When the Mediterranean Dried Up.
The Messinian Salinity Crisis doesn’t sound like much, but for 400,000 years it meant that the Mediterranean Sea was cut off from the Atlantic and the WHOLE SEA evaporated, leaving huge salt deposits, that are still on the deep sea-floor of the Med. Such a place, several kilometres below “sea level”, would’ve have been sweltering and rather nasty, aside from the occasional oasis.
A geophysicist Web-friend of mine, Glenn Morton, believes that human origins began in one such oasis, a haven amidst the salt-flats, watered via a river spilling over the edge and splitting into four tributaries that met at the oasis… if that sounds familiar it’s because it’s from Genesis 2 & 3 of the Hebrew Bible. Glenn believes that God had formed Eden – which was a Garden, remember – and placed our first parents there. But Glenn isn’t an evolution denier. His geophysics work led him to accept Darwin and long-ages over a decade ago, but geology also gave him the only known example of an entire “land” (ha-aretz in Hebrew) being drowned beneath the waves just like in the tale of Noah’s Flood. To reconcile the Flood and the evidence of geology, Glenn suggests that Noah’s boat was the sole survivor of the refilling of the Mediterranean.
But when was it? The Messinian Salinity Crisis ended with the Miocene, some 5.33 million years ago, which implies Noah was a lot like Australopithecus, Orrorin and Sahelanthropus. Is that reasonable? Until 2003 I didn’t really think it was possible, but towards the end of that year a dimunitive hominid, much like those billennia ago, was uncovered in sediments on the Indonesian Island of Flores… Homo floresiensis. The more we learn about the Hobbits, as they’ve been dubbed, the more – to my eyes – they seem a relic of a far distant time in our evolution.
Perhaps Glenn is right?