Speaker 1: Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to venture down into the darkness of the vault.
Speaker 1: This time there are monsters in the vault, and perhaps
Speaker 1: dinosaurs and previous dark creatures as well. This episode originally
Speaker 1: aired June two thousand sixteen, and it is our episode
Speaker 1: about geo mythology and the relationship between fossils of ancient
Speaker 1: extinct organisms and the best mythical monsters of all time.
Speaker 1: That's right. This is a perfect rearing of this episode
Speaker 1: because we just published our new episode about the idea
Speaker 1: of a Cambodian Steaga saucus. Oh yeah, that was a
Speaker 1: lot of fun. Yeah, And and I believe we referenced
Speaker 1: this episode in the Steaga Staris episode. Yes, we do.
Speaker 1: So if you were wondering what are they talking about here,
Speaker 1: you're about to find out. All right, let's dive in.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. The hunt grows tense. It's been three
Speaker 1: days since you last caught the trail of deer through
Speaker 1: the wilderness, and your hunger, the hunger of the tribe
Speaker 1: mounts toward a breaking point. And so with bow and arrow,
Speaker 1: fire and amulet, you've wandered beyond the limits of the
Speaker 1: fall hunt. You've tracked your quarry into the rocky hills beyond,
Speaker 1: and here, amid these strange rocky outcroppings, you happen upon
Speaker 1: a cave. You know, animals sometimes venture into these places
Speaker 1: for shelter, perhaps water or salt, so you venture in
Speaker 1: as well. You find nothing in the cave save a
Speaker 1: few dry sticks, but as night falls you build a
Speaker 1: small fire against the cold. As the flames illuminate the
Speaker 1: cavern walls, you suddenly make out the shattered form of
Speaker 1: bones in the rock, bones as solid as the stone itself.
Speaker 1: In the dancing glow, they describe a form you've never
Speaker 1: seen before, and it instantly makes you wonder where the
Speaker 1: deer have gone, What things beyond the scope of your
Speaker 1: experience thrive here amid the stony hills you've dared to
Speaker 1: hunt for. The bones describe a thing twice the height
Speaker 1: of a man, hornet and clawed, a talent toothed, and
Speaker 1: with a rib cage or large enough to swallow you,
Speaker 1: your family, the entire tribe, all of it within the
Speaker 1: dark hell of its hunger. Hey, welcome to stuff to
Speaker 1: bloil your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. And Robert. What were you getting at in
Speaker 1: that little story there, Well, basically about finding some bones, uh,
Speaker 1: not knowing what those bones are from, and having to
Speaker 1: sort of fill in the holes, fill in the details.
Speaker 1: Well maybe with a little myth making. Yeah, I want
Speaker 1: to put you in just a strange frame of mind
Speaker 1: you might not be used to. We we all know
Speaker 1: about fossils. We we all know now that there are
Speaker 1: things that lived a long time ago that sometimes undergo
Speaker 1: a mineralization process where their remains become sort of locked
Speaker 1: in stone and preserved in ways that can keep them,
Speaker 1: keep them holding their holding their shape across the eons. Yea,
Speaker 1: and inherently incomplete fossil record of what came before. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but try to imagine. You don't know any of that.
Speaker 1: You don't know how old the earth is. You don't
Speaker 1: know anything about geology, sediment replacement or permanent mineralization, anything
Speaker 1: about soil chemistry, any of that. You're you're just you know,
Speaker 1: maybe a shepherd or something like that a few thousand
Speaker 1: years ago, and you come across gigantic bones in the
Speaker 1: ground that are bigger than any animal you've ever seen,
Speaker 1: and looked nothing like it is for some animal with
Speaker 1: a gigantic lizard like head and sharp teeth. What would
Speaker 1: you think you were looking at? Well, as our character
Speaker 1: in in our introductory piece here seemed to think that
Speaker 1: perhaps this is an exactly an existing creature that's somewhere
Speaker 1: out there in the world, and I should be afraid
Speaker 1: of it. But then also I'm I'm probably gonna know
Speaker 1: enough about bones, enough about actual organisms to realize there's
Speaker 1: something fishy about this one. These bones are like like stone.
Speaker 1: There's you know, there's something there's something unnatural going on
Speaker 1: here as well. Yeah, I was having this thought recently
Speaker 1: when my wife Rachel and I went to New York
Speaker 1: and one of the places we went there was the
Speaker 1: American Museum in Natural History, which is just an absolute delight.
Speaker 1: If you've never been, it is wonderful. You should also
Speaker 1: commit more than one day of your trip to it,
Speaker 1: because there's no way you can see it all in
Speaker 1: a day, and it's just absolutely wonderful. I recommended as
Speaker 1: a pure experience just to go see, for example, the
Speaker 1: dinosaur fossils and stuff like that. They're and they're charming
Speaker 1: lye retro dioramas of old animals and all that. But
Speaker 1: it's it's not only just a great visual experience, it's
Speaker 1: also wonderful science education. And because the museum exhibits do
Speaker 1: an excellent job of not just telling you what we
Speaker 1: know about the things you're looking at, but also helping
Speaker 1: you understand how we came to know what we know
Speaker 1: about the things you're looking at, and what the what
Speaker 1: the method behind and reasoning behind what we know is.
Speaker 1: So it's it's a wonderful monument of scientific education for
Speaker 1: for kids and people of all ages. Really. But anyway,
Speaker 1: people wander in not knowing what fossils were, asking what
Speaker 1: what dragons are these? I I don't think they did,
Speaker 1: but only if only you could, because that I was
Speaker 1: having that thought. I'm looking at at these bones walking
Speaker 1: around and thinking, Man, if I didn't know anything, I
Speaker 1: would think these were monsters. I would be like, where
Speaker 1: are the live ones? I need to get away from them.
Speaker 1: And so this is what we want to talk about today,
Speaker 1: the idea that fossils and uh, not just fossils, but
Speaker 1: remains fossilized or not bones of extinct animals would have
Speaker 1: inspired visions of mythological creatures throughout history. We want to
Speaker 1: essentially focus on the topic of geo mythology. Yes, now,
Speaker 1: if you I just want to have a one quick
Speaker 1: note about myths here, if you turned into the previous
Speaker 1: episode of The Christian and I did Unraveling the Mythic,
Speaker 1: you know that there are various ways to tackle mythology.
Speaker 1: The most most agree that it's ultimately poly functional. Uh.
Speaker 1: That that means that, you know, a myth, myth has
Speaker 1: several simultaneous purposes Uh within a culture. Yeah, it's not
Speaker 1: just uh you know, it's like it's like the Swiss
Speaker 1: Army knife of of like cultural uh energies. I guess yes.
Speaker 1: I I think that scientists and science minded people often
Speaker 1: have a tendency to overrepresent the role of naturalistic explanation
Speaker 1: when trying to think about the origins of myths. And
Speaker 1: what I mean by that is, uh, if you're you're
Speaker 1: you're a science e kind of person, you're more likely
Speaker 1: to say, Okay, here's a myth about um a god
Speaker 1: who throws thunderbolts. The This myth was created in order
Speaker 1: to explain why lightning happens during storms, and I'm not
Speaker 1: saying that's not part of our mythological structures. I think
Speaker 1: it absolutely is. I think mostionally, most of the better arguments,
Speaker 1: the more modern arguments to at least acknowledge that that
Speaker 1: is part of it, that is one of the functions
Speaker 1: and the poly functional um explanation. Yeah, that's the point
Speaker 1: I'm making. I think myths are definitely truly meant to
Speaker 1: be explanatory for natural phenomenon, but that's not all they are.
