Robert Alley: Your comments to me: Yeah, if the “Roman” colony on Ireland actually existed it was a freelance operation like the ones you describe.  I think we’re headed in the same direction with this one.  Roman civilization did have it’s attraction to people outside of its control, at least when it wasn’t indulging its dark side.  What I was visualizing was the survival of a strongly Roman-influenced culture in Ireland, maybe even calling itself Roman, though it would never have actually been controlled from Rome.  That could happen due to better diplomacy instead of by conquest as you point out.

By the way, what actually happened toward the end of Roman Britain is pretty controversial, with some experts saying that there really wasn’t much of Roman culture left by the time the legions pulled out, while others claim that Roman culture pulled itself back together to some extent after the legions left, forming a series of possibly allied small kingdoms that maintained something of the Roman culture for a fairly extended period.

The anti-tank grenades scenario has quite a bit of potential actually.  One of the peculiarities of the French army of 1940 was that the French did not have anti-tank rifles.  They depended completely on anti-tank artillery for anti-tank defense.  While anti-tank rifles of the period weren’t particularly effective, they did give troops of the armies that had them some close-in anti-tank capability.  More importantly, they gave the troops an important psychological boost, making them less like to panic when tanks approached.  The anti-tank grenades could have played that same role, but their actual effectiveness would have been considerably higher.

You’re visualizing about the same set of events in the November 1942 part of the scenario seed that I was figuring on, with a few minor changes.  First, the Vichy army had 100,000 men in metropolitan France, with additional forces in North Africa.  Historically, I believe that the Germans used something on the order of ten divisions to take the south of France.  The Italians also had some troops involved, at least in the occupation of Vichy if not in the initial invasion. 

The French had contingency plans to mobilize another couple of hundred thousand men—mostly transport troops, plus some hidden transportation assets and some hidden weapons, including a considerable number of artillery pieces and even some airplanes in addition to the ones they were officially supposed to have.  The French also produced about 300 armored personnel carriers under the guise of ‘forestry tractors’, though I’m not sure if all of them had been produced by November of 1942.

 None of this actually got used when the Germans invaded, and one French general that tried to use the hidden weapons got arrested by the French army.  I’m not sure if the French would have resisted under this set of circumstances either.  It would have probably depended on how strong of a force they thought that the US could bring to bear.  Admiral Darlan once told a US envoy who was sounding him out on how the French would react to a US move into North Africa that the French would welcome that kind of a force as long as it included a large enough force to land in and protect Vichy France too.  I believe that the figure he mentioned was twenty or twenty-five divisions—far more than the US had available at that time.  Darlan almost certainly knew that the US didn’t have that kind of forces available, and was trying to warn the US against a premature move that would draw the Germans into southern France and North Africa.

Vichy probably didn’t resist historically because they still hoped to salvage some kind of deal with the Germans that left Vichy with the French fleet and some degree of independent military power, and also because they realized that resistance would just bring the Germans down on them in full occupation of Poland-style brutality.  If that was going to happen anyway, they might decide to go for calling for US help.

If the US was going to be able to hold on to any part of southern France they would have to send essentially all of the forces they had earmarked for North Africa, along with the British troops that were scheduled to go to French North Africa.  I’m not even sure that would be enough.  The main question would be how much the Germans could spare from the Eastern Front.  With the Stalingrad battle sucking German forces in, that might not be much, unless of course the Germans decided that the situation was serious enough that they needed to suspend the Stalingrad offensive, which has all kinds of implications.

On Magic and Religion, hopefully all mysteries were cleared up last issue.  On Flintstones Timeline, Take 2: for some reason I hadn’t thought about domesticating dinosaurs, though that would add to the fun of the scenario.  I can vouch for the fact that cats are hard to tame down if they don’t have contact with people in fairly early kittenhood.  My sister and I tamed down several generations of kittens on my uncle’s farm, but when I went back there a few years ago the farm cats were essentially feral.

Yes, the Daladier-Reynaud feud complicated French efforts and demeaned both men, especially since it seemed to be precipitated by their mistresses.  Reynaud’s mistress in particular seems to have played a significant role in undermining Reynaud’s attempts at rallying support for continuing the war. 

