. But this approach can miss something important, which is that the question is not whether each feature could have a natural explanation in isolation, but whether all of the features together are more likely to
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result from natural processes or from human activity. A 12 m biocalcaranite column isolated on a flat sandy bottom with three regularly spaced cylindrical holes broken cleanly in two in a location that was once dry land inhabited by people is a combination of
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features that requires a natural explanation to account for all of them simultaneously. That is a harder task than explaining any one feature on its own. Lollo and Ben Abraham made this argument in their paper and it is a reasonable one. The
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cumulative pattern of the evidence is what makes the human construction hypothesis worth taking seriously, not any single feature in isolation. The skeptics, to their credit, acknowledged this to some degree. The published responses to the paper were not dismissals. They were calls for more
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data, more analysis, more careful examination of the stone itself. That is actually a fairly healthy state of scientific discourse. The disagreement is not about whether the object is interesting. It is about what the object is. And everyone seems to agree that the
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only way to resolve that question is to go back and look more carefully. One thing that has been somewhat underappreciated in the public discussion of this debate is that the skeptical geologists and the original research team actually agree on more
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than it might seem. Both sides agree that the column is unusual. Both sides agree that the current evidence is insufficient to settle the question definitively. Both sides agree that more fieldwork is needed. The disagreement is about probability and interpretation,
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not about the basic facts of what was found. That is a much narrower gap than the popular framing of the story sometimes suggests where it gets presented as a battle between believers and skeptics when really it is a scientific
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conversation about what kind of evidence would be necessary to reach a conclusion. It is also worth noting that the skeptical voices in this conversation have not proposed a fully worked out natural explanation for the column. Pointing out that bioalcarinite
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can form elongated shapes is not the same as explaining how this specific 12 m object came to be lying on a flat sandy bottom with three holes in it.
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Pointing out that boring organisms exist is not the same as demonstrating that boring organisms produce these specific holes. The skeptical arguments raise legitimate doubts, but they do not replace the human construction hypothesis with an equally detailed alternative. They occupy the space of
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reasonable objection rather than confident counter explanation, which is an honest position to take given the available evidence, but it means the debate is genuinely unresolved rather than settled in either direction. What we are left with after working through
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both sides of this argument carefully is something that is actually quite rare in archaeology and earth science. A genuinely open question where the evidence is real and documented. The interpretations are contested by credentialed researchers. The physical object exists and can in principle be
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examined further and the outcome of that examination would actually matter for how we understand human prehistory.
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Most mysteries when you look at them closely turn out to be not very mysterious at all. The evidence points clearly in one direction and the remaining uncertainty is just a matter of public perception catching up with the scientific consensus.
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This one is different. The evidence does not point clearly in one direction. The scientific community has not reached a consensus. The object is sitting at the bottom of the Mediterranean covered in marine growth waiting for someone to go
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and look at it properly. That is an unusual situation and it is worth sitting with for a moment before moving on because the Pantileria Veia bank column is not alone in that situation.
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There are other places in the world where submerged structures or possible structures have been found at depths consistent with ancient sea level positions and where the scientific community has struggled to reach agreement about what it is looking at.
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The story of underwater archaeology more broadly is one of genuine difficulty and genuine discovery. And understanding where this particular object fits within that larger field is part of understanding why it matters and why the questions it raises are so hard to
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answer. The Pantaleria Veia Bank column is not the only submerged site from this general era that has caused serious researchers to stop and reconsider what they thought they knew about early human activity. And that context matters because one of the quieter objections to
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taking the column seriously is the implicit assumption that finding evidence of sophisticated human behavior at this depth and this age would be so anomalous as to be nearly impossible.
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But the picture that underwater archaeology has been assembling over the past few decades is more complicated than that and considerably more interesting. Perhaps the most well doumented submerged prehistoric site in the world is Atlit Yam located off the
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northern coast of Israel in the eastern Mediterranean. It sits at a depth of between 8 and 12 m below the surface, roughly a kilometer and a half offshore from the modern town of Atallet. The site was discovered in 1984 by a marine
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archaeologist named Aude Galilei during a survey of the seabed. And what he found was not ambiguous. There were stonebuilt structures, rectangular outlines of buildings with preserved walls, a freshwater well lined with stone hearths, storage pits, and the skeletal remains of both humans and
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animals. There were grinding stones and flint tools and fish hooks made of bone. There were even the remains of domesticated cattle and Emma wheat, which pushed the evidence of agriculture in the region back further than had previously been expected.
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The site has been dated to between approximately 6,900 and 6,300 BC E which makes it somewhere between 8 and 9,000 years old. It is by any reasonable standard a complete Neolithic village sitting on the bottom of the sea
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and it has been there since the sea swallowed it sometime after its abandonment. What makes Atallet Yam particularly compelling in this context is that it demonstrates something important. The seafloor can preserve things. Not always, not everywhere, and not
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perfectly. But the conditions in certain parts of the Mediterranean are stable enough that organic material, architectural features, and even human remains can survive for thousands of years beneath the water. The site also confirms the basic premise that underlies the entire conversation about
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the Pantileria Veia Bank, which is that people were living on land that is now underwater, building things, farming, raising animals, and conducting the full range of human life in places that the modern sea has since claimed. This is
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not a speculative idea. It is a documented archaeological fact. Atlet Yam also includes something that has drawn particular attention over the years. A semic-ircular arrangement of seven large stones, each weighing between a quarter and half a ton, positioned around what appears to have
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been a freshwater spring. The stones have cup marks carved into them. The arrangement is clearly deliberate.
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Nobody argues that the semicircle of stones at all is a natural formation. The site is well excavated, well doumented, and the evidence for intentional construction is overwhelming. It is a useful comparison point when thinking about what intentional human construction looks
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like in the archaeological record from this period. And it is a reminder that people 9,000 years ago were quite capable of moving and arranging large stones for purposes that appear to have been ceremonial or ritual in nature.
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Moving further east, the Gulf of Kat in northwestern India has generated a much more contentious chapter in the history of underwater archaeology. In 2001, the National Institute of Ocean Technology in India conducted sonar surveys of the Gulf and reported acoustic anomalies at
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depths of around 30 to 40 m that they interpreted as possible evidence of submerged structures. Subsequent dredging operations brought up artifacts including pottery fragments, beads, and pieces of worked wood, one of which was radioarbon dated to approximately 7,500
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to 8,000 BCE. The scientists involved, particularly the oceanographer EI Ralph and his colleagues, made significant claims about the site, suggesting it might represent a submerged urban civilization predating the Indis Valley civilization by several thousand years. The scientific response to those claims was,
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to put it diplomatically, skeptical. The main problem was the methodology. The artifacts recovered by dredging could not be precisely located on the seafloor. Dredging is not excavation. It pulls material from a broad area without recording where each item came from or
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what it was associated with. The sonar images, while suggestive, were not conclusive. Several independent researchers pointed out that the geometric shapes visible in the sonar data were consistent with natural geological formations common in that region and that the artifacts, while
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genuinely old, could have been washed into the Gulf from river sediments rather than representing a structure built in place. The Gulf of Kamut claims have not been resolved, but they have not been confirmed either, and the scientific consensus at this point is
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that the evidence is insufficient to support the claims that were made. It is a case where the initial excitement outran the methodology which is a different situation from the pantilaria veia bank where the original paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal and
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the methodology while limited was at least transparent about its limitations. Then there is Yonauni, the Japanese island near the southern tip of the Ryuku chain, where a dive instructor named Kihachiro Aratake discovered a series of unusual rock formations in
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1986. The structures, if that is the right word, sit at depths of between 5 and 40 m and include flat terraces, sharp right angle corners, what appear to be steps, and large flat surfaces that look in photographs remarkably like
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architectural features. The site attracted considerable attention in the 1990s and a marine geologist named Masaki Kimura spent years diving there and arguing that the formations were at least partially humanmade or human modified from natural rock. He suggested the site might date
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to around 5,000 years ago or possibly older based on the sea level history of the region. The counterargument made most thoroughly by Robert Shock, a geologist at Boston University who has also written extensively about ancient structures, is that the Yonauni
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formations are entirely natural. Shock dived the site himself and argued that the angular shapes, the terraces, and the flat surfaces are all consistent with the natural fracture patterns of the local sandstone, which tends to split along horizontal and vertical
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planes due to its sedimentary layering. He noted that similar formations can be found in the surrounding area on land where no one has suggested human construction.
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The debate about Yonauni has never been fully resolved, but the current weight of geological opinion leans toward natural formation with some acknowledgement that the site is genuinely unusual and visually striking.
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What these three cases illustrate taken together is something that is easy to miss when you focus on any one of them individually. Underwater archaeology is genuinely difficult. And the difficulty is not just logistical. It is interpretive. The seafloor is not a
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museum. It is dynamic environment where sediment moves, organisms grow on and into stone. Geological processes continue to reshape the landscape, and the tools available for investigation are significantly more limited than on land. The difference between a natural rock formation and a human modified one
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can be subtle, even when you're standing next to it in good lighting with full access to every surface. At 40 m depth with limited visibility and a thick coating of marine growth, that distinction becomes enormously harder to make with confidence.
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At Latiam is the clearest case because the evidence there is so abundant and so varied. It is not just one unusual object. It is an entire site with multiple lines of evidence pointing in the same direction. architecture, tools,
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food remains, human burials, all in a coherent spatial arrangement that makes sense as a settlement.