Speaker 1: They're also about moralizing to people, and they're also about
Speaker 1: representing social norms and all kinds of things that you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're as you say, poly functional. Yeah, so you know,
Speaker 1: it's important for us to to keep in mind that
Speaker 1: a mythical monster, beast is all is almost always more
Speaker 1: than a mirror, you know, proto scientific explanation in a
Speaker 1: mirror geo mythological explanation. But the geo mythological explanations I
Speaker 1: think can be very helpful. Uh at times that they
Speaker 1: seem to just hit the nail right on the head.
Speaker 1: Other times they at least raise some interests in questions
Speaker 1: about how fossils, which which ancient people undoubtedly came across
Speaker 1: as they as they they you know, dug in the earth,
Speaker 1: as they farmed, as they explored their world, they would
Speaker 1: they found these things. We know they found these things,
Speaker 1: but then they had to somehow make sense of them
Speaker 1: without a modern understanding of fossils. Yeah, so what is
Speaker 1: the concept of geomethology. We should offer a definition. And
Speaker 1: I'm going to read a quote from the Encyclopedia of
Speaker 1: Geology that was an entry written by Adrian Mayer, who
Speaker 1: is who is a name who's going to figure very
Speaker 1: big into this episode because she's one of the biggest
Speaker 1: names right now in the in the whole field of geomethology,
Speaker 1: but especially in linking ancient mythological creatures to fossil evidence
Speaker 1: and and remains of extinct animals. So she writes, quote,
Speaker 1: geo mythology also called legends of the Earth, myths of observation,
Speaker 1: natural knowledge, and physical mythology. I like that last is
Speaker 1: the study of ideological oral traditions created by pre scientific
Speaker 1: cultures to explain, in poetic metaphor and mythological imagery, geological
Speaker 1: phenomena such as volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, fossils, and other natural features.
Speaker 1: Of the landscape now in this century. She goes on
Speaker 1: to relate stuff about all kinds of geology, like explanations
Speaker 1: of myths that would explain why a volcano is erupting.
Speaker 1: You know, at Mount Etna, there happens to be a
Speaker 1: dragon underneath this volcano who's trying to escape, and that
Speaker 1: might explain why sometimes melted stone comes out the top
Speaker 1: of it, or you know, just one example of why
Speaker 1: earthquakes are being caused by God's the way the landscape
Speaker 1: is shaped, the topography of it has sometimes that has
Speaker 1: a mythological explanation, like you know, the great the combat
Speaker 1: creation myths, like the God slays a monster and then
Speaker 1: the monster's dead body becomes the earth, and you know,
Speaker 1: the ridges on its spine are the mountains and things
Speaker 1: like that. So there's just a wonderful wealth of great
Speaker 1: links between the earth and its geological features and the
Speaker 1: mythology that people come up with. But fossils are a
Speaker 1: big part of this, and so uh Mayor Mayor is
Speaker 1: a Stanford folklorist and historian of science who studies ways
Speaker 1: in which knowledge about the natural world, often knowledge that
Speaker 1: we could consider scientific or proto scientific, appears in pre
Speaker 1: scientific myths and traditions, and she's going to come up
Speaker 1: repeatedly in this episode, so we thought we should establish
Speaker 1: her um. She's written a lot on this topic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: two of her key books, there's two thousand seven Fossil
Speaker 1: Legends of the First Americans and then her two thousand
Speaker 1: eleven book The First Fossil Hunters, Dinosaurs, Mammoths and myth
Speaker 1: in Greek in Roman Times. So that's a reissue of
Speaker 1: the book the too o Love and version is it's updated,
Speaker 1: I think with some stuff. Okay, so that one actually
Speaker 1: predates the America's book, but yeah, it tackles antiquity, you know,
Speaker 1: looking at, for example, Greek legends. Yeah, and at times
Speaker 1: she she points out that so many of these these
Speaker 1: monsters that we discuss, they often what they break out
Speaker 1: of the ground, they have origins in the earth or
Speaker 1: perhaps under the earth. So that's just one of the
Speaker 1: many different and it's gonna vary depending on what the
Speaker 1: particular myth is, because certainly you have you have mythical
Speaker 1: creatures that are terrestrial in nature, that are celestial in nature,
Speaker 1: that are tied to the ocean or the rivers, or
Speaker 1: to the caves. Uh, there's a lot of variety here.
Speaker 1: Needless to say, there are so many different mythic creatures,
Speaker 1: some related to one another, but they're all going to
Speaker 1: have particular ties to their own time and place and
Speaker 1: the people who dreamt about them, and we're not gonna
Speaker 1: have time to cover them all here today, right, But
Speaker 1: we should start looking at some examples of arguments that
Speaker 1: certain mythological creatures and monsters are truly inspired by fossil evidence.
Speaker 1: And one of the big ones, I think the one
Speaker 1: we really need to start with is the griffin, because
Speaker 1: this is this is something that's been widespread. I think
Speaker 1: this has become sort of well known that there's an
Speaker 1: idea that griffins are inspired by dinosaur bones, and so traditionally,
Speaker 1: a griffin is a creature said to have the body
Speaker 1: of a lion with the head, beak, and wings of
Speaker 1: an eagle, and in ancient Greek sources, the griffin is
Speaker 1: often mentioned in association with a tribe called the r
Speaker 1: A Mosspi, which were traditionally said to all have only
Speaker 1: one eye on their head, so they're kind of cyclopsis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the the r Mospy were like these, uh, these Central
Speaker 1: Asian Scythian type people who who harvested gold from the
Speaker 1: fields of the of the Griffins. And this is great,
Speaker 1: the whole thing about them all having one eye on
Speaker 1: on their head. Herodotus, the Greek historian Herodotus, expresses some
Speaker 1: skepticism about this that I find really funny. I want
Speaker 1: to quote Herodotus now, as translated by George Rawlinson, quote
Speaker 1: the northern parts of Europe are very much richer in
Speaker 1: gold than any other region. But how it is procured
Speaker 1: I have no certain knowledge. The story runs that the
Speaker 1: one eyed r a mosspy purloin it from the Griffins.
Speaker 1: But here too I am incredulous and cannot persuade myself
Speaker 1: that there is a race of men born with one eye,
Speaker 1: who in all else resemble the rest of mankind. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: it seems to be true that the extreme regions of
Speaker 1: the earth, which surround and shut up within themselves all
Speaker 1: other countries, produced the things which are the rarest and
Speaker 1: which men reckon the most beautiful. And so that's Herodotus
Speaker 1: writing in the fifth century b c uh. And I
Speaker 1: find it great that he's skeptical about the one eyed humans.
Speaker 1: He's like, I don't buy it, but not necessarily about
Speaker 1: the Griffins, And I wonder why could it be that
Speaker 1: in ancient times people with a skeptical, fairly evidence based
Speaker 1: epistemological framework might have reason to believe in some mythical creatures.
Speaker 1: And if so, what could that reason be? One one
Speaker 1: part of me says that it could just be not knowing. Right,
Speaker 1: We've never been to the ends of the Earth. Who
Speaker 1: knows what creatures live there. Yeah, the the understanding of
Speaker 1: the time of of Earth's diverse um life forms was
Speaker 1: was very incomplete. I mean it's still incomplete, but it
Speaker 1: was even more incomplete at the time. So the idea
Speaker 1: that something like a griffin existed, sure, that's not out
Speaker 1: of keeping with our experience of other creatures. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so a couple more ancient sources about the Griffins. The
Speaker 1: Roman author Plenty of the Elder summarizes what he's learned
Speaker 1: about the Griffins while talking about the R mos b
Speaker 1: So writing in his Natural History in the first centuries CE.
