So little being said in both news blurbs always makes me suspicious. And while likely an innocent thing, getting the principal news maker's name wrong bodes ill as well.
@Fd:
There appears to be geological evidence that may point to the Mediterranean sea bed having been repeatedly flooded and empty over time. It is presumed that the Ice Ages have accounted for this by lowering the global sea level to the point where the Pillars of Hercules acts as a dam and the water, once trapped, eventually evaporates. If that core samples that have been taken and carbon dated are an accurate reflection of this phenomenon, the last time the Med was
dry and then re-flooded is something like 200 million years ago.
The last vestiges of the Pleistocene Ice Age is dated back to some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. So it is rather unlikely that the re-watering of the Med sea basin, itself, is the source of the flood story.
Interestingly, however, the Black Sea region, along the eastern most coast of
Turkey and going north into the Trans-Cacucasus region, is beginning to yield
VERY tempting evidence of catastrophic flooding which may have destroyed some form of a civilization, especially in the Georgia coastal region. This flooding is loosely estimated in time to be around 10,000 years ago. There are no hard and fast facts as yet but what is being discovered is making a lot of people enter into some intriguing conjecture.