I’ve seen a variety of opinions of Weygand.  He did apparently do a reasonably good job of rallying the French army to fight on after the Dunkirk fiasco, and he did make some efforts to secretly rebuild French forces in North Africa during his term in charge there during the Vichy period.  On the other hand, when he took charge of the French army he took a rather leisurely tour to evaluate the situation at a time where a matter of hours in making key decisions might have allowed considerably more of the French army to escape south out of Belgium before the Germans reached the coast.  He also played a significant role in undermining French morale as you noted.  My overall impression is that he was a considerably better leader overall than Gamelin, but he didn’t have much respect for the French Republic and he was certainly not the best leader for the French army if the idea was to fight to the bitter end.

Sorry I stepped on the potential Columbus Editor’s Challenge.

Yeah, you’re right about old data surviving on digital media—sporadically.  I don’t think I have a digital copy of the final version of my first complete novel anymore (believe it or not I accidentally dumped coke on both the floppy disk with the main copy and the floppy disk with the last backup of it.  On the other hand I keep stumbling across older copies of the novel on various old hard drives in computers from that era, along with a bunch of old AH stuff from the old (and now defunct) Genie online network.  That’s actually kind of interesting stuff.  Both Steve Stirling and Harry Turtledove hung out there, and I got into a couple of hard-fought but reasonably friendly debates with Stirling.

On the Poland expanding west scenario: Yeah, I’ve toyed with using the Kapp Pusch to end up with a fragmented or smaller Germany too.  It’s not a bad point of divergence.  I like the way you take it for the most part, with Germany fragmenting and the rump going communist.  If rump Germany went communist you would almost certainly see massive Red Scares in the US, as well as in some of the European countries, probably including France.  If the new German government started rearming seriously that could easily lead to an early World War II, with Poland, France, and maybe Japan on one side and rump Germany on the other.

Let’s say that the new German government starts rearming, or more likely expanding and militarizing communist party militias.  The Poles and French tell them to disband the militarized militias.  That doesn’t happen and France and Poland moves in to overthrow the communist government.  At that point the Soviets either let the German communists go down or take a hand in the proceedings.  I’m not sure how that would play out.  Stalin had no great love for the German communists, regarding them as potential rivals for leadership of the communist movement.  If the Soviets end up at war with the French and Poles, the Japanese might decide to pick off a few Soviet possessions in the Far East.  I’m not sure how this would all end up.  It probably depends on the timing of the war.

On Internet and other computer alternatives, I agree that Linux will probably not displace Windows anytime soon, though I recently installed SUSE Linux 9.0 on one of my computers alongside Windows and I was very impressed with how easily it installed and how well it inter-operated with Windows.  I was easily able to access information on the Windows computers on my little peer-to-peer network.

The rise of Open Source applications software like Gimp, Abiword, Mozilla, Open Office and many others make it easier for smaller ‘hobby operating systems’ to be more competitive choices.  The operating systems don’t have to attract commercial software.  They just have to attract enough technically inclined people to port a subset of the Open Source applications to their operating system. 

There are well over a dozen alternate operating systems currently being actively developed, with some of them barely past the design idea and a little coding stage and others with several stable releases under their belts and quite a bit of Open Source software ported.  Some of them are commercial, but most of them are Open Source or Freeware.  Among the Open Source projects, there are a couple of flavors of BSD, an Open Source BEOS project, an Open Source Amiga project called AROS, a Windows NT clone called Reactos (alpha stages but with a few applications starting to run like AbiWord and Irfanview), and some start-from-scratch efforts like SkyOS, Atheos, Plan 9, and Minuet.

Of all of those, I would say that the BSD variants and Reactos have the best shots at actually developing a following, though both the Amiga operating system and BEOS (the operating system developed by a now defunct company started by an ex-Apple CEO) do have active and fanatically loyal followings.

Your comments to Docimo: Yeah, I’m guessing that the US would be a tad bit more vengeful toward the German in the aftermath of a successful Valentine’s Day-type attack.
 
Dale Cozort:  Commenting on my own zine again.  I’m very sorry I didn’t get a section of Char done for last issue.  I made up for it with a double-sized helping of Char for this issue.  I still like Magic and Religion after it has had a month to ‘cool’.  I also like this segment of Mars Looks Different, though it starts to show some plot problems at this point, and the segment in this POD definitely starts going downhill.