Speaker 1: Plenty says, quote many authorities, the most distinct wish being
Speaker 1: Herodotus and r a status of proconnesus. Right that these
Speaker 1: people and he's referring to the r Mosby or arm
Speaker 1: posse sorry wage continual war with the griffins, a kind
Speaker 1: of wild beast with wings, as commonly reported that digs
Speaker 1: gold out of minds which the creatures guard, and the
Speaker 1: r mosby tried to take from them, both with remarkable covetousness.
Speaker 1: That's a nice sort of like moralizing. They're a little
Speaker 1: bit right, adding some kind of motivations. But then here's
Speaker 1: one more long one that will give you a pretty
Speaker 1: good picture of the ancient view of the griffin. So
Speaker 1: this is alien writing on animals, translated by Shoalfield in
Speaker 1: his Greek Natural History second century a d. And I've
Speaker 1: made a couple of illusions just for brevity, because this
Speaker 1: is a long quote. But Alien writes. I have heard
Speaker 1: that the Indian animal the griffin, is a quadruped like
Speaker 1: a lion, that it has claws of enormous strength, and
Speaker 1: that they resemble those of a lion. Men commonly report
Speaker 1: that it is winged, and that the feathers along its
Speaker 1: back are black and those on its front are red,
Speaker 1: while the actual wings are neither but are white. It
Speaker 1: has a beak like an eagle's and a head to
Speaker 1: just as artists portrayed in pictures and sculpture. Its eyes
Speaker 1: are like fire. It builds its layer among the mountains,
Speaker 1: and although it is not possible to capture the full
Speaker 1: grown animal, they do take the young ones. And the
Speaker 1: people of Bactria, who are neighbors of the Indians, say
Speaker 1: that the Griffins guard gold in those parts, that they
Speaker 1: dig it up and build their nests with it, and
Speaker 1: that the Indians carry off any that falls from them.
Speaker 1: The Indians, however, denied that they guard the aforesaid gold,
Speaker 1: for the Griffins have no need for it. And if
Speaker 1: that is what they say, then I at any rate
Speaker 1: think that they speak the truth, but that they themselves
Speaker 1: come to collect the gold. While the Griffins, fearing for
Speaker 1: their young ones, fight with the invaders, they engage too
Speaker 1: with other beasts and overcome them without difficulty. But they
Speaker 1: will not face the lion or the elephant. Accordingly, the natives,
Speaker 1: dreading the strength of these animals, do not set out
Speaker 1: in quest of the gold by day, but arrived by night.
Speaker 1: For that season they are less likely to be detected. Now,
Speaker 1: the region where the Griffins live and where the gold
Speaker 1: is mind is a dreary wilderness, and the seekers after
Speaker 1: the aforesaid substance arrive a thousand or two strong armed
Speaker 1: and bringing spades and sacks and watching for a moonless night,
Speaker 1: they begin to dig. Now, if they contrive to elude
Speaker 1: the Griffins, they reap a double advantage, for they not
Speaker 1: only escape with their lives, but they also take home
Speaker 1: they're freight. So this is pretty outline into sounding. But
Speaker 1: I am already seeing a connection here between this creature,
Speaker 1: this fantastic creature, and the Earth with things mind from
Speaker 1: the Earth exactly right. And you are not the first
Speaker 1: person to notice that this figures in to Adrian Mayer's
Speaker 1: theory about the Griffins and the and a specific type
Speaker 1: of dinosaur will get into in a minute. So the
Speaker 1: griffin head of an eagle, body of a lion lives
Speaker 1: in a desolate or desert wilderness where gold can be found.
Speaker 1: It's got wings, claws, scary as heck, screaming death, diving
Speaker 1: at you out of the sky while you are blinded
Speaker 1: by desert sun glinting off a mountain of gold. Pretty cool, uh,
Speaker 1: And it builds its nests out of gold and just
Speaker 1: jealously guards the golden treasures or not, maybe it doesn't
Speaker 1: care about gold. But either way they're pilfering humans who
Speaker 1: it does battle with. The Greek and Roman legends often
Speaker 1: associate Griffins with the north and the east, so India
Speaker 1: and northern Europe or Central Asia the land of the Scythians.
Speaker 1: In real life, that was a group. The Scythians were
Speaker 1: a large group of horse riding people who occupied Central Asia,
Speaker 1: and the extent of their empire overlapped the desert in
Speaker 1: Asia now known as the Gobi. And there's a curious
Speaker 1: thing about the Gobi Desert. It is a place where
Speaker 1: fosse tolls are not nearly as difficult to find as
Speaker 1: they are in many other places. According to the paleontologists
Speaker 1: within the archives of the American Museum in Natural History,
Speaker 1: it was not historically uncommon to come across fossils of
Speaker 1: the dinosaur proto Serratops peaking naked out of eroding hillsides
Speaker 1: in the Gobi Desert. And this, of course one with
Speaker 1: kind of a beaked apparience. So it's a saratopsid. It's
Speaker 1: a four legged dinosaur, and it has so it's a
Speaker 1: quadruped and it has yeah, I frill along the top
Speaker 1: of its head and a beaked mouth. But here's one
Speaker 1: account that was from the American Museum and Natural History
Speaker 1: exhibit that they did on this comparison between dinosaurs and
Speaker 1: griffin's and so it's an account related from when the
Speaker 1: m n H paleontologist Michael knew A Check and paleontologists
Speaker 1: Mark Noral were on an expedition in the Gobi Desert
Speaker 1: in which they came across a skeleton of a dinosaur,
Speaker 1: this Protoceratops dinosaur uh so nova. Check described the scene
Speaker 1: in these words quote, We stopped at a low saddle
Speaker 1: between the hills. Before I could remove the keys from
Speaker 1: the ignition, Mark sang out excitedly. Several feet away, near
Speaker 1: the very apex of the saddle was a stunning skull
Speaker 1: and partial skeleton of a Protoceratops, a big fellow whose
Speaker 1: beak and crooked fingers pointed west to our small outcrop,
Speaker 1: like a griffin pointing the way to a guarded treasure.
Speaker 1: We continued to pounce on precious specimens with remarkable consistency.
Speaker 1: Mark would sing out skull, and almost on que I
Speaker 1: would find one too. The surface of the gentle slopes
Speaker 1: and shallow gullies was splattered with white patches of fossils,
Speaker 1: as if someone had emptied a paint can in a
Speaker 1: random fashion over the ground. So they're just tripping over
Speaker 1: fossils and and it's not you don't to do a
Speaker 1: detailed excavation to try to find one. Apparently in this
Speaker 1: region they can be seen by the naked eye. Anybody
Speaker 1: who had happened to come across them would see these
Speaker 1: huge beasts with four legs and beaks. So Adrian may
Speaker 1: Or has over the years developed a fairly strong argument
Speaker 1: that these Protoceratops fossils have points of agreement with the
Speaker 1: griffin legend. So their quadrupedal, they've got a beak, the
Speaker 1: griffin has an eagle's beak, but a quadrupedal body like
Speaker 1: a lion. Uh. That's sort of that that goes in
Speaker 1: line with the shape of these dinosaurs. It's got the
Speaker 1: bony frill uh. And and she argues that the bony
Speaker 1: frill sometimes gets broken and leaves these stumps there, which
Speaker 1: could have been interpreted as the crests you often see
Speaker 1: on griffin heads or the ears you often see on
Speaker 1: illustrations of ancient griffins uh. And sometimes the elongated shoulder blades,
Speaker 1: the shoulder blades that if you look at a Proto
Speaker 1: Serratop skeleton, they have shoulder blades that kind of poke
Speaker 1: backward and look strange, and they look kind of like wingbones, honestly,
Speaker 1: So that could explain griffin's being said to have wings.
