Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Ever see a hawk pick up a snake?

As I am one with an ardent appreciation of the classics, allow me to fill in what your memory has forgotten. So, the Mediterranean has some interesting geological features where it meets the ocean which means that its own water level will not necessarily correspond with sea level. As a result, at the end of the ice age it was mostly if not entirely dry, as its own water level rose in response to whatever phenomena was responsible various expressions of life came to inhabit the region. As the region filled it also became impassible and so some rather unlikely, and unfortunate, population centers were left essentially stranded -such as people, who would become the Minoans and other Greeks, as well as elephants. Dwarfism is a pretty straightforward adaption to environmental constraints, one can see it in goldfish readily, whom will remain diminutive if lacking sufficient volume to grow, but also with many other animals. Most recently it was observed in a species of toad which shrank by a third in just a century on two different islands. It happens amongst people as well, which is why those native to the Mediterranean were historically so short. I mean, 5'2'' was the average height of a Roman male, now it is the average height of an Italian female.

In any event, this is what was likely responsible for the description of Cyclops on Odysseus' journey home following the fall of Troy. A lot of contemporary research has offered incredible illumination on the events of both the Illiad and the Odyssey, for instance, we know the day Troy fell now as June 1st 1312 since the Illiad mentions two eclipses which took places and the seasons in which they occurred with sufficient detail to model when those events would have occurred in relation to one another, which only occurs every 5000 years or so if memory serves. We also know that the concept of money had not been invented yet as of that time by account of what constituted the wealth seized from Troy and the terms in which it was described. Academia takes some hard raps, but at least in the classics departments, there is still some very real scholarship going on and we learn a little bit more about those wily Greeks every year.

EDIT: Anyway, here is a picture of a dwarf elephant from Malta, an island in the Mediterranean which should help make the Greek interpretation of the fossils they found make more sense:

This, a fossile, lacking its teeth giving it a more anthropomorphic aesthetic.



And this for scale: