The central finding is staggering in its implications for how prehistoric life is understood in the region. Land once roamed by hunter-gatherers and later tended by early farmers now lies deep beneath the sea. The present-day Venice Lagoon, famous for its island city built on marshy, muddy ground, was once dry land that lay kilometres from the coast. The same is true of other towns in the lagoons further east, such as Grado, and even present-day coastal cities like Trieste would once have stood in hills overlooking swamps and lagoons below. In other words, some of the most archaeologically significant terrain in the region is invisible to conventional, land-based survey, hidden beneath seabed sediments that have accumulated over millennia.

Technically, the study is a palaeolandscape reconstruction built from two complementary strands of evidence. The researchers combined existing data from the analysis of sediment cores with new, high-resolution geophysical data acquired by OGS. Sediment cores allow scientists to identify different types of deposits, each characteristic of a particular environment, whether open marine, coastal barrier, lagoon, marsh or floodplain. Geophysical surveys, in turn, reveal the buried architecture of these deposits across wide areas of the seabed. By identifying the sediment types and modelling successive flooding episodes, the team was able to trace the backward shifting of coastal barriers, deposits running parallel to the shore, and the back-barrier systems, the marshy areas that lay beyond them. The result is a sequence of maps showing how the coastline retreated inland, stage by stage, across five millennia.

The timeline that emerges is anything but smooth. The reconstruction identifies a rapid rise in sea level around 8,400 BC that created tidal channels, marshes, sandbanks and large lagoons, followed by a more stable phase in which these features could persist and develop. Then came a large rise, a total of eight metres in the 1,200 years leading up to 6,600 BC, during which the sea repeatedly created, subsumed and recreated lagoons and marshes, pushing kilometres inland. A further major rise of up to five metres after 6,000 BC again shifted coastal features landward. Finally, after about 5,800 BC, the origins of the lagoons and the landscape recognisable today began to form. At times, the rate of rise reached up to 25 millimetres per year, a pace that would have been plainly visible within a single human lifetime.

That pace matters for understanding what prehistoric communities actually experienced. A rise of 25 millimetres per year translates into roughly a metre of relative sea level change across two or three generations, enough to permanently abandon settlements, alter hunting grounds and redraw the geography of trade and movement. The study highlights the constantly changing environment that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had to cope with, as rising water altered habitats, resources and the availability of food such as plants, fish and animal prey. Coastal barriers were overrun and rebuilt; lagoons formed, filled and re-formed. Successive shaping and reshaping of coastal features influenced the lives of Mesolithic and Neolithic people and the development of local communities, as the sea swallowed features it had previously formed, shaped new ones, and eventually produced the origins of the modern coast.

Samuele Ongaro, lead author and PhD researcher at the University of Southampton, an archaeologist by training, emphasises why these drowned terrains matter. Submerged landscapes, he notes, are an important missing piece in the study of prehistory, especially in the Northern Adriatic, because they hold many secrets about how ancestors lived and how they were connected to the land. According to Ongaro, the results of the research allow the reconstruction of these lost landscapes, the environments they hosted, how they changed over time, and what significance they might have held for prehistoric populations, which he describes as a fundamental step for future archaeological research in the area. The framing is significant: rather than treating the seabed as a blank between terrestrial sites, the study treats it as a continuous, inhabited landscape worthy of systematic investigation.

The environmental variety of the reconstructed coast also helps explain why people were drawn to it in the first place. As Ongaro points out, the variety of coastal environments, lagoons, river deltas, marshes and swamps, would have been an attractive landscape for foragers and hunters, offering diverse and productive ecological niches. Yet the flat nature of the landscape also made it prone to significant land loss, and communities were forced to adapt over time, choosing where to hunt, fish and settle. This tension, between ecological richness and geographic vulnerability, is central to the study’s archaeological implications. The team hopes further study will reveal more about how communities shifted their activities in response to coastal flooding, and how this eventually affected the advent of farming in the region by Neolithic people, one of the most debated transitions in European prehistory.

From the marine geoscience side, the collaboration demonstrates the value of integrating geological and geophysical data. Dr Federica Donda, a marine geologist from the Geophysics section of OGS and co-author of the paper, comments that the study shows how integrating geological and geophysical data makes it possible to reconstruct the environmental evolution of areas that are now submerged, while highlighting that the seabed is an integral part of archaeological heritage. In her view, a significant portion of the areas frequented by ancient populations is now underwater, and their history and evolution cannot be understood through terrestrial archaeology alone. This is a pointed methodological claim: any model of Mesolithic or Neolithic settlement in the Northern Adriatic that ignores the drowned plains is, by definition, incomplete, because it excludes the very terrain where much of early coastal life unfolded.