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The Pantaleria Veia Bank column does not have that kind of supporting context. It is one object in one location with a limited set of features that require explanation. That is not nothing, but it is also not at Yam. The column is more
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like the semicircle of stones at Atlit Yam than like the full village in the sense that it is a single feature whose interpretation depends on reading the physical evidence carefully without the benefit of surrounding context to anchor the interpretation.
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What the broader field of underwater archaeology has established though is that the impulse to look is a valid one.
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The seafloor between Sicily and Tunisia, the seabed off the coast of Israel, the shallow waters around the Mediterranean rim. These were all inhabited landscapes during the periods when sea levels were lower. People lived there. They built things. They left things behind. Some of
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those things have survived. Some of them have been found. Many more have not been looked for because underwater archaeology requires resources, equipment, and institutional support that are chronically in short supply.
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The field is not fringe. It is underfunded. There is a practical reality here that shapes the entire conversation about sites like the Pantileria Veia Bank column. Terrestrial archaeology is expensive. Underwater archaeology is more expensive, often by a significant
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margin. The cost of ship time, diving equipment, remotely operated vehicles, and the specialized expertise required to conduct proper underwater excavation means that even well doumented sites like Atllet Yam have taken decades to study thoroughly and even then the work
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is far from complete. A site like the Pantileria Veia Bank, which is more remote, more controversial, and less clearly defined as a settlement site, faces even higher barriers to serious follow-up investigation.
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The 2015 paper by Lollo and Ben Abraham was essentially a report of what was found during a survey that was not primarily focused on archaeology.
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The column was noticed, documented, and published. That is where the formal record currently ends. This is not unusual in underwater archaeology. Many sites are documented and then wait, sometimes for years or decades, for the resources and institutional interest to
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align in a way that allows for more thorough investigation. The pace of progress in this field is slow, not because the questions are unimportant, but because the answers are expensive to obtain. And in the meantime, the objects themselves continue to sit on the
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seafloor, accumulating marine growth, potentially being disturbed by currents or fishing activity, waiting. One thing that the comparison with other submerged sites does clarify is the range of what is possible. The existence of Atllet Yam tells us that a
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wellpreserved Neolithic settlement can survive for 9,000 years on the seafloor of the Mediterranean under the right conditions. The Yonauni debate tells us that even experienced and credentialed researchers can look at the same underwater formation and reach opposite conclusions about whether it is natural
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or humanmade. The Gulf of Combat situation tells us that enthusiasm and genuine discovery can be undermined by insufficient methodology and that the scientific community is capable of being both interested and skeptical at the same time. All of these lessons are
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relevant to the Pantilaria Veia Bank column and all of them suggest that the right response to the column is neither confident belief nor confident dismissal but careful wellunded methodologically rigorous investigation.
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What is also worth noting is that the Mediterranean is an unusually wellstudied sea in terms of human history and yet the underwater archaeology of the Mediterranean is still in relatively early stages compared to the terrestrial archaeology.
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The coastlines of Sicily, Tunisia, Malta, and the islands between them have been occupied by humans for tens of thousands of years. The sea level changes of the past 20,000 years have moved the shoreline dramatically. The land that was coastal plane during the
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last glacial maximum is now in many places well beneath the surface and most of it has never been surveyed with the kind of systematic attention that would be needed to understand what is down there. The column at the Pantaleria Veia
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Bank was found during a geoysical survey that was not even looking for archaeology. It is reasonable to wonder what a survey specifically designed to look for submerged prehistoric sites in this region might find. That question of what a proper search might reveal is one of
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the things that makes the column feel like a beginning rather than an isolated anomaly. Whether it is humanmade or not, its discovery points to a region of the seafloor that was once inhabited land that has never been systematically
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examined for archaeological evidence and that sits in a geologically and historically significant location between two major land masses. The column is in a sense an invitation and an invitation to look more carefully, to ask harder questions, and to take
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seriously the possibility that the history of human activity in this region extends further back and deeper underwater than the current record shows. Whether that invitation will be accepted and by whom and with what resources is a different question
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entirely and it leads directly into the practical realities of what studying this site would actually require. So let us stay with that practical reality for a moment because it is worth understanding in some detail. The column sits at roughly 40 m of depth. That
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number might not mean much at first, but in the world of diving, it is a significant threshold. 40 m is technically within recreational diving range, which is usually defined as a maximum of around 40 to 50 m depending
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on the training organization in the country. A certified recreational diver can in principle reach the site. But reaching it and doing useful scientific work, there are very different things.
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At 40 meters, a diver breathing standard compressed air is dealing with a significant partial pressure of nitrogen, which increases narosis risk.
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Nitrogen narcosis is a wellocumented effect that can impair judgment and fine motor control at depth. Sometimes in ways the diver does not even fully notice in the moment. The deeper you go on air, the more pronounced the effect
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tends to be. For the kind of careful methodical observation and documentation that archaeological survey requires, working at this depth on air is genuinely difficult. Technical divers using mixed gases like try mix, which reduces the nitrogen fraction and adds
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helium can work more comfortably at this depth, but that requires additional training, equipment, and cost. It also reduces the pool of qualified personnel who can participate in the work. Beyond the physiological challenges, there is the question of bottom time. At 40 m, a
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diver on a standard recreational dive profile has a limited window before decompression obligations become significant.
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Working dives at that depth where you want to spend enough time to actually examine something carefully, photograph it systematically, measure it, and take notes typically require decompression stops on the way back to the surface.
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That adds time, complexity, and risk to every dive. It means a support team on the surface, a boat with oxygen and emergency equipment, and a logistical operation that is considerably more involved than a simple recreational dive. This is part of why the initial
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documentation of the column relied heavily on remotely operated vehicle cameras rather than direct diver observation. An ROV does not have a bottom time limit in the same way a diver does. It can hover over the object for as long as the surface team needs,
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as long as the equipment holds and the sea conditions allow, but an ROV also has limitations. The cameras on a survey ROV are good, but they are not the same as a trained human eye at close range.
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An ROV cannot reach out and feel the texture of the stone, cannot easily examine the interior surface of one of the holes, cannot make the kind of spontaneous observational decisions that an experienced archaeologist diving alongside an object can make. There is a
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reason that underwater archaeologists still get in the water even when ROVs are available. The technology supplements human judgment. It does not replace it.
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The visibility in the straight of Sicily is another factor that complicates the work. The straight is a dynamic body of water. It connects the eastern and western Mediterranean basins and significant water masses move through it in both directions. Currents in the
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straight can be strong and variable. And when currents move across a sandy or silty bottom, they stir up sediment. The visibility at any given dive site in the strait can range from excellent, perhaps 15 to 20 m on a calm day with settle
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conditions to very poor, just a few meters or even less when currents are active and sediment is suspended in the water column. Planning a scientific dive operation around visibility conditions requires monitoring flexibility and time. You cannot simply show up and dive
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on a schedule. You wait for the right conditions and sometimes those conditions do not arrive during the window you have available. The bofouling on the column is a related problem.
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Bofouling is the term for the accumulation of marine organisms on a submerged surface over time. At 40 m in the Mediterranean, after an unknown number of years on the seafloor, a stone column will be covered in a layer of
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biological material, encrusting algae, briozoins, surplus worms, sponges, and various other organisms that colonize hard surfaces. This layer is not thin.
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On a stone that has been underwater for any significant length of time, it can be several cm thick in some places. It obscures the surface of the stone underneath. It hides any tool marks, any worked edges, any fine details that
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might help resolve questions about the column's origin. To examine the stone surface properly, you would need to remove the bofouling.
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But removing it carelessly could damage the stone underneath. The standard approach in underwater archaeology is to remove bofouling very carefully, often by hand using soft tools in a controlled way that documents the process and preserves whatever is revealed. That
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takes time, expertise, and the kind of sustained on-site presence that is only possible with proper funding and logistical support.
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The question of jurisdiction adds another layer of complexity that is easy to overlook. If you are not familiar with how underwater archaeology works legally, the Pantaleria Veia Bank sits in international waters or at least in a zone where the jurisdictional picture is
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not entirely straightforward. Italy has jurisdiction over the nearby island of Pantileria and its surrounding waters out to a certain limit. Tunia has jurisdiction over its own coastal waters. The bank itself sits in the straight between them in an area where
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the relevant legal frameworks are not as clear as they would be for a site located within the recognized territorial waters of a single nation.
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This matters because underwater cultural heritage is governed by a patchwork of national laws and international conventions, including the 2001 UNESCO convention on the protection of the underwater cultural heritage, which Italy has ratified, but which not all relevant parties have adopted in the
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same way. Getting the necessary permits and authorizations to conduct a formal excavation at a contested or ambiguous jurisdictional site is not a simple administrative task. It requires diplomatic coordination between institutions and governments. And that kind of coordination takes time,
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goodwill, and often a level of political interest in the outcome that is hard to generate for a site whose significance is still under debate. Funding is in the end the most fundamental constraint.
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Underwater archaeology as a field receives a small fraction of the resources that terrestrial archaeology receives. This is not a recent development or a temporary situation. It reflects a long-standing structural reality and how archaeological research is prioritized and financed. Terrestrial
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sites are more accessible, easier to excavate, and have a longer track record of producing the kind of dramatic, visually compelling discoveries that attract public attention and institutional support.
