Balkans: The continent – a bridge of 30 million years that included Greece

An international team of scientists says it has found traces of a lost continent, the Balkans, stretching between Europe, Asia and Africa, which allowed Asian mammals to cross the European continent and colonize it some 34 million years ago, well in advance. in relation to previous scientific estimates. The Balkans, which included present-day Greece, the rest of the Balkans, and Turkey, existed as far back as 50 million years ago.

Paleontologists and geologists from France (National Research Center-CNRS, Universities of Marseilles and Rennes), USA (Universities of Washington, Connecticut, Kansas and Chicago) and Turkey (Universities of Kutahya and Eskisehir) Geoscience “Earth Science Reviews” reported that the forgotten Balkans played an important “bridging” role in the evolution of mammals in Eurasia. For millions of years during the Eocene Age (55 to 34 million years ago) Western Europe and Eastern Asia were two separate land masses with very different mammal fauna.

About 34 million years ago this state of separation changed when Europe was massively colonized by Asian animal species, which led to a significant enrichment of our continent’s fauna, but also to the extinction of previous European endemic species. Fossils found in the Balkans show that in the region of Southern Europe (including Greece) there were animals of Asian origin long before they appeared in Western Europe, which shows that the Balkans had earlier received mammalian populations from the East.

Scientists now have an explanation for this paradox, and that is the existence of the Balkans, a continent-bridge between Europe and Asia. Analysis and re-evaluation of all available paleontological data and discoveries from the 19th century to the present day lead to the conclusion that for a long period of the Jocene Age the region of present-day Balkans and Anatolia hosted a homogeneous fauna, distinct from those of Europe and the East. Asia. This exotic fauna included marsupials and large herbivorous mammals that looked like hippos.

Researchers estimate that the distinct Balkan continent was colonized by Asian animals about 40 million years ago. It is possible that then a significant glacier period 34 million years ago, when Antarctic ice sheets formed, led to a sharp drop in sea levels, connecting the Balkans by land with Western Europe and thus enabling massive migration of mammals to the west from the first to the second.

The Balkans are probably a remnant of the Greater Adriatic, another forgotten continent in the Mediterranean region that formed at least 200 million years ago.

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