Speaker 1: And then of course there's the location. So these are
Speaker 1: found in the bone beds of Central Asia and Mongolia
Speaker 1: and China, near where the Scythians would have been mining gold.
Speaker 1: These alluvial gold deposits are are near where Protos Saratops
Speaker 1: fossils are found. And these these griffin descriptions seem to
Speaker 1: appear in the ancient Greek literature around the time that
Speaker 1: the Greeks would have been interacting and trading with the Scythians.
Speaker 1: So I think that's a really interesting argument, And essentially
Speaker 1: it goes not necessarily that there were no griffin ideas
Speaker 1: before the the Scythians interacted with Protoceratops fossils, but that
Speaker 1: if they came across these fossils, it could have very
Speaker 1: much have shaped and steered the griffin legend to boot
Speaker 1: to the strong version that we see of it repeated
Speaker 1: so often in this ancient Greek literature. Yeah, and that's
Speaker 1: a motif that we we come back to again and
Speaker 1: again with these examples, And I think it's very important
Speaker 1: to drive them because it's on one hand, you could
Speaker 1: very much take the approach that like, oh, a primitive
Speaker 1: person solve this bone, and then a myth was born
Speaker 1: on it. But but as we probably not that, probably
Speaker 1: not that simple. Myths are more complicated than that. It's
Speaker 1: also not impossible, but not impossible. But it seems like
Speaker 1: the the more believable version the of of the encounter
Speaker 1: is that you have a pre existing myth that involves
Speaker 1: some sort of fantastic beast or another. Then you find
Speaker 1: these fossils, and without you know, and without a you know,
Speaker 1: an actual understanding of how fossils work, without a without
Speaker 1: a better explanation, you turn to that script as an
Speaker 1: explanation for what you see here. So the myth informs
Speaker 1: your interpretation of the fossils, and then the fossils may
Speaker 1: enforce and and and change your interpretation of the myth itself,
Speaker 1: and then you move into new a new age that's
Speaker 1: informed both by the myth and the fossil. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: so I do think we should come back to uh
Speaker 1: to exactly that idea later on about how how these
Speaker 1: myths would be formed and what what level of explanation
Speaker 1: we need for them as we encounter them. But for
Speaker 1: this one specific example of Protoceratops fossils or other dinosaur
Speaker 1: fossils in the Gobi Desert or in Central Asia more
Speaker 1: generally inspiring the Scythian griffins that guard the gold, the
Speaker 1: paleontologist and paleo artist Mark Witten wrote an interesting blog
Speaker 1: post I read that essentially is a pretty well researched
Speaker 1: disagreement with the idea that Protoceratops could have served as
Speaker 1: the inspiration for the griffin, and and he makes some
Speaker 1: pretty decent arguments against it. For one thing, according to Witten,
Speaker 1: the timeline is not very favorable to the proto Protoceratops
Speaker 1: griffin hypothesis because he says it's sort of ignores evidence
Speaker 1: of griffin lore from the for the seventh century b C,
Speaker 1: when when the Scythians could have introduced this these Protoceratops
Speaker 1: inspired ideas to the Greeks. For example, one one example
Speaker 1: he gives is this fourth millennium b C. Depiction of
Speaker 1: a griffin from the ancient city of Susa and what
Speaker 1: is now iran Um. And so there's this long tradition
Speaker 1: of griffin iron iconography predating the supposed Scythian interaction with
Speaker 1: the Greeks Um. But then again there there could also
Speaker 1: be a sort of like myth and fossil back and forth,
Speaker 1: like we were just talking about. Whitten also argues that
Speaker 1: Mayer's hypothesis is based on sort of a narrow selection
Speaker 1: of griffin representation types, because he says they're actually, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of different ways to depict a griffin, And
Speaker 1: he's saying that the proto Saratops griffin hypothesis is based
Speaker 1: on selection bias in griffin imagery sampling, so sort of
Speaker 1: cherry picking the Griffins that best fit the protoceratops, whereas
Speaker 1: there are other types of Griffins that don't look very
Speaker 1: much like that. Yeah, this, and this will come up
Speaker 1: again too with some other monsters that we're going to
Speaker 1: discuss here, uh huh, and then a few more one uh,
Speaker 1: One thing, he says that the griffin doesn't really need
Speaker 1: an explanation in Exotic Anatomy of Extinct Species, because it
Speaker 1: will could well have been imagined simply by combining elements
Speaker 1: of existing animals known to these cultures at the time.
Speaker 1: You don't have to have seen a quadruped with a beak.
Speaker 1: You can just imagine an eagle's head which you've seen
Speaker 1: on the lines body which you've seen. So that argument
Speaker 1: that makes some sense to me, and I do want
Speaker 1: to come back to that idea also. Um. He also
Speaker 1: argues that the earliest Greek accounts of griffin lore come
Speaker 1: from semi mythical stories. Quote why should we consider griffin's
Speaker 1: to have any more basis in reality than the gods,
Speaker 1: monsters or strange human races also mentioned in these stories? Uh,
Speaker 1: if griffins are based on actual phenomenon, do we need
Speaker 1: to seek rationales for these other creatures too? And I
Speaker 1: you know, one thing that comes to my mind is yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So if we need to seek a rational explanation for
Speaker 1: the inspiration of the griffin myth, do we also need
Speaker 1: it for the arm posse with the one eyed people? Um?
Speaker 1: Do we have to figure well, where the people who
Speaker 1: all had one eye from some genetic kind of condition?
Speaker 1: I don't think so. But also I think this point
Speaker 1: seems a little weak to me because everybody acknowledges that
Speaker 1: Griffins are mythical and the stories about them are not
Speaker 1: historically true. So the question is whether the myths are
Speaker 1: pure imaginative fiction or fictions inspired by real world objects
Speaker 1: and events. And I think either could likely be the case.
Speaker 1: There's no way to automatically favor one or the other.
Speaker 1: I think the fossil link is just an argument for
Speaker 1: the latter. And another point he makes is that Protosterotops
Speaker 1: fossils are you know, have not been found at the
Speaker 1: sites of the Scythian gold mines, but rather within a
Speaker 1: few hundred miles of them, so you know, it's not
Speaker 1: like we saw them there at the gold mine. That
Speaker 1: would be a pretty good argument. I think, yes, yes,
Speaker 1: if we actually had seen them there. But yeah, so anyway,
Speaker 1: there there are arguments for their arguments against that the
Speaker 1: Protoceratops or another dinosaur quadrupedal dinosaur with a beak could
Speaker 1: have inspired griffin ideas, and uh, I think, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure where I come down on it, but
Speaker 1: I think it's still an interesting idea. But he wouldn't
Speaker 1: make some some interesting arguments against it. Yeah, but that
Speaker 1: is by no means the only mythical creature that has
Speaker 1: been said to have been inspired possibly by fossils, right right,
Speaker 1: I mean we've been talking about one eyed folks. So
Speaker 1: that leads us, of course to the cyclops. Man. I
Speaker 1: love a good cyclops. Yeah, I do too. And and and
Speaker 1: you know, we see a lot of variety. That's the thing.