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An underwater site requires a ship, which is expensive to charter or operate. It requires specialized diving equipment or ROV systems, which are expensive to buy or rent. It requires trained personnel who can work effectively in an underwater environment, which is a smaller pool
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than the pool of trained terrestrial archaeologists. And it requires all of these things to be in the same place at the same time under good enough weather and sea conditions to actually work. The logistical overhead alone before a
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single measurement is taken or a single sample is collected is substantial. The original survey that found the column was a geoysical survey conducted with equipment and funding aimed at understanding the geology of the seafloor in the straight. The
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archaeological discovery was in a sense a byproduct. Looo and his team recognized what they had found and did the right thing which was to document it, analyze it and publish the results.
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But a geoysical survey budget does not include line items for archaeological followup. The money that paid for the initial discovery was not the money that would be needed to investigate it further. That further funding would have to come from somewhere else. From
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archaeological research grants, from institutional partnerships, from government cultural heritage programs, or from some combination of all of these. And none of those sources are particularly easy to access for a site that is controversial, located in international waters, and whose
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significance is still being debated. It is worth thinking about what a proper follow-up investigation would actually cost, even in rough terms.
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Ship time in the Mediterranean for a research vessel equipped for diving operations, runs to thousands of euros per day. A week-long expedition, which would be a fairly minimal time frame for the kind of systematic survey that would be needed, might cost €50,000 in ship
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time alone before accounting for equipment, personnel analysis, and reporting. a more thorough investigation involving multiple seasons of fieldwork, sediment cing, 3D photoggramometric mapping, isotopic analysis of stone samples, and a systematic search of the surrounding seafloor could easily run
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into the hundreds of thousands of euros. For a site that might turn out to be a natural formation, that is a hard case to make to a funding body. For a site that might turn out to be the oldest
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known monolith on Earth, it is a case that arguably should be easy to make, but in practice is not because the uncertainty itself is the obstacle.
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There is also the question of what would happen to the column during any excavation or investigation.
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The stone is sitting on the seafloor in a relatively stable condition right now, as far as anyone can tell. Disturbing the sediment around it could change that. Removing the bofouling to examine the surface could expose the stone to
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accelerated weathering. Any physical intervention carries risk and the standard in underwater archaeology is to do as little physical intervention as possible until you have a clear plan and the resources to execute it properly.
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Non-invasive survey methods like photoggramometry, multi-beam sonar, and subbottom profiling can provide a great deal of information without touching the object at all. These would logically be the first steps in any serious follow-up investigation.
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But even non-invasive survey requires ship time and equipment and personnel. Which brings us back to the funding problem. What is perhaps most striking about the practical situation surrounding the Pantaleria Veia Bank column is how ordinary it is in the
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context of underwater archaeology. This is not a unique case of a site being neglected or overlooked due to some specific failing. It is a representative example of how the field actually operates. Sites are found, documented, published and then wait.
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Sometimes they wait for years. Sometimes they wait for decades. Atlet Yam was first discovered in the 1980s and has been studied intermittently ever since with significant gaps between fieldwork seasons. The pace of investigation at underwater sites is slow not because of
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indifference but because of the structural constraints of the field. The Pantileria Veia Bank column is in that queue somewhere waiting for the alignment of funding, institutional interest, favorable conditions, and the specific combination of expertise and equipment that would allow the next step
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to be taken, and the seafloor does not wait in a static way. Currents continue to move sediment across the site.
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Fishing activity in the straight, particularly bottom trollling, which is still practiced in parts of the Mediterranean despite restrictions, can disturb the seafloor in ways that damage or relocate objects. The bofouling continues to accumulate. The conditions that allow the column to survive in its
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current state for however long it has been there are not guaranteed to persist indefinitely.
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There is a quiet urgency underneath the practical obstacles, a sense that the window for investigation is not unlimited, even if it feels from a human time scale like the object has been sitting there forever and will continue to do so. What the practical constraints
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also do in a more subtle way is shape the character of the mystery itself. The column at the Pantelleria Veia Bank is not unexplained because the question is inherently unanswerable. It is unexplained because the resources required to answer it have not yet been
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assembled and deployed. That is a different kind of mystery than one where the evidence is genuinely ambiguous and no amount of investigation would resolve it. It is a mystery of access and priority, not of fundamental unknowability.
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The tools exist to learn a great deal more about this object. Isotopic analysis could tell us where the stone came from. Photoggramtric mapping could give us a precise three-dimensional model of the column and its holes.
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Sediment cing in the surrounding area could tell us more about what the seafloor looked like when the column was placed there, if it was placed there. A systematic sonar survey of the broader bank could tell us whether there are
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other features nearby that have not yet been noticed. None of this is beyond the reach of current science. It is beyond the reach of current funding and institutional priority which is a solvable problem even if it has not yet
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been solved. That gap between what is technically possible and what has actually been done is where the column currently lives. And it is that gap more than anything else that will determine whether the question of the Pantelleria Veia Bank monolith is answered in the
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coming years or continues to sit unresolved for another decade. The object itself is patient elf. The sea around it is not particularly cooperative, but it is not actively hostile either. The conditions for investigation are difficult, but not impossible. What is missing is the
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decision made by someone with the authority and the resources to go back and look more carefully. And what might prompt that decision? What might shift the balance of priority and funding in a direction that would allow serious follow-up work to begin is itself an
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interesting question because it speaks to how science actually moves which is not always in the direction of the most important questions but often in the direction of the questions that have found the right advocates, the right moment and the right resources to be
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taken seriously. The column is still waiting for that moment. And what it might reveal if that moment comes is a question worth sitting with as we turn to consider what the structure might actually have been used for. If the
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people who built it were real and the landscape they built it in was the living world they knew. So let us sit with that question for a moment. If the column was placed there by human hands, if someone on that coastal plane
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thousands of years before any civilization we normally talk about decided to quarry a 15 ton piece of stone, shape it into something long and deliberate and stand it upright in the landscape. Then what were they doing with it? What did it mean to them? What
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did it do? The honest answer is that we do not know. And it is worth being clear about that from the start cuz speculation about prehistoric intent has a tendency to run ahead of the evidence, especially when the object in question
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is large and old and sitting at the bottom of the sea. The temptation is to reach for the most dramatic explanation or alternatively to reach for the most mundane one and in either case to settle on something with more confidence than
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the evidence actually supports. The column at the Pantelleria Veia Bank does not come with an instruction manual. It does not come with any associated artifacts, no hearths, no midens, no carved symbols, no accompanying structures that have been identified. It
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is, as far as the available survey data shows, a single object in an open space.
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And that is actually a genuinely difficult interpretive situation. What we can do is look at what we know about the landscape it sat in, what we know about people living in similar environments during the same broad period, and what we know about how
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monolithic stones have been used in other prehistoric contexts around the Mediterranean and beyond. None of that tells us definitively what this particular column was for, but it gives us a reasonable range of possibilities. And some of those possibilities are more plausible than
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others given the specific physical characteristics of the object. One of the simplest possibilities is that it was a boundary marker. In a flat coastal landscape, a single upright stone would have been visible from a considerable distance. It would have been a fixed
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point in a terrain that along a coastal plane might otherwise have been relatively featureless, at least to an outside observer.
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Boundary markers appear in prehistoric contexts across many cultures and many periods. They mark the edges of territories, the limits of grazing land, the boundaries between one group's range and anothers. A 12 m stone, if it was standing upright, would have been an
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unmistakable landmark. You would not lose it. You would not confuse it with anything else. In a landscape where navigation was done by memory and by physical features, a stone that large would have been a reliable reference point for anyone who knew the area.
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There is also the possibility that it had a more explicitly ceremonial or ritual function. Standing stones with no obvious practical purpose appear in the archaeological record across a surprisingly wide range of cultures and time periods. The menes of Malta, some
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of which predate the famous temple complexes on the island, are among the closest geographically to the Pantaleria Veia bank site. The megalithic traditions of the Mcgreb, the North African coast that would have been visible from the bank's plane on a clear
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day, include standing stones and stone arrangements that date to the Neolithic and possibly earlier. These objects seem to have served purposes related to collective memory, ancestor veneration, astronomical observation, or communal gathering. Though the specifics vary enormously from sight to sight and
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culture to culture, a single large upright stone in a coastal landscape could have functioned as a focal point for any of these activities. A place where people gathered. A place that marked something important. A seasonal event, a death, a boundary between the
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living world and whatever people at that time understood to lie beyond it. The three holes are the feature that most complicates the simple interpretations.
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A plain standing stone, even a very large one, is relatively easy to understand as a marker or a monument.
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But three holes drilled through a stone at regular intervals suggest something more specific was happening. They suggest attachment. They suggest that something was meant to be connected to the column or that the column was meant to be connected to something else. The
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most straightforward functional reading of holes in a large stone is that they were used to thread ropes or poles through. In a coastal setting, a large stone with rope holes could have served as an anchor point for fishing
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equipment, for nets, for lines. A mooring post for watercraft is another possibility that has been mentioned in discussions of the site, though the scale of the object makes this feel slightly unlikely as a primary function.
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A 15 ton column is a lot of stone to quarry and transport just to tie a boat to, even a fairly large boat. But the holes could have served multiple purposes simultaneously. and the object's primary function might have
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been one thing while the hole served a secondary more practical purpose. There is also the possibility that the column was not a standalone object but part of a larger structure. In many prehistoric megalithic traditions, large upright stones are components of more complex
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arrangements alignments enclosures dolmens, or roof chambers. The holes could have been points where horizontal beams or stones were attached, creating a more elaborate construction.
