Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (9 page)

The idea of a Minotaur is firmly in the realm of fantasy and myth. There are no animals alive today or found in the fossil record that combine the traits of humans and bulls in any way. Moreover, even if such a creature did exist, the biology would not work. Unlike, say, humans and bears, which have teeth and digestive systems that can manage both plants and meat, bulls are obligate plant eaters and cannot chew or process meat. Since there are no fossil mammals that suggest the merging of a bull and human skeleton, it is more likely that the concept for a beast that was half man and half bull stemmed from Greek interpretation of the culture found on Crete between 3000 and 1100 BC.

The people of ancient Crete, the Minoans, were ahead of their time. Women are depicted in paintings as having been leaders. The cities had intricate plumbing systems. Tools of war are almost entirely unseen in the archaeological record. Paintings of dolphins and bulls
abound with art revealing Minoans engaging in games with bulls, grabbing them by the horns, and vaulting off of bulls’ backs. They are somewhat reminiscent of Spanish bullfights except that no works of art have yet been found showing a Minoan attacking or slaying a bull. Archaeologists speculate that Minoans were engaging bulls for sport and that the art depicts a favorite activity of the culture.

By the time the Greeks emerged as a strong and healthy civilization, the Minoan world had effectively collapsed. The reasons for the collapse are debated. Some suggest that invaders with iron weapons overwhelmed them while others posit that a tsunami or severe earthquake wiped out the society. Regardless of the cause, it is possible that the mythmaking Greeks heard stories, passed along by word of mouth, of a people on Crete “who were one” with bulls. Some artwork showing humans and bulls grappling may have further inspired the idea of a half-man, half-bull monster.

But the Greeks were not the first to merge man and beast. Ancient paintings in the Chauvet cave of southern France, where some artwork on the walls is nearly thirty-two thousand years old, depict a creature that is clearly half woman and half bull. Whether this was a monster is a mystery, but we know these ancient humans were not bull leaping like the Minoans. What seems a more probable explanation for this drawing is that early humans saw the power of wild animals and believed drawings that mixed animal and human features imbued some strength of the wild upon them. The same ideas may have been present in Greece and played their part in the rise of the Minotaur.

Even so, these arguments at best only partially explain the story of the monster. Why go to the effort of inventing the labyrinth, and what about the “cruel bellowing” that Callimachus describes as having come from belowground?

If it truly existed, exactly where the labyrinth was built is a matter of intense debate among historians. Sir Arthur Evans, the first person to excavate the Minoan palace of Knossos on Crete, proposed that the extensive ruins of Knossos itself, which have numerous tunnels and passages carved into the ground, was where later
Greeks believed the labyrinth to be. Others argue that the labyrinth was associated with either the Skotino cave complex on the island, a short journey east of Knossos near the modern resort village of Gouves, or a series of tunnels about 45 miles south of Knossos at a site known today as Gortyn.

Regardless of the precise location of the labyrinth, there is no question that the Minotaur was specifically being placed underground and that its “cruel bellows” were coming from some subterranean location. To fully understand what this means, a bit of geology is required.

Earthquakes have been common on Crete for more than a hundred thousand years. The reason is because Crete, and many of the other Greek islands, are sitting above some very active sections of Earth’s crust.

Not all crust is created equal. Some crust forms the continents and some crust forms the ocean floor. At first glance they look the same, but they are chemically and functionally quite different. Continental crust is relatively light and buoyant, while oceanic crust is relatively dense and heavy.

In areas called subduction zones, like those around Japan, Indonesia, and Washington State in the United States, heavy oceanic crust moves toward the coasts and runs into buoyant continental crust. When this happens, the ocean crust’s weight draws it under the continental crust and it begins a long journey deep into the earth. During this journey, the oceanic crust cracks, causing earthquakes, and experiences ever-increasing pressures and temperatures that cause it to melt. Because heat rises, some of this molten rock comes up toward the surface and eventually gets blasted out of volcanoes. These regions are almost always marked by a series of big volcanoes laid out in rows aligned with the subduction zone.