Speaker 1: We always see more variety than than you might expect.
Speaker 1: So like with the Cyclops, you see some artistic depictions
Speaker 1: where there's just one um one orifice for the eye
Speaker 1: in the head, just one one eyehole. Sometimes they are three,
Speaker 1: and two of them are fleshed over. Uh. So there's
Speaker 1: a lot of variety there as well. And indeed we
Speaker 1: see a number of different explanations for where this might
Speaker 1: have come from. I've read that this man might have
Speaker 1: been informed by the forehead lanterns of Pellucidian miners, or
Speaker 1: perhaps the protective eye patches that were worn by blacksmiths
Speaker 1: was prevented sparks from blinding both eyes at once. You'd
Speaker 1: always have one covered. Uh. But the theory that I
Speaker 1: think most people have probably encountered, and you either probably
Speaker 1: encountered this in a school textbook or perhaps at the
Speaker 1: zoo um, and that is that the school that the
Speaker 1: skulls of elephants, particularly the skulls of prehistoric Mediterranean dwarf elephants,
Speaker 1: could have informed our idea of the psyclops because you
Speaker 1: look at this skull and you see this massive hole
Speaker 1: there in the middle, that of course is a nasal
Speaker 1: opening is for the trunk, right, but you might think, hey,
Speaker 1: that looks like an eye socket and the head looks
Speaker 1: kind of humanoid. Maybe that's what's going on here. And
Speaker 1: indeed Um mayor chi is in on this as well.
Speaker 1: And uh, the argument here is that the myth may
Speaker 1: have originated or at least gathered some some steam via
Speaker 1: the discovery of elephant skull fossils, namely the prehistoric Mediterranean
Speaker 1: dwarf elephants. Or another particular one is Dionithrum giagantum, which
Speaker 1: had been a would have been a fifteen foot four
Speaker 1: point six meter high elephant creature, but unlike modern elephants,
Speaker 1: these guys had had a four four point five foot
Speaker 1: one point three meter backward pointing tusks. Yeah so backward. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll have to look at an image of this because
Speaker 1: the tusk that they kind of look like a chin beard,
Speaker 1: like some sort of a chin beard that has been
Speaker 1: uh been shaped those braided devil beards. Yeah, like kind
Speaker 1: of like a braided devil beard. Yeah, with the forks
Speaker 1: and it's kind of turning backwards towards the individual's chest
Speaker 1: chin fangs, chin kind of chin thangs. The elephant would
Speaker 1: have probably used these two strip barks from trees or
Speaker 1: possibly dig up plants. But no, only use them for
Speaker 1: draining the blood out of enemies. But but but you
Speaker 1: look at it, and it does look like a humanoid skull,
Speaker 1: a very monstrous humanoid skull that for some reason has
Speaker 1: a skeletal basis for its goatee. Uh. And it has
Speaker 1: something like a third eyehole or a large central eyehole
Speaker 1: in the middle of its head. Now, a geologist from
Speaker 1: the University of Crets Natural History Museum believe these creatures
Speaker 1: probably swam over from Turkey via the islands of Rhodes
Speaker 1: and Carpathos to reach Crete. But yeah, these present one
Speaker 1: possible idea of where the cyclops came from. Uh. Again,
Speaker 1: If not an origin story, then perhaps something that informed
Speaker 1: and strengthened existing beliefs along the way. Yeah. Again, that
Speaker 1: seems like an interesting explanatory fit, but I guess there's
Speaker 1: no way to know for sure. All Right, we're gonna
Speaker 1: take a quick break and when we come back, we
Speaker 1: shall get to the dragons. Hey, everybody, do you like TV? Well,
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Speaker 1: So one of the obvious things has got to be dragons, right,
Speaker 1: I mean you think about therapod dinosaurs like, uh, you
Speaker 1: see a spinosaurus or Terrannosaurus rex, alberta Saurus and any
Speaker 1: kind of Uh, I mean they just look so dragon like. Yeah. Uh,
Speaker 1: as soon as you see them, you're like, that is
Speaker 1: a thing that Yeah, it guards golden treasure, kind of
Speaker 1: like the griffin, I guess, and it will bite you
Speaker 1: in half if you look at it cross side. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of hard, like I find with with
Speaker 1: a four year old at times, it's been a little
Speaker 1: challenging to describe and to explain that, Okay, this dragon here,
Speaker 1: this is not real. These were never real. These are
Speaker 1: purely made up. But this dinosaur this is this is real.
Speaker 1: This was real, These used to exist. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: some people make a kind of very different but in
Speaker 1: a strange way, sort of parallel argument. I didn't really
Speaker 1: know this, but if you google dinosaurs and dragons together,
Speaker 1: actually you will get a lot of Young Earth creationist literature.
Speaker 1: It wasn't really a where this, but apparently some people
Speaker 1: of that persuasion believe that the dragon myths were created
Speaker 1: not out of a need to explain fossils, but came
Speaker 1: out of direct human interactions with dinosaurs. Uh So, leaving
Speaker 1: that belief aside, uh, if you walk among the skeletons
Speaker 1: of these dinosaurs and you see the fossils, that's really
Speaker 1: I think all you would need to definitely want to
Speaker 1: come up with some kind of dragon type creature to
Speaker 1: explain them, and so that yeah, they may have dreamed
Speaker 1: up something like we see in various mythological depictions. But
Speaker 1: you also, in fact, and I think I agree with
Speaker 1: this may Or makes the point that you wouldn't necessarily
Speaker 1: have to see dinosaur fossils to dream up dragons. In fact,
Speaker 1: the fossils or or just skeletal remains of many large
Speaker 1: mammals could easily be taken as dragon like in nature. Yeah,
Speaker 1: especially when you start thinking outside of the box of
Speaker 1: about what a dragon is. We discuss this a little
Speaker 1: bit in our Chinese Zodiac episode, because in the in
Speaker 1: the the Asian traditions, you strip away this sort of
Speaker 1: cliche Western idea sort of dungeons and dragon's view of
Speaker 1: a dragon. And he's try trying to describe it. It
Speaker 1: just becomes this amalgam of different biological influence. They're less
Speaker 1: large lizards and more boundary crossing chimera animals. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so all you need is a large rib cage. All
Speaker 1: you need is, uh, you know, a few bones that
Speaker 1: clearly don't match up with anything in the world that
Speaker 1: you have seen, or some huge skulls in ancient India,
Speaker 1: that's right. So uh so there is a tradition of
Speaker 1: dragons in India that is attributed to so a story
Speaker 1: about the first century CE Greek philosopher Apollonius of Tyana
Speaker 1: saying when he when he traveled through the foothills of
Speaker 1: the Himalayas and went to northern India. Philostratus's story about
Speaker 1: this is that it was just full of dragon skulls. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're not dragon skulls. Dragons. Well, he basically reported as
Speaker 1: fact that, hey, dragons are everywhere in this area, and
Speaker 1: I've seen the skulls to prove it. Um. And and
Speaker 1: indeed there seemed to have been just a number of
Speaker 1: different skulls or heads that were laid at the base
Speaker 1: of a mountain in a place that referred to as
Speaker 1: a paraca. They kept his trophies, right, like the predator. Yeah,
Speaker 1: kind of like the predator and the skull and some
Speaker 1: of these are like, you know, not only are they skulls,
Speaker 1: but they have crystals inside them in some cases, which
Speaker 1: seems to have represented you know, the supernatural powers perhaps
Speaker 1: of these these creatures. Yeah. Now, so who knows where
Speaker 1: this was actually supposed to take place or if there's
Speaker 1: any truth to the story of this journey at all
Speaker 1: about Apollonius, But either way, it could have been inspired
Speaker 1: by accounts of the region independent of Apollonius. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: some reculation that it might match up with with Peshawar
Speaker 1: and modern Pakistan, uh and In and indeed in later
Speaker 1: times according to Mayor, a famous of Buddhist holy place
Speaker 1: near Peshawar was known as quote the Shrine of the
Speaker 1: Thousand Heads. So what could these heads have been if
Speaker 1: they were not truly dragon heads? Well, as you as
Speaker 1: you mentioned, they could have been just about anything. Um
Speaker 1: in this area is just strewn with the impressive Pleo
Speaker 1: Pleistocene era vertebrate fossils. So they would have had their
Speaker 1: pick of pretty impressive dragon heads. And and what's more,
Speaker 1: calcite and uh selenite crystals are very common in the
Speaker 1: fossilized bones in this area, So this would have led
Speaker 1: to perhaps to the tails of the gems that are
Speaker 1: embedded within the dragon's heads. Yeah, that's a crazy myth.
