Free Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters by Matt Kaplan Page B

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 laterGreeks 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.
Shaken and stirred
    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 anenormous 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. 27
    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 28 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