The paper, titled Palaeolandscape reconstructions for the Northern Adriatic: Inundation models, depositional environments, and potential archaeological implications, underscores the potential of palaeogeographic reconstructions for studying the evolution of past societies. By returning to archaeological research a piece of territory that is no longer visible today, but which for thousands of years was part of the European landscape, the work opens a path toward predictive models of where submerged prehistoric sites might survive. The method of research is described as computational simulation and modelling, combining inundation models with depositional interpretations, an approach that could be applied to other drowned coastlines around the world where post-glacial sea level rise has erased the record of early coastal adaptation.

For a region whose modern identity is bound up with the fragile balance between water and land, from the Venice Lagoon to the gravelly shores of Trieste, the study offers a deep-time perspective on an ongoing process. The coast that residents and visitors know today is merely the latest configuration in a long sequence of flooding, barrier migration and lagoon formation that began when the last ice age ended. What the Southampton and OGS team has shown is that this sequence is readable in the sediments beneath the seabed, and that within those sediments lie clues to how some of Europe’s earliest coastal communities lived, moved and adapted as the sea rose around them. The next stage of research, the authors suggest, will focus on pinning down how human activity responded to each successive inundation, turning a drowned landscape into a map of prehistoric resilience.

Subject of Research: Prehistoric sea level rise and coastal landscape change in the Northern Adriatic

Article Title: Study reveals how prehistoric coastal flooding shaped the Northern Adriatic

Article References: Study reveals how prehistoric coastal flooding shaped the Northern Adriatic. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Northern Adriatic, sea level rise, Venice Lagoon, Mesolithic, Neolithic, submerged landscapes, palaeogeography, coastal barriers, lagoons, sediment cores, geophysics, Quaternary Science Reviews

The point itself is a classic example of what archaeologists call a plain point, a barbless projectile head belonging to the broad Type 1 category first defined by J. G. D. Clark in his 1936 study of Mesolithic settlement in northern Europe. Straight in profile, oval to subcircular in cross-section, and tapering to a conical tip and a long, pointed conical base, the artefact was carved from the metapodial bone of a large ruminant. What makes it extraordinary is not its shape, which has parallels across the European Plain, but the survival of a circumferential band of dark residue about 8 millimetres wide and up to a millimetre thick, preserved roughly 6.5 centimetres from the base, exactly where a hunter would have seated the point into its haft.

Because plain points are notoriously difficult to date on morphology alone, the research team, led by Justyna Orłowska and Grzegorz Osipowicz of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń together with colleagues from the Lithuanian Institute of History and Vilnius University, took the unusual step of radiocarbon dating the adhesive itself. A 7.1-milligram sample of the residue, removed with an ethanol-cleaned scalpel, was analysed by accelerator mass spectrometry at the Poznań Radiocarbon Laboratory. The uncalibrated result of 8840 plus or minus 40 years before present calibrates, using the IntCal20 curve, to between 10,154 and 9,711 calibrated years before present, or roughly 8205 to 7762 cal BC. That makes the Garnys point the oldest directly radiocarbon-dated plain bone point of this morphological type from Lithuania, and one of the oldest osseous projectile points yet dated in the country.

Identifying the animal that supplied the raw material required a different toolkit. Macroscopic examination suggested a large cervid metapodial, but poor collagen preservation limited the ZooMS analysis, a technique that fingerprints collagen peptides by MALDI-ToF mass spectrometry, to just five diagnostic markers. Even so, the preserved marker set was sufficient to assign the bone to the deer family, and when combined with the artefact’s dimensions and cortical thickness, the evidence points most plausibly to an elk, Alces alces, metatarsal. Red deer and roe deer cannot be entirely excluded, but fallow deer can be ruled out outright, since the species never occurred naturally in prehistoric Lithuania.

Under the microscope, the point tells the story of its own manufacture. High- and low-magnification wear analysis at the Traceology Laboratory in Toruń revealed that the lateral edges, tip and base were shaped by flat scraping, leaving characteristic multi-planar surface bands that survive best near the base, where they were shielded by the haft. The tip also shows probable remnants of rough scraping with a denticulated tool, and linear, unidirectional sheen across the surface indicates that the finished point was deliberately burnished. The tip is broken, but the fracture is non-diagnostic, and the researchers note that post-depositional damage in the riverbed appears the more likely cause than an impact in flight.

