Did ancient Romans whale the Mediterranean?
(Artdaily.org)

Ancient Roman hunters may have precipitated the disappearance of grey and right whales from the Mediterranean, a study said Wednesday, suggesting commercial whaling is much older than we thought. Bones belonging to the two species were uncovered around the Strait of Gibraltar south of Spain, where they were never thought to have existed at all, a research team reported. The finding suggests right and grey whales were `common` in the North Atlantic 2,000 years ago, likely navigating the strait to calve in the temperate Mediterranean Sea. `The evidence that these two... species were present along the shores of the Roman Empire raises the hypothesis that they may have formed the basis of a forgotten whaling industry,` researchers wrote in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The Basques of northern Spain and southwestern France who lived about 1,000 years ago, are widely considered as being the first large-scale whalers. But the latest discovery of bones, identified