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If the pantilary veia bank column was once part of a larger structure, the other elements of that structure may be buried under sediment, dispersed across the seafloor by currents, or simply not yet identified because the survey of the
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surrounding area has been limited. The column may be the only surviving piece of something that was once considerably more complex.
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That is speculative, but it is a reasonable speculation given how other megalithic traditions work. What is interesting about comparing this object to other monolithic traditions in the Mediterranean is how consistent some features are across very different cultures and very different time
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periods. The use of a single large stone, the deliberate shaping of that stone, the placement of it in a landscape in a way that suggests intentionality rather than convenience.
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These things appear repeatedly. The menes of Brittany which are much later in date, some from around 4,500 B.CE share these characteristics.
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The standing stones of the Maltese archipelago share them. The early megalithic traditions of the Iberian Peninsula share them. There is something about a large upright stone in an open landscape that seems to have appealed to people across a very wide range of
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cultures and time periods. And while we should be careful about assuming that the same impulse explains all of these objects, the pattern is at least suggestive. The early megalithic traditions of the Mcgreb are particularly relevant here because of
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the geographic proximity. The North African coast was during the period when the Pantaleria Veia Bank was dry land, part of the same broadly connected landscape. The straight between what is now Tunisia and Sicily was narrower than it is today, and
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people were moving across it. The obsidian trade routes that archaeologists have traced through the central Mediterranean show that materials from the volcanic islands of the region were being carried by boat or raft across open water as early as
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10,000 years ago. The people who lived on the Pantaleria Veia Bank plane were not isolated. They were part of a network, however loose and informal, of human groups moving through the same general region, sharing materials and possibly ideas. If monolithic stone
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traditions were developing in North Africa during this period, and there is evidence that they were, then it is not unreasonable to think that similar practices might have been present on the coastal plane that connected Africa to Sicily.
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None of this proves that the column is a monolith in the traditional sense, but it places the possibility within a plausible cultural context, which is a meaningful step beyond treating it as an isolated anomaly.
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There is one more possibility worth discussing and it is the least dramatic but perhaps the most practically interesting. The column might have been a structural element of a building.
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Large stone columns are used as architectural supports in many traditions. And while the column at the Pantileria Veia Bank is unusually large for a simple architectural support, it is not impossibly so. If the building it was part of has since collapsed or been
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buried, and if the column was the most durable element, it might be all that remains. The holes in this scenario could have been used to attach wooden beams or other structural elements. The break in the column could have been the
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result of the building's collapse. This interpretation would make the site less a monument and more a ruin, which is a different but equally interesting kind of object. What all of these possibilities share is that they require a group of people with the
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organizational capacity to quarry a large stone, transport it, and place it deliberately in a specific location.
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That is not a trivial requirement. Moving a 15 ton stone without wield vehicles or draft animals requires a significant number of people working in a coordinated way with some kind of shared plan and shared purpose.
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Experimental archaeology has shown that it is physically possible for relatively small groups to move very large stones using wooden sledges, rollers, ropes, and human muscle power. But it requires coordination. It requires that people agree on what they're doing and why, and
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that they sustain that agreement long enough to complete the task. That is a social and cognitive achievement, not just a physical one. And it is one that we know Mesolithic and early Neolithic people were capable of because the
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evidence for it exists at sites like Quebec where stones of comparable size were moved and arranged into complex structures at roughly the same period.
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The column at the Pantileria Veia Bank, if it is humanmade, is in some ways less impressive than Gobeclete in terms of the complexity of the overall construction. But it is potentially older or at least contemporaneous with the earliest phases of that site. And it
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is in a completely different part of the world. Which suggests that the organizational and cognitive capacity to move and place large stones was not a unique development in one specific location, but something that was emerging independently or spreading
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through contact across a much wider area of the ancient world. That is a significant idea. Even stated carefully and with appropriate uncertainty, the function of the column may never be definitively established. Without additional excavation, without the discovery of associated artifacts or
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structures, without some form of evidence that speaks more directly to how the object was used, the interpretation will remain open, and that is genuinely okay. Archaeology is full of objects whose function is debated or unknown and the uncertainty
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does not diminish their significance. What the column represents, even in the absence of a clear functional explanation, is evidence of human presence in a landscape that no longer exists above the waterline. Someone was there. Someone did something with stone.
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Whatever the specific purpose was, it was purposeful and that matters. What also matters in thinking about the function of this object is the landscape it was part of. A flat coastal plane between what is now Sicily and Tunisia
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with a view of the sea in multiple directions with access to marine resources and to the interior of the land mass would have been a productive and probably desirable place to live.
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The people who built the column or used it or gathered around it were not living in a marginal or desperate environment.
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They were living in a place that had food, water, shelter, and connection to other groups. They had, in other words, the conditions that allow for the development of the kinds of social and cultural practices that produce monuments and markers and deliberate
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arrangements of large stones. The column fits into that landscape, not as an anomaly, but as something that makes sense given where it was found. And then the sea came slowly at first and then in geological terms quite quickly. The
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plane that supported that life was gradually swallowed. The landmarks sank. The structures went underwater. The people who had known that landscape moved as people always do and the memory of what had been there faded and then disappeared. The column did not
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disappear. It settled onto the seafloor and stayed there, covered in bofiling and sediment, waiting in the dark water of the straight of Sicily for someone to find it again. What that flooding meant for the people who experienced it, what
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it felt like to watch a known landscape slowly become the sea is something we will turn to next because it is a human story as much as a geological one. and it is one that the column at the
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Pantelleria Veia Bank sits at the center of even if silently. The sea did not arrive all at once. That is the first thing worth understanding about what happened to the plane that is now the Pantilaria Veia Bank. There was
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no single morning when people woke up and found their world underwater. The inundation was gradual, measured in the slow rhythms of centuries rather than the sharp shock of days. Sea level rise after the last glacial maximum was not a
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smooth or even process. But over the broad sweep of thousands of years, the water came and it kept coming. And the land that had once been home to people and animals and whatever was built on that coastal plane was piece by piece
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swallowed. To try to imagine what that experience was like from the inside, from the perspective of people actually living through it, you have to let go of the geological time scale and think in human time scales. Instead, a single generation living on that plane
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would probably not have noticed the sea moving at all. The change from one year to the next, or even from one decade to the next, would have been small enough to fall within the natural variation of tides and storms and seasonal flooding.
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The shoreline was not a fixed thing. Even then, it moved with the weather and the seasons. People who lived near the coast understood that water advanced and retreated, and they would not have immediately recognized a slow, permanent advance as something different from the
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ordinary movement of the sea. But across generations, the change would have become visible. A beach that a grandparent remembered as wide and walkable might have narrowed by the time their grandchildren were old enough to notice. A low area that had once been
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dry land might have become a seasonal marsh, and then a permanent lagoon, and then open water.
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Landmarks would have shifted. Paths that had once connected communities might have become impossible. Fishing grounds that had once been inland might have become shallow coastal waters and then deeper water and eventually too deep to reach. This is not speculation about
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this specific place in isolation. It is based on what we know about how sea level rise affects low-lying coastal plains in general and on the evidence from other submerged sites around the world where archaeological remains have been found preserved beneath the water
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at Yam off the coast of Israel, a Neolithic village that was eventually submerged around 6,000 years ago shows signs that the people who lived there were aware of environmental change. The village was apparently abandoned before it went underwater, not drowned with its
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inhabitants inside. The people left. They took what they could carry. They moved to higher ground or further inland or along the coast to places that were not yet threatened. The abandonment was deliberate, which means the change was slow enough to allow for a response.
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Something similar probably happened on the Pantileria Veia Bank plane. The people who lived there were not victims of a sudden catastrophe, at least not in the way we might imagine a flood. They were more likely participants in a long and difficult
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process of adaptation, watching their landscape change around them over many generations, making decisions about where to go and what to take and what to leave behind. Some things could not be carried. A 15-tonon stone column could not be loaded onto a boat and taken
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somewhere safer. Whatever it meant to the people who built it, it stayed where it was. And eventually the water came up around it and it became part of the seafloor. There is something quietly difficult about sitting with that image.
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Not dramatic, not the stuff of disaster stories, but genuinely sad in a low ordinary way. The loss of a landscape that people knew and loved and built things in is a real loss. Even if it happened slowly and even if the people
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themselves survived it by moving elsewhere, the places we grow up in, the landmarks we orient ourselves by, the specific contours of a particular piece of land, these things matter to people, they always have. And when they are gone, something is lost that cannot
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quite be recovered, even if the people themselves go on. What is interesting and worth thinking about carefully is how this kind of loss gets processed in human memory over time. Oral traditions are remarkably good at preserving certain kinds of
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information across many generations. Stories about specific places, specific events, specific changes in the landscape can survive for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years in cultures that rely on oral transmission.
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There is growing evidence from indigenous communities in Australia, for example, that some oral traditions preserve accurate memories of coastline changes that occurred more than 10,000 years ago when sea levels rose after the last ice age. These stories were not
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recognized as historical records until geologists began comparing them to the physical evidence of sea level change and found that the geography described in the stories matched the geography of a much earlier period. The Mediterranean world in the period we're talking about
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roughly 9 to 10,000 years ago was also a world of oral tradition. The people who lived on the Pantaleria Veia Bank plane or who later heard stories from those who had may have carried memories of that landscape forward in their
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narratives. The specific content of those memories is of course completely inaccessible to us now. The cultures that held them were preiterate. The stories were not written down. And even if they were passed forward for a time, the thousands of years between that
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period and the earliest written records in the Mediterranean are long enough to have transformed any specific memory into something unrecognizable.
