A new study, published last week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B by an international team of researchers, offers the first evidence that there were once whales in the Mediterranean. In their article, the team, headed up by Ana Rodrigues of the Université de Montpelier, analyzed the DNA in a rare set of whale bones from Roman and pre-Roman sites in the Strait of Gibraltar. The results identified two species of whale: right whales (Eubalaena glacialis) and Grey whales (Eschrichtius robustus). Their article concludes that roughly two thousand years ago the Mediterranean was a calving ground.
Even more remarkable, the study argues that the reason we no longer see these whales in the Mediterranean is because ancient commercial whaling by the Romans drove them from the region.
The Romans were prodigious fishermen and had hundreds of processing plants for fish dotted along the Western coast of the Mediterranean (much of which was salted, dried and, sometimes, turned into garum, a popular Roman fish sauce). In a sensibly guarded comment to the New York Times, Rodrigues said, “We show the Romans had the means, technology and the opportunity for a whaling industry. But we don’t prove that they did.”
If accurate, this study can explain why it was that ancient peoples who lived along the Mediterranean were so afraid of sea monsters, and also why we no longer see these “monsters” today.
This in turn can help solve one of the biggest marine puzzles in the Bible: what did people imagine swallowed Jonah? Christian catacomb art of the “fish” depicts it as a kind of undersized water dragon with bunny ears. So while Northern Europeans might have always assumed it was a whale, this wasn’t always the case, and only now seems credible.
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