Speaker 1: Gym's inside the dragon head? Yeah, the gyms are its
Speaker 1: brain or you know, some component, maybe some cybernetic opponent.
Speaker 1: Oh man, that's great. That's another one that that sounds
Speaker 1: like a very interesting historical explanation. But then again, we're
Speaker 1: just sort of like fitting what we know now onto
Speaker 1: the details of history. So it's it's hard to know
Speaker 1: for sure if if an explanation like that was true.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, it's interesting, this very same region just
Speaker 1: below the Himalayas. UH. It's also been argued that this
Speaker 1: may have informed and molded some understandings of of of
Speaker 1: an of a very important event in in Hindu mythology,
Speaker 1: specifically the dynastic war between the Carabas and the Pandavas
Speaker 1: in the epic mahabarata Um and this UH. This idea
Speaker 1: comes from the paper Fossil Folklore from India The Sea
Speaker 1: Wala Hills and the Mahabarata by Alexander van der Geer, Uh,
Speaker 1: Michael Dermissoats and John DeVos. And this was published in
Speaker 1: the journal Folklore in two thousand and eight. But they
Speaker 1: basically point out that you have you have a number
Speaker 1: of fossil ammonites, for example, that are worshiped as the
Speaker 1: disc or chakra of the Hindu god Vishnu. Oh I
Speaker 1: didn't know that and that Uh, And then indeed, this
Speaker 1: is an area that's rich invertebrate fossils. And the authors
Speaker 1: argued that this region was seen as perhaps the historical
Speaker 1: stage for this legendary battle that's described in the Mahabaratah,
Speaker 1: during which hundreds of mighty and sometimes gigantic heroes or
Speaker 1: are engaging in battle with each other. They are elephants
Speaker 1: that are war elephants that are said to have fought
Speaker 1: and died. So that kind of makes sense. How if
Speaker 1: you were to find a bunch of fossils all in
Speaker 1: the same place, you you might not having an understanding
Speaker 1: of how things get deposited over geological time, you might
Speaker 1: very well assume that something big went down here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: surely this was the side of some epic attle and
Speaker 1: look at all the strange things that died here. Some
Speaker 1: of these are clearly elephants, because you would have seen
Speaker 1: a number of prehistoric elephant type species. But also you'd
Speaker 1: have four horn horn giraffe creatures, giant tortoises, sabretooth cats,
Speaker 1: different camels, and on top of this, you would have
Speaker 1: also found lots of ancient bronze javelins and spears. So
Speaker 1: the archaeological artifacts plus the uh the paleontological remains would
Speaker 1: have equaled an influence over the setting and context of
Speaker 1: the great battle that occurs in this Indian epic. That
Speaker 1: is really interesting. And I think the the idea of
Speaker 1: the density of fossils leading into the differential mythical interpretations
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, that that's something to keep in mind.
Speaker 1: But let's go farther east, right, shall we. Okay, let's
Speaker 1: do Yeah, let's talk just a little bit about the
Speaker 1: the Chinese unicorn, the the the quillan, a creature that
Speaker 1: is often known referred to by Westerners as the Chinese unicorn.
Speaker 1: And it's worth noting that the that that Western unicorn
Speaker 1: depictions vary a lot on their own. So you have
Speaker 1: some Western unicorns that look more like a goat, some
Speaker 1: look more like a horse. Sometimes within the same work
Speaker 1: or series of works, such as the Lady in the
Speaker 1: Unicorn Tapestries. Um. But the the Chinese quillon, and it's
Speaker 1: various incarnations that you find throughout East Asia. They vary
Speaker 1: even more so. It's it's essentially a mystical sacred forest creature,
Speaker 1: but there are elements of a deer and other herbivores,
Speaker 1: and the details vary beyond that. Um there's um you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes it's it's sometimes it has one. Sometimes there's two
Speaker 1: or three fleshy horns. Sometimes they're more distinctly antlers. Um
Speaker 1: So you can well imagine that in looking at the
Speaker 1: fossil record, you could easily pick and choose what you
Speaker 1: want this thing to resemble in the fossil record. Um So.
Speaker 1: There are a couple of interesting arguments that are made
Speaker 1: about it. One is that is that this might that
Speaker 1: the origin of this might have been a giraffe. Um So,
Speaker 1: essentially you would have had travelers that and this is
Speaker 1: not even fossil related, but the idea that you would
Speaker 1: have had travelers who ventured out to the coast of
Speaker 1: Africa and returned with not only stories of giraffes, but
Speaker 1: in one case UH fourteen fourteen, the unit commander ching
Speaker 1: Ho would have returned with a giraffe as a tribute
Speaker 1: to Emperor Yunglow. And the Somali name for giraffe is
Speaker 1: also gearing, which might have sounded like quillen and so um,
Speaker 1: which is a word that also is an emblem of
Speaker 1: justice to the Chinese. So there's a possibility that that
Speaker 1: the giraffe might have played some role in the formation
Speaker 1: or the evolution of the idea of equilling. That's interesting now.
Speaker 1: I know. One thing I think I've heard is that
Speaker 1: different unicorn legends would have to be traceable back to
Speaker 1: the rhinoceros. Is there anything to that, Well, possibly, you know,
Speaker 1: there's no This is one of another one of those
Speaker 1: areas where you can't really say for sure, and I
Speaker 1: tend like, personally, looking at the information, I tend to
Speaker 1: doubt some of the connections that are made a lot
Speaker 1: of people, both for western and Eastern unicorns. They pull
Speaker 1: they point to the elasmotherium um, which were particularly more recent.
Speaker 1: It's been in the news recently because Uh, it's been
Speaker 1: discovered that you actually had humans and elasmo theoriums living
Speaker 1: side by side in modern day Kazakhstan, a mere twenty
Speaker 1: nine thousand years ago. This according to a recent study
Speaker 1: published in the American Journal of Applied Sciences. Previous estimates
Speaker 1: would have placed it outside the two hundred thousand year
Speaker 1: run of human history. The elasmotherorium did not look like
Speaker 1: at western unicorn. It did not really look like any
Speaker 1: of the depictions we see of an Eastern unicorn or quillan.