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What we do have from later periods is a widespread tradition of flood narratives across Mediterranean and Neareastern cultures. The flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest written narratives in the world, describes a catastrophic inundation that destroys a
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known world. The Hebrew Bible contains a similar account. Greek mythology includes the story of Ducalon, who survives a great flood sent by Zeus.
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Plato, writing in the 4th century B.CE, CE described the sinking of Atlantis, a large island civilization that supposedly disappeared beneath the sea in a single day and night. These stories are not all the same, and they do not
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all describe the same event. But the pattern of a world destroyed by water is remarkably consistent across cultures that developed independently and at different times. Some researchers have suggested that these flood narratives preserve cultural memories of the actual sea level rise that occurred
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at the end of the last ice age or of specific flooding events like the possible rapid infilling of the Black Sea basin which some geologists believe may have occurred relatively quickly around 7,500 years ago. Others are more cautious, pointing out that floods are a
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universal human experience and that flood myths could easily arise independently in any culture that lives near water. The connection between specific flood narratives and specific geological events is very difficult to establish with confidence. It would be a stretch and probably an irresponsible
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one to connect the Pantaleria Veia Bank directly to any of these stories. The column at the bottom of the straight of Sicily is not Atlantis. Plato's account of Atlantis is almost certainly a philosophical allegory rather than a historical record, and even the scholars
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who take it most seriously do not place it in this specific location. The temptation to link submerged prehistoric sites to flood myths is understandable because the emotional resonance is real, but the evidence for any specific connection is not there. And it is worth
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being honest about that. What is true and what does not require any mythological connection to be significant is that the flooding of the Pantaleria Veia Bank plane was a real event that affected real people. The sea level data is solid. The timing is well
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established. The plane was there and then it was not. And the people who had lived on it had to go somewhere else.
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That is a human story even without the mythology. And the column at the bottom of the sea is a physical remnant of it.
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Not a legend, not an allegory. A stone object that someone made or at least placed in a landscape that no longer exists above the waterline. The emotional weight of that when you let it settle is actually quite considerable.
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We tend to think of the past as fixed, as something that happened in a particular place that we can still visit, still see. The ruins of Rome are still in Rome. The pyramids are still on the plateau at Giza.
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The landscape has changed around them, but the structures are still where they were built, still visible, still accessible. The Pantaleria Veia Bank column is different. The landscape it was part of is gone. Not ruined, not changed, but genuinely gone, replaced by
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40 meters of seawater. To visit the column, you have to descend into the sea. You have to enter a world that was not there when the column was built, that came into being after the fact, that is itself the evidence of the loss.
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There is also something worth noting about how the gradual nature of the inundation would have affected the people's relationship to it. A sudden catastrophe, a tsunami or a volcanic eruption produces a clear before and after. There is a moment of rupture, but
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a slow inundation over centuries does not have that clarity. For the people living through it, the change was probably experienced as a series of small losses rather than one large one.
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A field that flooded and did not drain. a path that became a wade, a low island that became a shaw and then disappeared.
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Each of these small changes was probably mourned in its own way and then absorbed into the ongoing life of the community.
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The cumulative loss was enormous, but it arrived in pieces small enough to survive. That is, in a way, a harder kind of loss than the catastrophic kind.
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There is no single event to point to, no clear moment of before and after, no obvious narrative of disaster and survival. There is just the slow disappearance of a place, and the slow adjustment of the people who had known
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it, and eventually the fading of the memory of what had been there. The column stayed, the people moved on, the memory faded, and the sea, indifferent to all of it, continue to rise until it reached the level it is at today, and
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then it stopped, and the column sat at the bottom, undisturbed for roughly 9,000 years.
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What the experience of that inundation meant in terms of the social and cultural life of the communities involved is something we can only gesture at. Did groups that had lived on the plane for generations break apart as the land became unusable? Did they merge
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with communities in Sicily or North Africa, bringing their practices and their memories with them? Did the loss of specific landmarks, including perhaps the column itself, disrupt the ritual or social functions that those landmarks served? These are questions that
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archaeology cannot currently answer for this specific site because there has not been enough excavation of the surrounding seafloor and because the associated settlements if they exist have not been found. But they are not idle questions. The relationship between
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landscape and identity, between specific places and the social structures that organize around them is something that anthropologists and archaeologists have studied extensively in living in historical cultures. Landmarks matter.
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Sacred sites matter. The places where important things happened or are believed to have happened anchor communities in ways that go beyond the purely practical. When those places are lost, the communities that depended on them have to find new anchors or do
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without or carry the memory of the lost places forward in some transformed way. The flooding of the Pantileria Veia Bankank plane would have forced exactly that kind of renegotiation and the column sinking slowly into a landscape that was becoming the sea would have
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been part of what was lost. There is one more dimension to this worth considering before moving on. The plane that was flooded was not just a place where people lived. It was a connection.
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The straight of Sicily is one of the narrowest points between Africa and Europe. And in the period we're talking about when the plane was above water, it would have made that crossing significantly easier. Communities on either side of what is now the straight
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would have been able to maintain contact more readily than they can today. The flooding of the plane did not just displace the people who lived on it. It also gradually widened the distance between the communities on either side
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of it. What had been a relatively easy crossing became a longer and more demanding sea voyage. The social connections, the trade networks, the shared cultural practices that depended on easy movement across that landscape would have been strained and eventually
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broken or transformed. This is one of the ways in which sea level rise at the end of the last ice age reshaped not just geography but human social structure across the Mediterranean.
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The communities that had been neighbors in the sense of being separated by a walkable or easily crossed stretch of land became more distant from each other, and the stone column that had stood in the landscape they shared, went
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underwater with the plane and became part of a world that neither community could any longer reach without considerable effort. All of this, the gradual loss, the human adaptation, the severing of connections, the fading of memory, is the larger story that the
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column at the bottom of the Strait of Sicily sits inside. It is not just an archaeological puzzle about whether a stone was shaped by human hands. It is a remnant of a way of life in a landscape that no longer exists. And the flooding
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that covered it was one of the most consequential environmental changes in human prehistory. Even if it happened too slowly to feel like a crisis to the people living through it. What the column represents in this context is not
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just a mystery about construction technique or function. It is a marker of a world that was lost quietly and gradually to the rising sea. And if that is what it is, then the question of what it meant to the people who built it
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becomes in a way secondary to the question of what it means to us now.
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Looking down at it from the surface of a sea that was not there when it was made.
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That question about significance and what this object tells us about the deeper history of human construction and human capability is where the story turns next. So let us think carefully about the number 9,350 years. That is the estimate that Lodo
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and Ben Avaram put forward in their 2015 paper based on the regional sea level curve for the central Mediterranean and the sediment dating around the site. It is not a precise date in the way that a radioarbon date from an organic sample
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would be. It is an estimate derived from the geological record of when the Pantileria Veia bank plane was last above water. The logic is straightforward. If the column is sitting on a surface that was exposed land and that surface was submerged by
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rising sea levels at a calculable point in time, then the column must have been placed there before the flooding.
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The sediment and the sea level curved together suggest that the bank was above water until roughly 9,350 years ago, give or take a margin that the researchers acknowledge. So if the structure is humanmade, it was built no later than that point and possibly
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somewhat earlier. That number on its own is large enough to be difficult to hold in the mind. 9,000 years is a long time.
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But what makes it genuinely striking and what the researchers were careful to point out is where it sits in the broader timeline of human construction.
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Because when you line it up against the other major monuments and structures that archaeology has identified from this general era, it does not sit at the very beginning of the story. It sits somewhere near the start of what we
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know, right at the edge of the earliest evidence for large-scale human construction. and that positioning is what gives the discovery its real weight. The most useful comparison is Geekbecepe, the site in southeastern Turkey that has over the past few decades fundamentally
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changed how archaeologists think about the cognitive and organizational capacity of prehistoric people. Gbecepe consists of a series of large circular enclosures, each containing T-shaped limestone pillars, some of which stand over 5 m tall and weigh between 10 and 20 tons. The earliest
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layers of the site have been dated to approximately 9,500 BCE, which is roughly 11,500 years ago.
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The site was in active use based on current evidence from around that period until approximately 8,000 B.CE. after which it was deliberately backfilled and abandoned. That backfilling is one of the more puzzling aspects of the site, but it is not what concerns us here.
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What matters for this comparison is the date. The earliest faces of Gobecute and the estimated construction window for the Pantileria Veia Bank column overlap.
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They're roughly contemporary within the margin of error of the estimates involved. This is not a coincidence that anyone is claiming means the two sites are related or that the same people built both. The distances involved make that essentially impossible and the
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cultural contexts are quite different. But the overlap in time is meaningful in a different way. It suggests that the period around 9,000 to 10,000 years ago was one in which human communities in multiple parts of the world were
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independently engaging in the kind of largecale stonework that requires planning, coordination, and a level of technical skill that earlier assumptions about mealithic people had not fully accounted for before Gbeclete was excavated and dated. The prevailing view in archaeology was fairly settled on
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this point. Large monumental construction was understood to be a product of settled agricultural societies, communities that had developed the surplus food production and the social complexity needed to organize large labor projects. The sequence was supposed to go agriculture
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first, then settlements, then surplus, then social hierarchy, then monumental construction. Gobecée disrupted that sequence quite dramatically because the site predates agriculture in the region. The people who built it were, as far as the evidence shows, hunter gatherers. They
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were mobile or semi-mobile. They did not have the agricultural surplus that the old model said was necessary for this kind of project. And yet they built it anyway, which means the old model was wrong or at least incomplete.
