It is my understanding that the Mediterranean Basin was composed of two large lakes in times past. I also have read that the ocean has been as much as 400 feet lower during various ice ages. If during one of the previous ice age mixima in the past million years there was mostly dry land with only a relatively small passage of water from ocean to Mediterranean I am sure it would have been possible for hominids to swim or raft across. Furthermore, how do we know that the current channel depth was not caused by erosion from rising ocean levels rushing in to fill the entire M basin? Perhaps it was much less deep in times past.
Before the “dam” broke, it was all dry land in the area between Africa and Spain, but that was prior to about 5.5 million years ago, when (presumably) there would have been no one around to walk across the landscape or live down there. The sealevels fell during glaciations, but the decline was greater as one got closer to the poles. Thus, the Bering Strait is very much deeper than the straits, but in recent years research has shown that the seabed used to be dry land, and very similar to current landscapes on either side of the water. :’)
Humans didn’t need the water to get shallow and narrow to cross on vessels, they had it goin’ on even 800K years ago.
Mammoth Herds ‘Roamed Fertile Bering Strait In Ice Age’
Ananova | 6-5-2003
Posted on 06/04/2003 6:39:25 PM EDT by blam
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/923247/posts
A New View of the Bering Land Bridge
Article #1304
by Ned Rozell
September 26, 1996
Alaska Science Forum
http://www.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF13/1304.html
Whoops, “an average depth of 30–50 m (100–165 ft)”, but the point I was trying to make was, the seabed was exposed where the waters are now much deeper than this.