Beneath the northern Adriatic Sea lie the submerged remnants of habitats occupied by Mesolithic and Neolithic communities between 9000 and 4000 BC, according to a new reconstruction of the region's coastal evolution published in Quaternary Science Reviews.
Researchers from the University of Southampton and Italy's National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics (OGS) combined existing sediment core analyses with new high-resolution geophysical data acquired by OGS to map the ancient terrain. The reconstructions reveal multiple generations of coastal barriers, back-barrier zones, lagoons, marshlands, and river deltas that once formed a shifting, habitable landscape before rising seas submerged the area.
Samuele Ongaro, a doctoral candidate at the University of Southampton, is the study's lead author. Federica Donda, a marine geologist in the OGS geophysics division, co-authored the paper.