[DeBraid]

> Caribou are herded

This is literally the purpose of a stone wall: herding the animals in a specific direction, to a specific location.

> not sure why you would make a wall to hunt them

Because 8500 years ago hunting tools were primitive (stone tips on spears) so stacking the odds in their favour was smart.

[worldwidelies]

The wall is almost a kilometer long with some stones as large as cars. These were intelligent people. You think people intelligent enough to build something this massive were not intelligent enough to find other ways to efficiently hunt reindeer. I find it funny how a lot of these studies findings dumb down the people they are studying. Maybe this wall was a retaining wall for rising water levels. That would imply knowledge of their environment, their ability to think past their next meal and would be a testament to their engineering abilities.

[Retric]

The thing is only one and a half foot tall on average and has ~1500 stones, so rather than moving large stones they could have simply incorporated large stones that were in useful locations. It’s an artificial structure, but they didn’t need to move every stone just most of them.

I wouldn’t be surprised if a small hunting party could have saved time after building it because it lasts a lifetime and people hunted regularly. However, reducing the number of failed hunts was probably more important than making hunting more efficient. The transition to farming was a major increase in effort for a consistent food supply, this is could have been an in between step.

[RecycledEle]

> The thing is only one and a half foot tall on average

Stone walls tend to be taller when built, and then decay over thousands of years.

[Retric]

Many stone walls ~1/5th this age are still roughly intact. Surprisingly long sections of Hadrian’s wall would still be useful defensive fortifications.

This is a field of rubble but you can roughly figure height from the stones that remain.

[defrost]

There are many possibilities here.

Look up "glacial erratic", these are stones often as large as cars that are frequently found in lines, carried forward by glaciers, dropped as ice retreats.

People are, believe it or not, intelligent enough to infill really big rocks with smaller rocks and other materials in order to create a race wall to funnel herds towards a blind for corralling or killing - it's still done to this day albeit with dogs, horses, bikes, and other vehicles.

Depending on the landscape these may also be walls resulting from clearing rocks to surround herd animals and clear soil for more feed growth - again, path of least resistance dictates infilling between big rocks.

Various parts of Europe are littered with examples of very old rock walls, a kilometre or so is not much by comparison.