Stone structure beneath Sea of Galilee made by humans, archaeologists say

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The circular structure was first detected in a sonar survey of part of the sea in the summer of 2003. Photo by Shmuel Marco, taken from LiveScience.com

A huge stone structure discovered at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee in 2003 is a human-made form, Israeli archaeologists have said, Yahoo News has reported.

Researchers said the structure is made of "unhewn basalt cobbles and boulders," has the shape of a cone and weighs an estimated 60,000 tons.

The stone was submerged by the sea when the water level rose. These kinds of structures around the world were sometimes made to mark burials, yet it is unknown if the Galilee structure was made for that purpose.

"Close inspection by scuba divers revealed that the structure is made of basalt boulders up to one meter long with no apparent construction pattern," the researchers wrote in the latest issue of the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology. "The boulders have natural faces with no signs of cutting or chiseling. Similarly, we did not find any sign of arrangement or walls that delineate this structure."

The structure could be more than 4,000 years old, said Yitzhak Paz, a researcher from Israel Antiquities Authority and Ben-Gurion University.