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The Pantaleria Veia bank column, if it is human-made, fits into the same revision of that model. A 15-ton stone 12 m long with three regularly spaced holes placed on what was then a coastal plane in the central Mediterranean
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around the same time that Gbecepe was being built on a hilltop in Anatolia. The people who may have built the column in the Strait of Sicily were, based on what we know of the region's prehistory at that time, Mesolithic hunter
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gatherers, possibly with some early contact with the agricultural communities that were beginning to develop in the Near East and moving gradually westward. They were people with stone tools, with boats capable of open water crossings, with the navigational knowledge to move between
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Sicily and North Africa, and with apparently the ability to quarry, shape, and transport a large block of stone.
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What that last part actually required is worth thinking about carefully because it is easy to say 15 tons and move on without registering what that means. In practical terms, a 15 ton stone is not something one person moves or 10 people
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move or even 20 people move easily. Moving a stone of that size without metal tools, without wheeled vehicles, without draft animals in any well doumented form for this period requires a significant and coordinated group effort. It requires ropes probably and
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levers and some kind of sliding or rolling mechanism and a group of people who understand the plan and are working together toward a shared goal. The logistics of quarrying the stone, shaping it to the dimensions it has, drilling three holes through it at
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regular intervals, and then transporting it to the location where it was placed are not trivial. They imply a community with the organizational capacity to undertake a project that has no immediate survival value. You cannot eat a monolith. It does not keep the rain
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off. Whatever it was for, it was for something that the community considered worth, the considerable effort of making it. This is what archaeologists mean when they talk about cognitive and organizational capacity. It is not about intelligence in some abstract sense. The
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people of the Mesalithic Mediterranean were not less intelligent than people today. Their brains were the same size.
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Their social lives were complex. Their knowledge of the natural world was detailed and hard one. What the construction of large stone monuments reveals is not intelligence but a specific kind of social organization.
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The ability to coordinate labor across a group, to sustain a project over time, to share a goal that is not immediately practical, and to invest collective resources in something symbolic or ritual or communal. That kind of organization was for a long time assumed
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to require agriculture and settlement. Gobecée showed that it did not. The Pantaleria Vekia Bank column, if the interpretation holds, would add another data point to that same argument from a completely different part of the world.
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Now, it is important to be honest about the uncertainty here. The dating estimate for the column is not a direct date of the object itself. There is no organic material attached to the stone that has been radiocarbon dated. The
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9,350ear estimate is a maximum age derived from the flooding timeline, not a confirmed construction date. The column could be somewhat younger than that if it was placed in a location that was still above water, later in the flooding
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sequence than the general estimate suggests. It could theoretically be older if the plane was exposed land for longer than the regional sea level curve indicates, though the geological evidence constrains that possibility fairly tightly. The point is that the
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date is an estimate with real scientific grounding, but it is not a certainty and anyone presenting it as a confirmed date is going further than the evidence supports.
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What the evidence does support is this. The column is sitting on a surface that was above water during the period in question. If it is humanmade, it was made during that period. And the period in question is one that archaeology has
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only recently begun to understand as a time of greater human capability and social complexity than was previously assumed. That is the significance of the dating, not that it proves a specific claim, but that it places the object in
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a moment in human prehistory that is itself in the process of being revised and expanded.
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The comparison to Stonehenge is one that comes up often in discussions of this site, and it is worth addressing directly because it is sometimes used in a way that implies more than it should.
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Stonehenge in its most recognizable form dates to roughly 30,000 BCE, which is about 5,000 years ago. The earliest phases of the Stonehenge complex, the initial circular earthwork, date to around 3,100 B.CE. So the Pantaleria Veia Bank column at the estimated
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9,350ear age would predate Stonehenge by roughly 4,000 years. And that gap is real and significant. But the comparison can be misleading if it implies that Stonehenge represents some kind of peak or benchmark of prehistoric construction when in fact it is simply one of the
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best known examples. Gobeclete predates Stonehenge by more than 6,000 years and it is a far more complex site. The megaliths of Britany, the great standing stones of Cararnach and the surrounding region in northwestern France, date to roughly 4,500 to 4,000 B.CEE, which is
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also older than Stonehenge by a significant margin. The point is that large-scale stone construction has a longer and more geographically diverse history than the popular image of Stonehenge as the archetype of prehistoric monuments tends to suggest. Within that longer history,
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the Pantaleria Vekia bank column, if it is humanmade, would occupy a genuinely early position. Not the earliest given the overlap with Gbeclete, but early enough to matter and early enough to be surprising in the specific context of the central Mediterranean where the
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prehistoric record for this period is thinner than in some other regions. Partly because so much of the relevant landscape is now underwater. There is something else worth noting about the specific stone type. The column is made of bioalccarenite
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which is a sedimentary rock composed of cemented shell and coral fragments. It is a relatively soft stone by geological standards which is one of the reasons some skeptics have argued that natural processes could produce elongated forms in it. But it is also a stone that is
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workable with the kinds of tools available to meithic people. Flint and obsidian tools, both of which were in use in the Mediterranean at this time, are harder than bioalcarinite and could have been used to shape and drill it. This does not prove that the
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column was shaped by human hands. But it removes one of the potential objections, which is that the stone would have been too hard to work with the technology of the period. Biocalcaranite is not granite. It is a stone that prehistoric
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people could in principle have worked with the tools they had. The three holes in this context become particularly interesting. Drilling a hole through stone, even relatively soft stone, requires sustained effort and a specific technique.
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The most common prehistoric drilling method involved a wooden or bone rod rotated back and forth with the hands or with a bow drill using an abrasive material like sand or grit to grind through the stone. This technique is
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well documented in the archaeological record. Prehistoric people drilled holes in stone beads, in pendants, in tool handles in a variety of contexts. The holes in the pantilaria veia bank column are larger than bead holes, but the principle is the same. Scaled up. The
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regularity of the three holes, their similar diameter, and their spacing along the length of the column is what makes them difficult to explain as the product of boring organisms or random natural processes.
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Boring organisms do create cylindrical cavities in marine limestone, but they tend to be small, irregular in spacing, and oriented in response to the grain of the stone or the direction of water flow. Three holes of similar size spaced
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at intervals along a 12 m stone do not fit that pattern easily. None of this is conclusive. The honest answer is that without a proper physical examination of the holes, including measurements of their diameter, depth, and surface texture, and without comparison to known
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examples of bioalcarinite affected by boring organisms at this scale, it is not possible to definitively rule out a natural explanation. The researchers who published the 2015 paper were working with the visual evidence from ROV cameras and the physical context of the
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site. A more thorough investigation would need to get closer and stay longer and look more carefully. That investigation has not happened yet for reasons that the next part of this story will get into, but the holes remain sitting at the bottom of the straight of
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Sicily waiting for someone to look at them properly. What the age estimate ultimately does, if you sit with it for a moment, is shift the question from whether this object is interesting to what kind of interesting it is. If it is
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natural, it is a remarkable geological formation that happens to sit in an archaeologically significant location.
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And the story of the site becomes one about how our pattern-seeking minds can find human intention in the shapes that nature makes. If it is humanmade, it is a remnant of a period in human prehistory that is only beginning to
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come into focus. A period when people were doing things with large stones that we are still trying to fully understand in landscapes that are now underwater and largely inaccible.
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Either way, the object is real. The location is real, and the flooding that covered it is real. The 9,000 years of silence at the bottom of the Strait of Sicily are real. What remains uncertain is only what the stone was before the
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water came. And that uncertainty rather than being a frustration is what keeps the question alive and worth pursuing.
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The researchers who published the original paper understood this and they were clear about what further work would be needed to move the question forward.
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What that work would actually look like and what has or has not happened since 2015 is where the story goes from here.
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So what would it actually take to answer the question properly? That is where things get both practical and a little dispiriting because the gap between what science would need to do and what science has actually done since 2015 is
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considerable. Not because the researchers lack interest and not because the site is impossibly difficult to reach. The gap exists for reasons that are much more mundane and in some ways more frustrating than the mystery itself. The 2015 paper by Ludolo and Ben
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Araham was published in the journal of archaeological science reports which is a peer-reviewed journal and it received a reasonable amount of attention in the scientific press. The broader media picked it up as well which is how most people outside of marine geology or
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Mediterranean archaeology first heard about it. But attention in the press and attention in the form of funded follow-up research are two very different things. And the years since the original publication have not produced a systematic second investigation of the site, at least not
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one that has been published in any significant form. This is not unusual for underwater archaeology, and it is worth understanding why. Underwater archaeology is one of the most chronically underfunded areas of the entire discipline. Fieldwork on land is
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expensive. Fieldwork underwater is dramatically more expensive. And the logistical complexity scales up in ways that are difficult to fully appreciate unless you have worked in the field. A land excavation requires shovels, tels, buckets, and people. An underwater excavation at 40 m depth requires a
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research vessel, diving equipment, ROVs or AUVs depending on the depth and task, specialized recording equipment that functions in salt water, a support team on the surface, and a significant amount of time. Time on a research vessel costs money. The vessel itself costs money.
