Or maybe historical memory goes back further than most people allow. IAC, scientific theories tend to have the self life of bananas when they deal with events earlier than last week.That's the approach taken by Ryan and Pitman in "Noah's Flood" -- but they screw that up by taking the one tale from the Aegean basin which explicitly refers to a flood and tell us that it doesn't really say what it says. :') The reason Herodotus (who discusses Thera) and Plato (who doesn't) don't record a notable eruption on the island is, it didn't happen until Herodotus and Plato had been dead for centuries.
Regarding timelines, there is a tendency to confine human history to the last ten thousand years when the fossil and other evidence suggests that modern humans have been around for much longer than that, 100,000 years or more. We have become open to a less static view of the history of the globe, what with the awareness that asteroids have bashed into us in a regular basis. But scientists tend to be as blinkered.near-sighted as the rest of us. We tend not to see what we do not see.