Speaker 1: It really looks like a large prehistoric rhino with a
Speaker 1: really awesome horn. But there is the idea that if
Speaker 1: not direct human observation of this creature, then perhaps memories
Speaker 1: and stories in oral tradition of encountering or crew illustrations. Yeah,
Speaker 1: our crewe illustrations informed our knowledge of of of what
Speaker 1: it is. Um Now. Of course, there are also arguments
Speaker 1: to be made that the quillan is in what was
Speaker 1: informed by actual rhinos, more modern rhinos, particularly sue Matron
Speaker 1: Rhinoceros is that that once lived throughout China and still
Speaker 1: live in in parts of of Asia today. Um And
Speaker 1: there's some interesting arguments on both sides here, but you
Speaker 1: definitely see realistic depictions of Sumatran rhinos in Chinese artistic traditions.
Speaker 1: So there does seem to be a divide between the
Speaker 1: the pure real world rhino uh camp and the Quillen camp.
Speaker 1: So again it remains an open question. Well, Robert, I've
Speaker 1: got another one, and I want you to take a
Speaker 1: look at a vase with me. Okay, do you want
Speaker 1: to look at a not a vase, a mixing bowl.
Speaker 1: Put your eyes on it. Okay, I'm looking at it now. Okay.
Speaker 1: So this is a This is an object in the
Speaker 1: Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that is a late
Speaker 1: Corinthian mixing bowl from about five fifty BC, and it
Speaker 1: is it is described as Heracles, or also known as Hercules,
Speaker 1: firing arrows while he Sion hurls rocks at a dragon.
Speaker 1: Presumably this dragon is the monster of Troy or the
Speaker 1: cats troyas uh. This this illustration is crazy looking Hercules
Speaker 1: and Heracles. He looks like a robot, straight up robot,
Speaker 1: right and then uh he Sion of course is kind
Speaker 1: of standing there between him and this monster. And I
Speaker 1: don't know, I'll get to the monster in a second.
Speaker 1: But if you're able to look this up, do so,
Speaker 1: because it is weird. The monster does not look like
Speaker 1: a normal monster as you would expect it to be
Speaker 1: depicted in classical Greek art. It looks like a big
Speaker 1: black mass with some sort of white animal skull jutting
Speaker 1: out of it. So what's going on in this story? Well,
Speaker 1: in the tradition, Poseidon has a beef beef with Lawmadon,
Speaker 1: the king of Troy, and so Poseidon to get back
Speaker 1: at Lamadon sends a key TOAs a sea sea beast
Speaker 1: to attack the city, and the Trojans keep the sea
Speaker 1: monster at bay by sacrificing maidens to it. Keytas is like, okay,
Speaker 1: maidens are tasty, I can I can make this work, um.
Speaker 1: But at some point Hercules rolls up to Troy around
Speaker 1: the same time that the Trojans are about to sacrifice
Speaker 1: Lamadon's daughter Heson to the monster, and then Hercules saves
Speaker 1: Hecon by killing the sea beast. But in two thousand two,
Speaker 1: Adrian Mayor authored a paper in the Oxford Journal of
Speaker 1: Archaeology about this illustration on this mixing bowl, and the
Speaker 1: paper was called the Monster of Troy vase, the the
Speaker 1: earliest artistic record of a vertebrate fossil discovery, and Mayor
Speaker 1: argues that this illustration of the legend of Hercules rescuing
Speaker 1: from the Monster of Troy was likely visually inspired by
Speaker 1: a large fossil skull, so here it's not necessarily the
Speaker 1: myth itself, but at least this illustration of it um.
Speaker 1: So the key toss in this illustration does not conform
Speaker 1: to the Greek style of sea monster art, which was
Speaker 1: usually created kind of like the griffin tradition by mixing
Speaker 1: attributes of various different known animals like the head of
Speaker 1: a lion, body of a snake or something like that. Instead,
Speaker 1: features on the illustration caused Mayor to think that the
Speaker 1: image was inspired by quote, a large fossil skull of
Speaker 1: a prehistoric mammal, possibly a Samotherium, which was a giant
Speaker 1: Miocene giraffhoid. Back to giraffes again, that they're so terrifying
Speaker 1: in the mythic tradition, and having looked at both myself,
Speaker 1: I can definitely see the resemblance that would cause somebody
Speaker 1: to say this, including both the skull the skull monster
Speaker 1: in the picture and the sam ethereum have this l
Speaker 1: shaped lower jaw that protrudes from beyond the upper jaw
Speaker 1: in the front, and then when it hooks up in
Speaker 1: the l shape uh to connect with the rest of
Speaker 1: the skull, it's sort of right behind where the eyes are,
Speaker 1: and it's the same in the picture, so uh Mayor
Speaker 1: also points out that quote. Numerous literary accounts describe exposures
Speaker 1: of these and similar large mammal fossils in antiquity along
Speaker 1: the Turkish coast, on the Aegean Islands, and on the
Speaker 1: Greek mainland. I conclude that this vase painting is the
Speaker 1: earliest artistic record of such a discovery. So the idea
Speaker 1: here is that the image in the painting is inspired
Speaker 1: by a giant samotherium or other large extinct mammal skull
Speaker 1: jutting out of a cliff, which you may well have
Speaker 1: found at that time in that place. It's it's almost
Speaker 1: as if the the artist here they said, all right,
Speaker 1: what does this monster look like? And then someone said, oh,
Speaker 1: you see that skull up on the cliff, that that
Speaker 1: might have been when its head was like and then
Speaker 1: he did like a direct drawing of and they're like,
Speaker 1: your bonehead, that's not what it actually looked like. That's
Speaker 1: just the skull. Oh bonehead by accident. But seriously, you
Speaker 1: should look up this mixing bowl. It looks it looks
Speaker 1: so weird and so great. Yeah. Both the both the
Speaker 1: illustration of the monster of the of Troy and the
Speaker 1: the actual fossil skull both look very metal, like they
Speaker 1: could either one could be on the cover of a
Speaker 1: heavy metal album. You do usually don't think of giraffes
Speaker 1: as being very metal, but I guess they are, especially
Speaker 1: when you take all their flesh off. Yeah, and they
Speaker 1: have the elongated skull in this case and the bony
Speaker 1: horn lumps on top of the head. All right, we're
Speaker 1: gonna return to to China for for I think we
Speaker 1: have our last specific example here. So in many regions
Speaker 1: of China you will find track bearing fossil slabs that
Speaker 1: are used. They're either sometimes they're used as building materials
Speaker 1: or at least they're they're integrated into houses, yards, uh
Speaker 1: in older traditions, cave dwellings. Uh. And they serve as
Speaker 1: auspicious symbols or just mere decorations. But they are essentially
Speaker 1: the footsteps of dinosaurs. And there are records of these
Speaker 1: going back hundreds and hundreds of years of individuals finding
Speaker 1: these uh. People are fascinated with them and they hold
Speaker 1: onto them because when you encounter these footsteps, it's kind
Speaker 1: of like encountering the bones. Here are some some footsteps
Speaker 1: in the stone, and you know what footsteps are. You
Speaker 1: can you can look at these and go, oh, that
Speaker 1: kind of looks like the footsteps of a bird. But
Speaker 1: they're set in stone. There's something weird going on here,
Speaker 1: there's something supernaturalust have been a magical bird, right, So, uh,
Speaker 1: this is where we end up with the idea that
Speaker 1: these are the footsteps of the golden pheasant or sometimes
Speaker 1: that referred to as the golden chicken, like golden chicken,
Speaker 1: the gingi or um the or the golden chickens claw
Speaker 1: gingi za, and it's regarded as again an auspicious symbol. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: the golden pheasant is of course a real bird, but
Speaker 1: it's elusive nature, it's beautiful colors make it a prime
Speaker 1: candidate for deification, and it's also associated with the feng Hong,
Speaker 1: which is a mythological bird similar to the western phoenix.
