Aug 09, 2015 12:09 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Lying on the ocean floor off the coast of Sicily is an ancient monolith, recently discovered and detailed by a team of scientists.

According to Discovery News, a study on the find was published in The Journal of Archaeological Science. Various aspects of the three-foot monolith suggest it was manmade and the researchers dated it at 10,000 years.

Co-authoring the study was Emanuele Lodoloa, of the National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics in Trieste, Italy, and Zvi Ben-Avraham, an earth scientist at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

"There are no reasonable known natural processes that may produce these elements," they wrote in their paper, according to Discovery News. "The Sicilian Channel is one of the shallow shelves of the central Mediterranean region where the consequences of changing sea-level were most dramatic and intense."

You can see more photos of the dive, via Discovery News, here.

When the sea level in the Mediterranean rose, the region was flooded and left a series of islands close to one another. The researchers found the monolith at one of those islands, the Pantelleria Vecchia Bank.

The three-foot long stone block weighed some 15 tons and could have been part of a larger, more elaborate structure. The researchers described it as resembling Stonehenge.

"This discovery reveals the technological innovation and development achieved by the Mesolithic inhabitants in the Sicilian Channel region," Lodolo told Discovery News. "Such an effort undoubtedly reveals important technical skills and great engineering.

"Most likely the structure was functional to the settlement. These people were used to fishing and trading with the neighboring islands.

"It could have been some sort of a lighthouse or an anchoring system, for example."

(Source: Discovery News)

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