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The equipment costs money. And because underwater sites are harder to photograph, harder to sample, and harder to excavate without disturbing the surrounding sediment, everything takes longer than the equivalent work on land.
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40 m is, as was noted earlier, within the range of recreational scuba diving. But there is a significant difference between visiting a site at 40 m and conducting systematic scientific work there.
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A recreational diver at 40 m has a bottom time, meaning a safe working time before decompression becomes necessary, of roughly 10 minutes on a single dive using standard air. Technical divers using mixed gases like nitrox or tryix can extend that somewhat. But even with
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the best equipment, working time at depth is limited and every minute of it needs to count. You cannot spend an afternoon carefully examining a 12 m stone column the way you might spend an afternoon excavating a trench on land.
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You get minutes and then you have to ascend. This is why ROV cameras have been so important for sites like this one. A remotely operated vehicle can stay on the bottom indefinitely, does not need decompression stops, and can
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carry highresolution cameras and lighting rigs that produce better visual data than a human diver can typically gather by hand. But ROVs also have limitations. They cannot feel the surface of the stone. They cannot take a core sample with the same precision that
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a trained archaeologist can. They cannot make the kind of intuitive observations that come from a person physically present at the site noticing things that were not anticipated before the dive.
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The original survey of the Pantileria Veia Bank column used an ROV and the visual data it produced was what the 2015 paper was primarily based on. That data is genuinely valuable, but it is also a starting point, not a conclusion.
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What a proper follow-up investigation would require according to the logic of the original paper and the standards of the field is several distinct types of work. The first would be photoggramtric mapping of the column. Photoggramtry is a technique that uses overlapping
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photographs taken from multiple angles to construct a precise three-dimensional model of an object. applied to the column. It would produce a digital model accurate to within a few millimeters, which would allow researchers to measure the holes precisely, examine the brake
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pattern in detail, and compare the surface texture of different parts of the stone in ways that are simply not possible from a limited number of video frames. This kind of work has been done on other underwater archaeological sites
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including submerged shipwrecks and the Atllet Yam village off the coast of Israel and it has transformed the quality of data available from those sites. Applied to the Pantelleria Vekia bank column, it would be a significant step forward. The second type of work
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would be isotopic analysis of the stone itself. Biocalcaranite is not a uniform rock type. Its precise composition, the ratio of certain isotopes, and the specific mix of shell and coral fragments it contains vary depending on where it formed. If a sample of the
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column could be compared against samples from known biocalcaranite deposits in the surrounding region, it might be possible to determine where the stone originated. This matters because one of the arguments for human construction is that the stone does not appear to be
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local to the site where it was found. If isotopic analysis confirmed that the stone came from a specific location some distance away, that would be meaningful evidence because natural geological processes do not generally move 12 m stone columns from one place to another.
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If the stone turned out to be locally sourced, that would not disprove human construction, but it would remove one of the supporting arguments. Either result would be informative. The third and perhaps most important type of work would be systematic cing of the seafloor
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sediment around the column. Sediment cores from the surrounding area could be used to reconstruct the depositional history of the site, which would help confirm or refine the sea level dating that the original paper relied on. More importantly, calls taken in a grid
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pattern around the column might reveal whether there are other objects buried in the sediment nearby. One of the genuine unknowns about the site is whether the column is an isolated object or whether it is part of something larger. If there are other stones buried
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under the sediment within a few dozen meters of the column, that would change the interpretation significantly.
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A single stone column in isolation could be many things. A single stone column surrounded by other worked stones would be something much more specific. The fourth thing a proper investigation would need is simply more time on the seafloor looking at a wider area. The
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original survey covered the column itself and its immediate surroundings, but the Pantaleria Veia Bank is a substantial area of submerged terrain. A systematic acoustic survey of the broader bank using sidecan sonar or multi-beam bethimemetry at high resolution could identify other
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anomalies on the seafloor that might not be visible to the naked eye but that would show up as unusual features in the acoustic data. This kind of survey does not require divers or ROVs in the water.
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It can be conducted from a vessel moving at the surface which makes it relatively cost effective compared to underwater fieldwork. It would not answer the question of what the column is but it could tell researchers whether the column is alone or whether there is more
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to find. None of this has been published as of the time of this narration. Lollo has continued to advocate for further study of the site and there have been discussions within the Italian and international marine archaeology communities about the significance of
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the discovery. The site falls within Italian territorial waters which means that any formal excavation or sampling would require authorization from the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage.
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That adds a layer of bureaucratic complexity to what is already a logistically difficult undertaking. It does not make further research impossible, but it does mean that any team wishing to conduct systematic work at the site needs to navigate both
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funding and regulatory approval before they can begin. There is also the question of bofouling which was mentioned briefly in the context of why tool marks have not been identified on the surface of the column. Bofouling refers to the accumulation of marine
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organisms on submerged surfaces including algae, barnacles, brizzoans, and various other invertebrates. At 40 m depth in the Mediterranean, a stone that has been sitting on the seafloor for even a few decades will accumulate a significant coating of biological
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material. A stone that has been there for 9,000 years, assuming the column is that old, would be heavily encrusted.
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This encrustation both protects the underlying stone surface from physical erosion and makes it very difficult to examine. Removing bofouling without damaging the stone beneath requires careful mechanical cleaning which is itself a delicate operation that needs to be conducted by trained conservators
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working in situ. It cannot simply be scraped off with a knife. The process is slow, requires specialized tools, and produces biological material that needs to be collected and disposed of properly. It is one of the many practical complications that make
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underwater archaeology so much harder than it looks from the outside. What is perhaps most striking about the situation is that the object itself is not going anywhere. It has been sitting on that seafloor for a very long time
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and it will continue to sit there. Unlike a terrestrial site that faces threats from development, agriculture or erosion, the Pantaleria Veia bank column is in a relatively stable environment.
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The water above it protects it from the kind of surface weathering that affects exposed stone monuments. The sediment around it accumulates slowly. There is no urgent physical threat to the site that would make immediate excavation a priority on conservation grounds. In
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some ways, this works in favor of careful, well planned research. There is no reason to rush. The column will wait.
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But that patience cuts both ways. The column has been waiting since 2015 for a follow-up investigation, and the scientific questions it raises have been waiting with it. The original paper generated discussion and that discussion was valuable but discussion is not data.
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The researchers who published in 2015 were explicit about what further work was needed. That list of needed work has not substantially changed. What has changed is that nearly a decade has passed and the site remains as unexplored as it was when the ROV first
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filmed it. This is not a failure unique to this site or to the researchers involved. It reflects something broader about how science allocates its resources and about which questions get funded and which do not. Underwater archaeology does not have the same
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institutional support that some other fields enjoy. There are no large government programs specifically dedicated to surveying submerged prehistoric landscapes in the Mediterranean. Even though those landscapes cover an enormous area and potentially contain an enormous amount of information about early human
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history, the funding that does exist tends to go towards sites that are already well documented, like shipwrecks with known historical significance or towards surveys with clear practical applications.
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A single ambiguous stone column at 40 m depth whose significance depends on a question that has not yet been resolved is not the easiest thing to build a funding proposal around.
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And yet the question it poses is genuinely important. If the column is humanmade and if the dating estimate is approximately correct, it represents evidence of organized stone construction in the central Mediterranean at a period that is poorly understood precisely
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because so much of the relevant landscape is underwater. The people who lived on the Pantileria Veia Bank plane 9,000 years ago left almost no other trace that we have found. Their settlements, their tools, their middens, whatever structures they
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built are all either buried under meters of marine sediment or dispersed by currents and time. The column, if it is what the original researchers suggested, would be a rare surviving remnant of a world that is otherwise almost entirely
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invisible to us. That invisibility is part of what makes the Mediterranean seafloor such a significant and underexplored archive of human prehistory.
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The flooding that occurred between roughly 15,000 and 7,000 years ago did not just cover land. It covered the places where people lived, the landscapes they knew, the features they built, their understanding of the world around. Those places are still there
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under the water. They're waiting for the technology, the funding, and the sustained attention that would allow us to read them properly. The Pantileria Veia Bank column is one of the few places where something has already surfaced from that submerged world,
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literally been found by a passing ROV and brought to scientific attention. What happens next with it, whether it receives the investigation it needs or continues to sit unexamined on the seafloor, will say something about how seriously we take the question of what
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lies beneath the water that now covers so much of the landscape where our species first began to build things. and mark the land. The researchers who found it have not stopped thinking about it.
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That much is clear from the continued discussion in the literature and from the conversations that have taken place in the years since the paper was published. The question is whether the broader scientific community and the institutions that control research
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funding will eventually find a way to give this site the attention it deserves. And what that attention might actually reveal if it ever comes is something worth holding in mind as the story moves toward its close. So here we
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are at the end of the story or perhaps more accurately at the edge of it.