Tom Cron: I met Hal Clement briefly at a couple of science fiction conventions.  He seemed like a very nice guy.  I wish that I could have chatted with him a bit more.  Your comments to Gerson on the Draka versus the North American Confederacy remind me of a discussion I had with my wife a while back.  She’s a Star Trek fan, so I told her that the Star Wars powers could kick Star Trek Federation’s butt.  She had to reluctantly agree.  I’m not sure who would win between the Star Wars Empire and Babylon 5’s Shadows.  I’m guessing that it probably be the Shadows, though the Empire could take on the likes of Earthforce or the Narns with a pretty good chance of winning.  Okay now, this is getting silly.  I just visualized a battle between Darth Vader and that creepy telepath (Bester?) from Babylon 5.  Worse yet:  Buffy versus Darth Vader.  Spock versus Darth Vader?  The Star Wars Empire versus the Borg?  “Q” versus Darth Vader?  “Q” versus Luke Skywalker?  Yes, this is indeed getting silly.  By the way, last I heard there is going to be a Firefly movie next year.  If it is like the TV series it will be worth watching.

Your comments to me: Well, I finally did get one project finished.  Char is done.  It may need a little tweaking here and there, but it is done.

Anthony Docimo: I was rolling on the floor laughing when I read your Mystery Science Theatre take on John Gordon, but after I finished I got to thinking about it and have a slightly different take on the story.  In order for the APA to work we probably need to be somewhat careful that people feel safe submitting something to it.  Giving someone’s submission the MST3K treatment may not be compatible with people feeling safe submitting.  That being said, I still think it was absolutely hilarious.

Your comments to me: Remind me not to put you in the lifeboat with the women and children.

Robert Gill: Yeah, Buffy does manage to sneak in a lot of excellent social commentary, as well as some really good comments on the high school experience and the rest of life.  I think that the series would have been stronger if they hadn’t spun off Angel, though I really enjoyed that series too.  If you look at the two series side by side you realize that they really only had enough very good material for one show, with maybe a couple of episodes left over.  For example, if you look at first season Angel and fourth season Buffy (aired the same year) there are enough good Buffy episodes and enough good Angel episodes to make one extremely strong season.  As it was, both Buffy and Angel were noticeably weaker or maybe less consistently strong than the first three seasons of Buffy.  And this has nothing to do with Alternate History, so I’ll stop now.

Your comments to me: I enjoyed doing the Pseudo-Analog a lot, but man did it take a lot of work.  I’ll probably do something like that again some time but not until I get the novels I’m working on finished. 

Yeah, it is surprising that elephants are good swimmers, but they apparently are.  Fossils of pygmy species of elephants and elephant relatives show up on a lot of oceanic islands where not too many other land mammals have been able to make it.  Rats and related rodents are also very good at colonizing remote islands.  Monkeys aren’t quite as good as rats and elephants, but South American monkeys got to the West Indies when not many land mammals did, and Old World monkeys got to some of the islands between Asia and Australia when not many land mammals did.

As you’ve probably figured out by now, Magic and Religion is purely a personal alternate reality story.  It really doesn’t have an alternate history angle at all.

I did forward your comments on Valentine’s day to Lars.  Thanks.

David Johnson: Interesting about the San Francisco earthquake.  Lesson number one in corrupt politics: don’t cut corners on a building you’ll be spending a lot of time in. 

Your comments to me: Dang.  I didn’t think about the currents and scouring in the Strait of Gibraltar.  On second thought, would that really be a major problem?  It probably wouldn’t as the waters were going down.  The level of the Med would be going down because it is apparently not self-supporting, but the Atlantic would be going down too because of the ice age.  It would be a problem when the Atlantic refilled, of course.  Giant and very spectacular waterfall for weeks or months until the Med filled up.

Mars Looks Different: Yeah, I would put dumping water high on the list, but it is a desperation measure.  They use the water as a shield against solar flares, which are going to be fierce in that vicinity.  You are right that Ardith needs to be a tad more surprised when she realizes that they may actually have a shot at getting down.  I need to work on getting across character emotions.

Flintstones: Looks like I may actually want to do something with this one.  It does have some potential.  I guess I could move it back a ways from the end of the Cretaceous to give things a little more time to develop.

Alternate Columbus: Yeah, I wasn’t real comfortable with the amount of time it took to find MesoAmerica in this scenario either.  On the other had it did take 25 years from the discover of the New World until the discovery of MesoAmerica, (1492 to 1517) and even that discovery was accidental if I recall correctly.  A ship or two headed to Florida got caught in a hurricane and ended up off the coast of Central America.  Now I postpone the discovery a lot more than twenty-five years, but on the other hand you don’t have the density of people messing around in the Gulf of Mexico in this scenario.

