I'm from Malta. It's dead center in the Mediterranean sea, just 60 miles off the coast of Sicily, and always has been a melting point of cultures from around the Mediterranean as a result. This is literally the first time in my life I've heard it described as remote.

For the very early history of the Med—geological to 500 BC—I found the book The Making of the Middle Sea by Cyprian Broodbank to be an interesting read; ToC:

> One: A Barbarian History • Two: Provocative Places • Three: The Speciating Sea (1.8 million – 50,000 years ago) • Four: A Cold Coming We Had of It (50,000 years ago – 10,000 BC) • Five: Brave New Worlds (10,000 –5500 BC) • Six: How It Might Have Been (5500 – 3500 BC) • Seven: The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (3500 – 2200 BC) • Eight: Pomp and Circumstance (2200 – 1300 BC) • Nine: From Sea to Shining Sea (1300 – 800 BC) • Ten: The End of the Beginning (800 – 500 BC) • Eleven: De Profundis

* https://thamesandhudson.com/the-making-of-the-middle-sea-978...

* https://archive.org/details/makingofmiddlese0000broo

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyprian_Broodbank

Unanswered (and probably unanswerable) question: Was it deliberate? Or did they get blown off course while trying to go somewhere much shorter, and wind up hitting Malta before they sank or hit somewhere else?

It's also exciting that their code to actually reproduce these is also available. https://github.com/wccarleton/mesoneomalta

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