The chemical identity of the black residue was resolved through two complementary techniques. Attenuated total reflectance Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, applied first as a rapid, minimally destructive screen, produced a spectrum closely comparable to experimentally produced birch bark tar, showing aliphatic carbon-hydrogen stretching bands, carbonyl absorptions and carbon-oxygen bands typical of an oxygenated, triterpenoid-rich organic material. Because such functional groups are not individually diagnostic, the team turned to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. The chromatographic profile of the underivatised solvent extract matched the experimental birch tar reference closely, particularly in the retention-time region of lupane-type triterpenoids, and two principal peaks corresponded in both retention time and mass spectra to analytical standards of lupeol and betulin, the signature compounds of birch bark transformed by heating under oxygen-limited conditions.

The researchers are careful about what this identification does and does not prove. Lupeol and betulin also occur naturally in birch bark, so they are interpreted within the broader chromatographic pattern and archaeological context rather than as standalone markers, and the GC-MS data characterise only the solvent-soluble, gas-chromatography-amenable fraction of the residue. Even with those caveats, the finding is remarkable. Birch bark tar is a thermally transformed product, made by dry-distilling bark, and its presence on a weapon from the ninth millennium BC in the southeastern Baltic adds a crucial data point to a growing map of Mesolithic adhesive use that stretches from Star Carr in Britain to the Dutch North Sea seabed and the Early Mesolithic site of Krzyż Wielkopolski 7 in Poland.

Perhaps the most vivid insights come from the hafting traces themselves. Beyond the adhesive band, the point preserves distinct impressions of wrapping and compression marks near the base, and within the tar itself the researchers identified a clear imprint of a fibre strand, almost certainly from the binding material. Taken together with the adhesive’s distribution, the evidence points to a specific assembly sequence: the point was inserted into a socketed shaft, bound with fibrous ligatures, and then sealed with birch tar, which would have strengthened the joint and improved its water resistance. Unlike the side-mounted bone points known from sites such as Friesack IV, Ulkestrup Lyng and Krzyż Wielkopolski 7, the Garnys evidence more closely supports a non-detachable point mounted in a socketed shaft, a configuration the team has reconstructed in a step-by-step illustration.

What was the weapon for? Unbarbed points are generally interpreted as heads for lances or spears, and they may also have served as central prongs in multi-tined leisters used for fishing. The Garnys point’s broken tip prevents a definitive functional attribution, but its morphology and its riverine context are consistent with a lance or spearhead deployed in aquatic settings, perhaps for fishing or for hunting semi-aquatic mammals such as beaver and otter, both documented targets of bone-point weaponry in the ethnographic and archaeological record. Beaver remains make up roughly 7 to 10 percent of the faunal assemblage at Garnys 1, lending contextual weight to that interpretation.

The Garnys 1 site itself, discovered in 2017 and investigated since, has yielded hundreds of wooden, osseous, lithic and ceramic artefacts from a riverbed with exceptional organic preservation, and radiocarbon dates on other barbed bone points from the same stretch of river cluster in the Mesolithic, around 7700 to 7300 cal BC. Together with the new dating, the point confirms that the Žeimena River corridor was intensively used by hunter-gatherer-fishers across the Mesolithic, Subneolithic and Neolithic. More broadly, the study demonstrates how wear analysis, biomolecular fingerprinting and organic chemistry can be woven together to extract a full biography from a single artefact, especially in waterlogged contexts where even adhesives and surface deposits survive. For a region where most osseous points are contextless stray finds, the Garnys point offers a rare, precisely dated and technologically legible window into the craftsmanship of Europe’s early postglacial hunters.

Subject of Research: Interdisciplinary analysis of an early Mesolithic osseous projectile point with birch bark tar adhesive from the Garnys 1 site, Lithuania

Article Title: An early mesolithic osseous projectile point from the Garnys 1 site, Lithuania: interdisciplinary analysis of a rare find from the East Baltic Plain

Article References: Orłowska, J., Bosiak, M., Piličiauskas, G., Piličiauskienė, G., Matiukas, A., & Osipowicz, G. (2026). An early mesolithic osseous projectile point from the Garnys 1 site, Lithuania: interdisciplinary analysis of a rare find from the East Baltic Plain. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 18(10), Article 211. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-026-02576-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12520-026-02576-5

Keywords: Mesolithic, bone projectile point, birch bark tar, Lithuania, Garnys 1, ZooMS, GC-MS, radiocarbon dating, hafting, hunter-gatherers, East Baltic, underwater archaeology