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Because the story has not ended. It is still sitting down there at 40 m depth in the blue green quiet of the straight of Sicily, waiting for something we've not yet given it. There is something worth sitting with for a moment before
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we leave this place entirely. Regardless of what the column turns out to be, regardless of whether future analysis confirms it as a human construction or eventually explains it as an unusual product of natural geological processes, the seafloor it
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rests on was once a landscape. That is not speculation. That is simply what the sea level record tells us. The Pantaleria Veia Bank was dry land. It had weather above it, not water. It had soil, probably grasses and shrubs,
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adapted to the semiarid conditions of the central Mediterranean during that period. Animals moved across it, and people were there. We know people were in this region during the period in question. The evidence for human presence in Sicily, in North Africa, and
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across the broader Mediterranean basin during the Misolithic and early Neolithic is not in doubt. The question is not whether people lived in this general area 9 or 10,000 years ago. They did. The question is whether any of them
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stood where the column now rests and whether any of them had a hand in placing it there. What strikes me thinking about this quietly is how much of the human story we have simply lost to water. Not to time in the usual
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sense, not to decay or fire or the slow dissolution of organic material, but to a specific and dramatic change in the physical world that happened within the span of human cultural memory. The flooding of the Mediterranean's coastal shelves was not a geological event in
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the distant, incomprehensible past. It happened within the last 15,000 years. In some areas, significant inundation was still occurring as recently as 7 or 8 thousand years ago. That is well within the period when people were building things, burying their dead in
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deliberate ways, trading obsidian across open water, and developing the first elements of what we would recognize as organized social life. Some of the people who watched the sea rise were not so different from us in the ways that
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matter most. They remembered things. They told each other stories. They attach meaning to places and then the water came and the places they knew went under and whatever they had built on those coastal plains went with them. The
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column, if it is humanmade, is a fragment of that lost world. A single piece of stone that survived not because anyone preserved it, not because it was buried in a protective context or sheltered by a structure, but simply
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because stone is heavy and the seafloor is stable and no one disturbed it. 9,000 years of water above it and it is still there. still in two pieces, still with those three holes, still resting on the flat sandy bottom where it came to rest
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or where it was placed, depending on which explanation eventually proves correct. There is something quietly moving about that, if you let yourself think about it for a moment. The Mediterranean has been one of the most intensely used, most thoroughly
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traveled, most culturally layered bodies of water in human history. Phoenician traders, Greek colonists, Roman warships, Arab merchants, Norman fleets, Ottoman gs, and modern container ships have all crossed the waters above this bank. Countless fishing boats have worked the shallows nearby, and through
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all of it, the column sat on the bottom, unnoticed, covered in marine growth, completely invisible to the world above.
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It took a research vessel with sonar equipment and a remotely operated vehicle to finally see it in 2015 for the first time since the water rose over it thousands of years ago. That is a long time to be invisible. What the
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column represents in a broader sense is the incompleteness of what we know. We tend to think of human prehistory as something we have a reasonable handle on, at least an outline. We know approximately when our species emerged, approximately when we began using
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complex tools, approximately when agriculture developed and when the first cities appeared. We have a rough map of the story, but that map was drawn almost entirely from evidence found on land because that is where archaeologists can work. That is where surveys are
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conducted and excavations are funded and artifacts are found. The submerged portions of that landscape which in some regions represent a very substantial percentage of the total area where people lived during the plea scene and early hollow scene have barely been
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examined. The seafloor of the Mediterranean alone contains thousands of square kilometers of former coastal plane that has never been systematically surveyed for archaeological material.
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What is down there is genuinely unknown. The Pantaleria Veia Bank column is one of the rare moments when that unknown world has pushed back through the surface and made itself visible. It is not the only such moment. Atlet Yam off
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the coast of Israel is a well doumented Neolithic village preserved under 12 m of water with stone structures, human burials, and even the remains of a fishing net still in place. It is a remarkable site and it demonstrates
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clearly that underwater preservation can be exceptional that the seafloor is not a place where things simply disappear.
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They are there. They are preserved. They are waiting. Atletam was found because a storm exposed part of it in the shallow waters near the coast and researchers were close enough to investigate quickly. The Pantellaria Veia bank column was found because a research team
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happened to be conducting a sonar survey in that area for geological purposes and noticed something anomalous. In both cases, discovery was partly a matter of luck of being in the right place with the right equipment at the right moment.
206:56
Speaker A
That should tell us something about how many other sites have not yet been found. Not because they do not exist, but because no one has looked in the right place yet. The Mediterranean is a deep archive. It is old in ways that go
207:10
Speaker A
beyond the usual meaning of the word. The civilizations that rose along its shores, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Romans, are themselves ancient by any ordinary measure. But beneath the water that those civilizations sailed across, there are
207:26
Speaker A
traces of people who came before all of them. People who lived in a world that looked quite different from the one those later civilizations inherited.
207:35
Speaker A
People whose names we do not know and whose languages we cannot begin to reconstruct.
207:40
Speaker A
The column, if it is humanmade, was built by people who had no writing, no metal tools, no agriculture in the full sense of the word. They were working with stone and wood and rope and human effort. And they apparently moved a
207:56
Speaker A
15-tonon block of bioalcarinite, drilled three holes through it at regular intervals and set it upright, or at least positioned it deliberately, on a coastal plane that they could not have known would one day be covered by the sea. Or perhaps they could sense it in
208:11
Speaker A
some way. Perhaps the people who lived on the plane had watched the water creeping closer over the span of their lifetimes, had seen land that their grandparents remembered now gone beneath the waves. Perhaps the column was built in full awareness of a changing world as
208:27
Speaker A
a marker, a boundary, a statement of presence in a landscape that was already being lost. That is speculation and it should be labeled as such, but it is not unreasonable speculation.
208:42
Speaker A
People in coastal environments who experience gradual sea level rise do notice it. They adapt to it. They sometimes mark it. The idea that Messylithic people on the Pantelleria Veia Bank plane were entirely unaware of the encroaching water seems less
208:59
Speaker A
plausible than the idea that they lived with it as a constant feature of their world. What we are left with in the end is a question that cannot yet be answered. The column is real. The seafloor it rests on was once dry land.
209:14
Speaker A
The age estimate based on the regional sea level curve places its potential construction at around 9,350 years ago, give or take. The stone is not native to the immediate seafloor context. The three holes are regular and similarly sized. The break is clean.
209:32
Speaker A
These are the facts as the research team presented them and the paper in which they presented them was peer-reviewed and published in a legitimate scientific journal. The counterarguments that bioalcarinite can form in elongated shapes naturally, that boring organisms
209:49
Speaker A
can create cylindrical cavities are also legitimate scientific observations. Neither side of this debate has been resolved because the follow-up investigation that would resolve it has not yet happened. That is where the story stands tonight. Not at a conclusion, but at a pause, a long one,
210:08
Speaker A
as it turns out. There is something almost appropriate about that. The Mediterranean has always been a place where certainty dissolves at the edges, where the line between history and myth, between what we know and what we imagine has never been entirely clean.
210:25
Speaker A
The sea has a way of holding its secrets with a kind of patient indifference. It does not offer them up easily. It asks you to go down into it, to work slowly and carefully in difficult conditions, to spend money and time and attention on
210:39
Speaker A
things that may or may not yield what you're looking for. It is not a generous archive, but it is a real one. And somewhere on the Pantaleria Veia bank 40 m below the surface in the blue green quiet between Sicily and Tunisia, the
210:55
Speaker A
column is still there, still broken into two pieces. Still with those three holes, still covered in 9,000 years of marine life, still waiting with the particular patience that only stone and water share for someone to come back and
211:11
Speaker A
look more carefully. Whether that column is the work of human hands or the work of natural processes we do not yet fully understand. It sits in a place where people once walked. That much is true.
211:24
Speaker A
The plane it rests on was once open air, open sky, open land. Someone at some point was there. They breathed the air above that ground. They looked out over whatever the coastline looked like then.
211:39
Speaker A
They may have seen the column, if it existed in their time, as something ordinary, something so familiar it barely registered. Or they may have built it themselves with enormous effort for reasons that made complete sense to them and that we can now only guess at.
211:56
Speaker A
We have a habit, I think, of imagining the past as a place populated by people who are fundamentally different from us, simpler in some way, less aware, less curious, less capable of the kind of meaning making that we associate with
212:12
Speaker A
fully human experience. But the evidence keeps quietly pushing back against that assumption. Gerbec pushed back against it. Atllet Yam pushed back against it. The obsidian trade routes across the open Mediterranean pushed back against it.
212:29
Speaker A
And perhaps in its quiet way, the Pantilaria Veia Bank column is pushing back against it, too. Not loudly, not with any kind of certainty, just sitting there at 40 m depth, being exactly as strange and as interesting as it has
212:45
Speaker A
always been. The Mediterranean will keep its secrets for a while longer, but it is worth knowing they are there. Worth holding the question open, worth paying attention to what the seafloor might still have to say.
212:59
Speaker A
The history of this sea and of the people who lived along its edges and across its now submerged plains is longer and more complicated than the history we have written so far. That is not a cause for anxiety. It is a cause
213:13
Speaker A
for curiosity. quiet, patient, unhurried curiosity. The kind that good science runs on and the kind that brings us back again and again to questions like this one. Thank you for spending this time here tonight. If you found this story worth following, a
213:32
Speaker A
like and a subscription go a long way toward helping this channel keep making things like it. And if you have thoughts about this, about the column, about underwater archaeology, about what we might still be missing beneath the water, the comments are always a good
213:48
Speaker A
place to leave them. I read them and I appreciate them more than I usually say.
213:53
Speaker A
Rest well, wherever you are, the sea will still be there in the morning holding everything it holds.
Topics:Pantelleria BankMediterranean archaeologyunderwater archaeologyStrait of Sicilysubmerged landscapessea level riseEmanuele Lodolostone columnLife Beyond Sceneancient mysteries

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