While it may have been much drier 4 million ya, it is also likely to have been fairly dried out after 100,000 years of ice age evaporation. Probably had brackish swamps, salt deserts, islands, ponds and small seas. With the sea level 400 feet lower at the end of the ice age, it must have been some huge event when the ocean began to flow back through Gibralter as sea levels rose. Archeologists are only beginning to recognize the need for underwater exploration for drowned civilizations. The Greek historian H??? mentioned Egyptian priests speaking of events 9,000 years earlier which would have been at the beginning of the Younger Dryas cooling. Between Dryas cooling and Mediterranean flooding existing advanced cultures would have been seriously set back, especially as many of them would have been on sea coasts and river mouths.
If the Younger Dryas was precipitated by giant boloid strikes about 12,000 ya, there may also have been great Atlantic tsunamis which could have begun the Gibralter overflow. I too think the Noah flooding was probably caused by the sudden filling of the Black Sea at a much later date.
Herodotus.
Interesting series of books by James Churchward. His position was that in the Pacific there was a large land mass called MU. It was from MU that man settle the rest of the planet with the original travellers called Maya. They went west and east, through the Americas and Asia. They settled Egypt, founded Atlantis and even Scandinavia. They extended through India (original Ayrans) into China and beyond. Of course a great geologic upheaval destroyed Mu some thousands of years ago. Interesting read.
Mu had a population of some 64 million at its height around 50K years ago or more. It had a religion that worshiped a one god or deity that was represented by the Sun, although they did not worship the Sun, but used it as a representation of the Supreme Creator.
The Temples in the Americas were supposedly built by the folks from Mu and in the case of Mexico, were destroyed several times by cataclysm as the mountain ranges came to be. Same in North America and in South America. Mountain ranges in these areas came to be some 17 thousand years ago or so. Veliokovsy (sp) had the same theory regarding mountain ranges in the new world.
We still have much to learn regarding pre-historic times. Methinks that man was not actually a stone age knuckle dragger often depicted by modern man. In fact Churchyard writes that man devolved from his higher plateau due to the loss of Mu as the survivors tried to cope without tools. His theory was that the cruder the tool showed that the civilization was more in likely a higher society. Only after time of “living in the wilds” without their modern tools did arrow heads, etc get better made.
The HistoriesThe Egyptians... told me that the first man who ruled over Egypt was Min, and that in his time all Egypt, except the Thebaic canton, was a marsh, none of the land below Lake Moeris then showing itself above the surface of the water. This is a distance of seven days' sail from the sea up the river... Now if the Nile should choose to divert his waters from their present bed into this Arabian gulf, what is there to hinder it from being filled up by the stream within, at the utmost, twenty thousand years? For my part, I think it would be filled in half the time. How then should not a gulf, even of much greater size, have been filled up in the ages that passed before I was born, by a river that is at once so large and so given to working changes?
by Herodotus
tr by George Rawlinson
Book II -- Euterpe
...One fact which I learnt of the priests is to me a strong evidence of the origin of the country. They said that when Moeris was king, the Nile overflowed all Egypt below Memphis, as soon as it rose so little as eight cubits. Now Moeris had not been dead 900 years at the time when I heard this of the priests; yet at the present day, unless the river rise sixteen, or, at the very least, fifteen cubits, it does not overflow the lands. It seems to me, therefore, that if the land goes on rising and growing at this rate, the Egyptians who dwell below Lake Moeris, in the Delta (as it is called) and elsewhere, will one day, by the stoppage of the inundations, suffer permanently the fate which they told me they expected would some time or other befall the Greeks.