The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago.

There are stories and legends that, characteristically, get greatly amplified in the telling, largely because, not having a clue as to how large the earth really is, some particularly cataclysmic event can expand itself in the telling to encompass the entire world.

Case in point, the tenacious legend of Atlantis. Satellite scans have given a pretty good picture of the oceans' bottoms, revealing previously unknown phenomena such as the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. But—there are no signs of a sunken continent in the Atlantic Ocean. There is, however, Thera, in the eastern Mediterranean, a fairly advanced civilization for the time, which perished in a monumental volcanic eruption, leaving only the ring-shaped island of Santorini, all that's left of a huge crater.

There is evidence that toward the end of the last ice age and for some time after, there was an ice dam blocking the Bosporus. There are also signs of villages at the bottom of the Black Sea. Putting two and two together, it appears that after the end of the ice age, the ice dam eventually melted and let the Mediterranean come flooding into the Black Sea. And the villages built on the hitherto dry bottom

This would have been cataclysmic, and to the locals, it could have seemed as if the flood covered the entire world.

This may have very well been the basis for the legend of a great, worldwide flood—and the basis of the Biblical story of Noah and the Arc.

There is overwhelming evidence that the dinosaurs perished in the aftermath of the Yucatan meteor strike some 65,000,000 years ago. Which, incidentally, gave mammals a chance to evolve.

And—whatever happened to unicorns?

Don Firth