Your response to Docimo: I like the Photoshopping for the KFD box.  “You may be in an alternate time-line when…”

Your response to Cron: So if you had a hero and villain mix-and-match between the DC and Marvel universes, who would win?

Wesley Kawato: Good luck in deciding where your writing needs to go next.

Gerson Lodi Ribeiro: Good luck on taking advantage of the buzz from the AH interview. 

Your comments to me: Ah yes, the “Portugal conquers the Incas” scenario.  That could get seriously weird.  In the long term the influx of gold would have been bad for Portugal, but in the short term it might well have kept Portugal a major player in Europe longer than it was able to remain one in our history.  Another option might be having the Spanish and Portuguese sparring for influence over/control of the Incas.  The problem with that is that the Incas were just so far away from being able to match the Europeans militarily that I can’t see anything coming from contact other than the fragmentation or conquest of the Incas. 

Eric Henriet’s encyclopedia of AH sounds fascinating.  I’ve corresponded with him from time-to-time and I should try to pick up that book.  I’m flattered that he included a quote from me.
 
Christopher Nuttall: Glad to see that you’ve finally joined us.  I hope you find these comments helpful. 

I enjoyed your Russo-Japanese war scenarios.  Unfortunately that’s not a period I’ve read much about, so I can’t comment in too much depth on it.  You’re right that it was significant.  By exposing Russian weakness that war made Germany and Austria the dominant powers in Europe for the next several years, a fact that they used in the diplomatic jockeying in the years leading up to World War I.  It didn’t just spur the Russians to reform their army.  It also spurred French investment in Russian industry, which made Russia stronger in the lead-up to the war. 

That French investment in Russia hurt France financially after World War I because most of the Russian factories that weren’t destroyed were confiscated by the Bolsheviks. 

One possibility from the war that you didn’t mention is that the other powers might get a better idea of what modern war was like from it if it had lasted longer.  On the other hand they might not have.  There were certainly battles in both the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese war that should have shown the impact that increased firepower had on mobility and the ability of infantry to work on the offensive.

My understanding is that Japan’s financial situation was very precarious at the end of the war.  That leads to another possibility: what if the war had lasted longer and Japan had suffered something approaching bankruptcy?

Also, while the US helped broker the end of the war, the Japanese later felt (wrongly) that they had been snookered to some extent and that the US had prevented them from getting all of the booty that they should have gotten from their victory in the war.  That Japanese feeling played a role in the gradually increasing hostility between the Japanese and the US.

The German invasion of Britain scenario is a bit more iffy.  The British did have some options in mind in case the Germans gained air superiority over the channel.  They planned to withdraw fighters to parts of Scotland that were out of range of the Luftwaffe and husband them for whenever the Germans tried to invade.  That would mean taking more losses to industry and to the civilian population, but it could have been done if necessary.  The Germans would need to figure out something to go after that would force the Brits to keep sending their planes into battle or the Brits would be able to rest and rebuild.  Harbor facilities and shipping might be their best bet, but the Brits could send in shipping at night and defend harbors with extremely heavy flak.

If the Germans went after radar stations and aircraft factories that might make it harder for the Brits to play the “rope-a-dope” game with their aircraft.  If the British problem was a pilot shortage and not an airframe shortage they might just accept some damage to their aircraft factories and conserve pilots, while setting up heavy flak to gradually whittle down the Germans.

In the real war, the Allies were able to get air superiority by attrition, but they were only able to hold air superiority and keep the Germans from rebuilding the Luftwaffe because they found a point of attack that forced the Germans to keep sending up fighters: synthetic oil plants.  Damage to the synthetic oil plants meant less fuel to train new pilots, along with a lot of other damage to the German war machine, which meant that the Germans had to defend those plants, even if it meant sending up inadequately trained pilots.

In this alternative, the Brits could also bring their fleet in and take whatever losses from airpower and submarines that they had to take.  In the longer-term that would be a bad thing, but with the home islands on the brink of invasion that would be a price they would have paid.  As to the results of that, what happened around Crete during the British evacuation from Greece and during the battle for Crete gives some idea what would happen.  The British lost a lot of ships there, but a lot of British ships took a lot of pounding and fought back very hard with powerful anti-aircraft capabilities.  I’m not sure how much of that anti-aircraft capability the Brits added between September 1940 and early 1941, but on the other hand the Luftwaffe probably got more proficient in an anti-shipping role during that time too.