On Crete, the geology is different. South of the island there is an
enormous plate of continental crust that makes up most of Africa, and attached to the north side of this plate is a bit of old ocean crust. Crete itself is sitting on a small plate of continental crust, known as the Aegean Plate, that makes up both the floor of the Mediterranean Sea and the islands in the area.
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Unlike other subduction zones, where the ocean crust is doing the moving and sliding under immobile continental crust, in the Mediterranean, the continental crust of the Aegean Plate is sliding southward onto the bit of oceanic crust sitting along the northern tip of the North African Plate. Moreover, it is moving at the very fast
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rate of 1¼ inches (33 millimeters) a year while the North African Plate is moving northward at the sluggish rate of
¹
/
₅
of an inch (5 millimeters) a year.

With these differing speeds and movements, Crete ends up in an unusual situation. The oceanic crust attached to the North African Plate is not subducting in the way that ocean crust normally subducts in other parts of the world because there is not very much of it, it is not very heavy, and it is attached to the enormous chunk of continental crust making up North Africa. It is still melting and ultimately forming volcanoes far north of Crete, but rather than going down at a steep angle as oceanic crust usually does, it is staying stubbornly shallow and forcing the Aegean Plate upward. Indeed, Crete exists as an island specifically because the North African Plate is constantly pushing it up and out of the sea at a rate of
¹
/
₅
of an inch annually. While a rise of
¹
/
₅
of an inch doesn’t sound like much, it is a lot for an island to grow in a year.

As for earthquakes, Crete’s position is a miserable one. Because the ocean crust on the northern tip of the North African Plate is subducting (admittedly in an odd way), this causes earthquakes as
the old crust cracks during its shallow descent. In places like Japan and Washington State, which have large earthquakes, this would be the end of the geologic story, but in Crete, there is more. The Aegean Plate’s rapid movement up and over the North African Plate is causing tremendous tension to build up quickly and leading sections of both plates to crack more often than they would if one plate was just slowly descending below the other. This makes Crete much more prone to earthquakes than most other parts of the world.

Could regular earthquakes be the origin of the Minotaur myth? Such tectonic activity could have left ancient inhabitants of Crete searching for stories to explain what they were feeling beneath their feet. Certainly, the sound of an earthquake could be described as the “bellowing” of a beast somewhere underground. But it seems more likely that there must have been some unbelievably severe earthquakes that wreaked such terrible havoc that an explanation, like that of the Minotaur, was needed. And written accounts reveal that horrific earthquakes are a part of Crete’s past.

On July 21, 365 AD, the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who was living in Alexandria, wrote:

Slightly after daybreak, and heralded by a thick succession of fiercely shaken thunderbolts, the solidity of the whole earth was made to shake and shudder, and the sea was driven away, its waves were rolled back, and it disappeared, so that the abyss of the depths was uncovered and many-shaped varieties of sea-creatures were seen stuck in the slime; the great wastes of those valleys and mountains, which the very creation had dismissed beneath the vast whirlpools, at that moment, as it was given to be believed, looked up at the sun’s rays. Many ships, then, were stranded as if on dry land, and people wandered at will about the paltry remains of the waters to collect fish and the like in their hands; then the roaring sea as if insulted by its repulse rises back in turn, and through the teeming shoals dashed itself violently on islands and extensive tracts of the mainland, and flattened innumerable buildings
in towns or wherever they were found. Thus in the raging conflict of the elements, the face of the earth was changed to reveal wondrous sights. For the mass of waters returning when least expected killed many thousands by drowning, and with the tides whipped up to a height as they rushed back, some ships, after the anger of the watery element had grown old, were seen to have sunk, and the bodies of people killed in shipwrecks lay there, faces up or down.

Marcellinus was witnessing a tsunami of tremendous proportions, and according to research studies of the area, it appears that the inhabitants of Crete were plagued by these disasters.