The Japanese success against the British fleet off of Singapore probably gives a somewhat exaggerated impression of how vulnerable capital ships were to aircraft at this point in the war.  The Japanese pilots were incredibly proficient in terms of bombing accuracy compared to any of the other major powers, including the Germans.  That was due to an extremely rigorous selection and training process that gave Japan a small, elite, and (unfortunately for them) irreplaceable group of pilots.

As they did around Crete, the British would bring the fleet in to disrupt any sea-based component of the invasion and they would take whatever losses they had to take.  They would own the waters in the channel at night because the Luftwaffe couldn’t do the kind of precision night bombing it would take to keep the fleet out.  That means that the Brits could hammer any German bridgehead with battleship main guns at night.  That wouldn’t be a pleasant experience.  Battleships can put out a lot of firepower, and a new bridgehead wouldn’t have coastal defense guns to keep the ships off.
 
I agree that the impact on the empire of a perception of British weakness could have been very bad and might have forced British hands.  On the other hand, helping the French to a greater extent might have paid some bonuses for the British too.  For example, historically the French returned 400-odd captured German pilots to the Germans as part of the Armistice.  That might not have happened if the British had sent the extra planes to France.  Also, the gesture of sending the planes might result in more French pilots joining the Brits because Vichy wouldn’t be able to use the British ‘betrayal’ as a propaganda tool.  Granted, that wouldn’t make up for the pilots lost in France, but it would probably help some.  Also, if the British had plenty of planes but not enough trained pilots, I wonder if the US would have figured out some way to forward them a few ‘volunteers’.

I’m not saying that this scenario is impossible, but I do think that the British had some strong options up their sleeves.

The Iraq scenario makes some sense, but it might run afoul of some problems. 
    First, the destruction and the massacres that Saddam leaves behind would make it more difficult for world opinion to help him out.  So would the pictures of Iraqis cheering the incoming troops, which they certainly would in this scenario.  (After all, Saddam has just massacred a bunch of their relatives and torn up the local infrastructure). 
    Second, giving up the entire country except for Baghdad without much of a fight would probably have a terrible impact on the morale of Saddam supporters. 
    Third, if Saddam started moving troops back to Baghdad proper he might precipitate the invasion earlier than it would have ordinarily have happened, because the US would detect that movement and rightly figure that the Iraqi troops are more vulnerable on the move than they will be when entrenched.  Now Saddam could move before the US troops are in place, but if Saddam moves too early, he risks letting the US take the bulk of the country Afghanistan style—with Special Forces and revolting Kurds/Shiites.  After all, he would have moved most of his forces out of those areas after making the surviving Shia hate him even more than they already did. 
    Fourth, concentrating on Baghdad leaves the ‘Sunni triangle’, home of Saddam’s key supporters, open to US occupation, or worse yet Kurdish occupation.  He would pretty much have to defend that area to some extent or his most loyal supporters would be losing control of homes, palaces, land, etc. 
    Fifth, I doubt that the US would play the ‘bleed yourself dry in Baghdad’ game.  The army worked on a lot of scenarios to reduce an urban area without door to door combat before the war.  I don’t think they figured out all of the answers, but they did figure out some.  Among them: you don’t have to fight for all of a city to control it, at least enough to deny any coherent base to the enemy.  If you control the food and water supplies, the government buildings that are symbols of power, and the mass communications, that gives you a lot of control. 

So there are Saddam supporters in a bunch of Baghdad neighborhoods.  That’s nice.  How long can they fight without a fresh water supply?  How long will they fight if you isolate them and tell them that they are setting themselves up to be the last to die in a war that is already lost?  How will they keep up their morale if you prove that you can go anywhere in the city that you feel like going and anybody that tries to stop them dies?

Your comments to me: Yeah, it’s a good idea to put summaries of Char and Mars in once in a while.  I’m working on them for this issue.  Neanderthals and racism?  That’s a definite possibility.  I don’t have any basis to say if they would be treated better or worse than various truly human ethnic minorities.  There is a phenomenon where people react in a more negative way when something is close to human form but not quite.  Cartoonists and robot manufacturers have both run into it.  I’m not sure how that would apply to Neanderthals. 

One thing about Neanderthals or Neanderthaloids in this case, is that they would probably change to some extent as the technology changed.  The classic Neanderthals were apparently very robustly built because their technology forced them to get up close and personal with powerful animals.  A lot of Neanderthal skeletons had ‘rodeo rider’ type injuries.  That robust built would probably become less common when stone-tipped spears and bows and arrows made it possible to stand off more and still make a kill.

Luke: If it actually existed, the ‘Roman’ colony in Ireland was a freelance affair, not an official Roman colony—just a warlord who had been exposed to Roman ways, liked what he saw, and tried to set up something similar in a part of Ireland.  No Roman money or legions involved.

You are probably right about Giraud not being a particularly good political/military leader, based on his historic performance in North Africa after Torch.  And yeah, not having Vichy would probably force the Germans to come up with some kind of Quisling regime.  The communists toyed with playing that role to a limited extent during the period between the fall of France and the German invasion of the Soviet Union.  There were also quite a few semi-Fascists groups that could have played that role, along with politicians like Laval who would have probably been willing to head up a pro-German regime.

Steven Silver: So, you tease us with one very good submission and then go away again.  I hope we see you again sooner this time.

Kurt Sidaway: So English Librarians are becoming Service Development Officers.  Yuck.  Add in some  nasty politics too.  Double-Yuck.  I understand about the Civilization addiction.  I haven’t loaded any game of any description on any of my computers for just that reason—with the exception of Solitaire, which has wasted too many hours of potential writing time all by itself.

Your comments to me: Yes, Neanderthals were capable of picking up Sapiens technology.  Disease might be a problem at some point, but I suspect that it wouldn’t be a major problem until agriculture developed.  Actually, the development of agriculture itself could be a crisis time for the Neanderthaloids.  Would agriculture diffuse to England or would farming tribes on the mainland build up populations and technology and then invade or infiltrate?

Dale Speirs: The Progressive Conservatives wipe-out fascinates me, partly because I’ve often wondered what would happen if one of the two big US parties went belly-up in some election.  I suppose it would depend on which one did the big fall.  I don’t have any particular favorite for that role.  There may have been a time when the two parties stood for something worth voting for.  Now most supporters of either party support their choice as the lesser of two evils.

Dang.  You did the early Hudson Bay settlement idea first.  That’s what I get for procrastinating on it.  I would have taken it in a considerably different direction and I may at some point, though the overall pattern might not end up too different.

As usual your “Seen in the Literature” section was very worth reading.  I especially enjoyed the article about the potential for ancient castaways.  I’ve always been interested in places where humans existed for a while and then disappeared.  In some cases, like Flinder’s Island and Kangaroo Island, humans apparently survived for several thousand years and then died out.  All male groups of castaways are a very different story.  They might act as a sort of ‘vaccine’ for vulnerable island populations of animals is they didn’t totally wipe those populations out. 

The article on prehistoric corn was also very good.  How about this: a New World without corn, or without corn as the crop it became?  Would agriculture have developed around some other crop?  Probably.  It wouldn’t have been the same agriculture though, and the patterns of development would have probably been totally different.

I’m going to have to see if I can find the article on the rise and fall of American Indian horse cultures.  I’ve always had my doubts about whether or not the horse-riding, buffalo-hunting types were sustainable in the long term.  It’s possible that in the absence of European encroachment Indian populations would have grown large enough that over-hunting would have caused buffalo populations to crash, followed by either an Indian population crash or massive raids by the Plains tribes on areas adjacent to the plains.

The two cold war article summaries were also interesting.  I’ve always been amazed at how good the Soviets were at infiltrating their opponents, especially the British.  The Soviets were amateurs at the spy game and the British should have been professionals.  Of course the Soviets had Tsarist-era pros to draw on and they were often very good. 

I had to laugh at the ‘Diefenbunker’ article summary.  It sounds so governmental: build an elaborate system of shelters for the elite and then not come up with a realistic way for them to get to those shelters.

Your comment to me: Yeah, I knew about the Mediterranean drying up in the real world.  I was suggesting that it might have been interesting if the drying up had occurred multiple times during the ice ages.  Actually the problem with Sicily and genetic isolation isn’t so much the lack of distance from the mainland so much as the fact that the island gets joined to the mainland during the ice ages.  It doesn’t take much ocean to isolate most land mammals, as is evidenced by the fact that most land mammals didn’t make it to the main Philippine islands in spite of the fact that there isn’t much of a gap at the height of the ice ages.