In 2007, a team of geologists led by Beth Shaw, then a researcher at the University of Cambridge, set out to determine what might have caused the ancient tsunami and whether there was still a threat of enormous waves to the region. The team’s work brought them to Crete, where they started analyzing the carbon found inside corals.

Carbon is an element that appears naturally in the environment in two common forms, carbon 12 and carbon 14. Carbon 12 is stable and, as long as it is left alone, remains carbon 12 in perpetuity. Carbon 14 initially forms as the result of cosmic rays striking it and is a radioactive material, meaning that over time it loses energy by radiating away energized particles. During their lifetimes, all animals consume both carbon 12 and carbon 14 from their environment. After they die, the amount of carbon 12 in the body remains constant but the carbon 14 loses energy and slowly degrades into carbon 12. All samples of carbon 14 shed energy at precisely the same rate and, for this reason, it is possible to look at the carbon 14 found in fossils and work out very accurate dates of animal death by comparing the amount of carbon 14 in the fossil to the amount of carbon 14 in animals that are currently alive.

What surprised the Cambridge team was that all of the algal organisms and aquatic tube worms that had been growing along the western shore of Crete suddenly died in AD 365. When they looked closer, they noticed that the ground around the fossilized organisms
had marks on it that looked like a bathtub ring around the island. They realized that tectonic activity had suddenly shoved the western side of the island up and out of the Mediterranean Sea. The team’s analysis, reported in
Nature Geoscience
in 2008, proposed that tectonic activity pushed the western portion of Crete nearly 32 feet (10 meters) out of the water in a single powerful tectonic event. This sudden uplift quickly dried out all of the algae and worms that had been sitting happily on the seafloor and killed them, thus explaining why they all have exactly the same carbon 14 value.

Lifting that much rock out of the water would have caused a tsunami of epic proportions,
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similar to what Marcellinus described, as well as been connected to a very powerful earthquake. Yet 365 was several thousand years after the days of the Minoans and was probably just an isolated tragedy, right?

Not so. Work on the geology of the Mediterranean, conducted by Anja Scheffers at Southern Cross University in Australia and reported in
Earth and Planetary Science Letters
in 2008, revealed boulders along the Greek coast with shelled marine animals attached to them. Scheffers and her team realized that, because of the animals attached to them, these boulders had to have once rested beneath the waves. Yet the boulders themselves were not sitting among marine sediments. The only logical explanation was that giant waves had thrown the boulders out of the sea and onto dry land while animals were still hanging on.

When the team analyzed the carbon 14 of the fossil animals on boulders, they found that some of the boulders had been thrown out of the water in 365. This was not surprising. However, they also found evidence of tsunamis having formed in and around 6000, 1000, and 200 BC, suggesting that really big tsunamis, and the powerful earthquakes responsible for creating them, have been common phenomena along the Greek coast for the past ten thousand years.

Scheffers does not provide any evidence of powerful tsunamis between 3000 and 1100 BC, when the Minoan civilization was flourishing, but there is no need. Earthquakes half as strong as those that can send boulders flying out of the ocean terrify people living today who understand the geologic forces behind them. To the poor souls living on ancient Crete, violent shaking of the ground had to have been downright petrifying. During these episodes, buildings would have quickly crumbled, with collapsing pieces of stone and wood snapping human bones as if they were twigs. Without even the most rudimentary geology available to turn to for an explanation, there was no denying that these destructive events were the result of the Minotaur and the deafening roar was its angry bellowing as it fumed in misery deep within its shadowy labyrinth.
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But not all people of the world have come to associate earthquakes with monsters. In some places, earthquakes are viewed as indications of good deities being present.

On the Hawaiian islands, where people have long been relentlessly exposed to strong earthquakes, natives worshipped the goddess Pele. Described in myths as a sensitive woman of beauty with a fierce temper, she represented both the destructive fury of volcanic eruptions and the mesmerizing enchantment of Hawaiian dance. Sure, touching her could set fire to a mortal’s skin, but she was also sensitive, loving, and emotional. Thus Pele, the fair and fiery, is a far cry from the Minotaur.