Speaker 1: So without the knowledge of fossil making, the maker of
Speaker 1: these tracks clearly had to be divine. So so it's
Speaker 1: an interesting tradition I read about this in a paper
Speaker 1: titled Dinosaur Tracks Myths and Buildings Um the Gingi Stones
Speaker 1: from Zizo Area, Northern shawn Zi, China. It's a two
Speaker 1: fifty paper, um, but it's yeah, it's a more interesting
Speaker 1: insight into it. And again it doesn't specifically involve bones,
Speaker 1: but involves just the the fossil footsteps. Oh, that's still
Speaker 1: be geomethology typically, yeah, totally. But but this one I
Speaker 1: feel like it's more of a direct case because it's
Speaker 1: individuals saying and cultures saying, here are the footsteps, and
Speaker 1: this is why they're important to us, this is what
Speaker 1: they mean. Well, that would actually be a really good
Speaker 1: example than of, um, what it looks like when you
Speaker 1: have a very solid case in geo mythology explanations, because um,
Speaker 1: I mean with with this whole subject, it's very fascinating.
Speaker 1: I love reading about this stuff. It's super fun. But
Speaker 1: very often we're coming up with it's kind of like
Speaker 1: evolutionary psychology explanations that you encounter that can be very
Speaker 1: cleverly devised. Oftentimes there there's some very compelling kind of
Speaker 1: it makes sense fitting the evidence together for them, but
Speaker 1: at the same time they can feel less solid than
Speaker 1: a lot of other scientific hypotheses, because it's hard for
Speaker 1: you to make predictions with them. At the end of
Speaker 1: the day, even the best examples of either evolutionary psychology
Speaker 1: or a geomethology, I feel like I am shaking, I'm
Speaker 1: nodding my head and saying, yeah, I feel like that
Speaker 1: could be part of the explanation. So while I don't
Speaker 1: mean to downplay the work people have done on this
Speaker 1: at all, like I think that a whole lot of
Speaker 1: really really intelligent research has gone into this subject, and
Speaker 1: I love reading about it, but it definitely does feel
Speaker 1: like a softer, squishier science than than much other science.
Speaker 1: And one issue that follows from that is this, I've
Speaker 1: been thinking about this question, how hard should we be
Speaker 1: looking for scientific historical explanations for ancient myths and legends
Speaker 1: before we conclude that they're most likely explained just from
Speaker 1: forces inside the mind of the creator, whether that's conscious
Speaker 1: imaginative fiction writing, or visions or hallucinations, whatever psychogenic origins.
Speaker 1: Um Because if you try to explain every myth by
Speaker 1: external facts about the world that we can find evidence
Speaker 1: of now, it's sort of it can end up taking
Speaker 1: you to crazy extremes. Right. Yeah. One thing that definitely
Speaker 1: comes to my mind is have you ever heard what
Speaker 1: the ancient aliens people say about the Bible? Oh? How? How?
Speaker 1: How have I not? Oh? Yeah, I mean it's crazy.
Speaker 1: So in the uh quick one, the Book of Ezekiel,
Speaker 1: but the Bible, chapter one, the author says he sees
Speaker 1: a vision of God. Right. He says, quote, as I looked,
Speaker 1: a stormy wind came out of the north, a great
Speaker 1: cloud with brightness around it, and fire flashing forth continually,
Speaker 1: and in the middle of the fire something like gleaming amber.
Speaker 1: In the middle of it was something like four living creatures.
Speaker 1: This was their appearance. They were human, of human form.
Speaker 1: Each had four faces, and each of them had four wings.
Speaker 1: Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet
Speaker 1: were like the soul of a calf's foot, and they
Speaker 1: sparkled like burnished bronze. And then later, starting a verse fifteen,
Speaker 1: as I looked at the living creatures, I saw a
Speaker 1: wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, one for
Speaker 1: each of the four of them. As for the appearance
Speaker 1: of the wheels and their construction, their appearance was like
Speaker 1: the gleaming of Beryl, and the four of them had
Speaker 1: the same form, their construction being something like a wheel
Speaker 1: within a wheel. Obviously flying saucer aliens. Right, ask the Internet,
Speaker 1: it will tell you the author of this passage encounter
Speaker 1: to flying saucer aliens. Four aliens got out of it there.
Speaker 1: I don't know their shape shifting, uh, nanomaterial suits, whatever
Speaker 1: you want, it's all there. Now. This is a very
Speaker 1: different and much more extreme hypothesis than fossils explaining mythical creatures, right,
Speaker 1: because whereas we actually know that fossils exist, we do
Speaker 1: not know whether aliens or flying saucers exist. And there
Speaker 1: are some good arguments concerning interstellar distances, etcetera to make
Speaker 1: us think that even if they do exist, that it's
Speaker 1: unlikely they visited Earth. But them or principle is at play. Right,
Speaker 1: when we encounter an ancient account of a vision or
Speaker 1: a myth or anything that seems fantastical in any way,
Speaker 1: do we need to find a naturalistic external explanation for it,
Speaker 1: apart from psychogenic origins? Is it just the person writing it?
Speaker 1: Is that their imagination or a vision they saw in
Speaker 1: their head? Yeah, because otherwise you're limiting an ancient individual
Speaker 1: to some to some sort of really really ultimately alien
Speaker 1: mindset where they have no creative thought, they have no
Speaker 1: pre existing stories of the fantastic or ideas of the fantastic,
Speaker 1: and are not susceptible susceptible to hallucination of any sort,
Speaker 1: and they can only they can only make create a
Speaker 1: written account or a or an oral tradition based on
Speaker 1: something they directly saw as it is written. Yeah. Then again,
Speaker 1: people definitely do take inspiration in the fiction and the
Speaker 1: fantasy they create from events and objects in the real world.
Speaker 1: So I don't think it's a fool's errand to be
Speaker 1: looking for these kind of explanations. But how hard should
Speaker 1: we look? I guess as the question like, when should
Speaker 1: we just be satisfied that, well, you know, this person
Speaker 1: probably just had an active imagination and they came up
Speaker 1: with the with the lion's body and an eagle's head.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't that be weird? You know? Do they need to
Speaker 1: have seen something that made them think of a quadruped
Speaker 1: with a beak? Yeah? Because I mean, ultimately, if you
Speaker 1: to take a skeptical approach, more even skeptical approach, you
Speaker 1: can basically say that this person is describing a bunch
Speaker 1: of um, sort of psychedelic craziness, and the religious script
Speaker 1: for it that they had to play with says, oh,
Speaker 1: well this is God. Our modern supernatural script is that
Speaker 1: it's aliens, and both are essentially just um, you know,
Speaker 1: fictional scripts that we have to describe something that does
Speaker 1: not conform to the world. Yeah, if you're going to
Speaker 1: go with a naturalistic nation, yeah, or it's God, I
Speaker 1: mean just literally, it's just that's the actual God appearing
Speaker 1: before well, I mean, of course, for people who believe
Speaker 1: in whatever God is figuring into this particular story, that's
Speaker 1: obviously an option for them. For people on the outside
Speaker 1: of that belief tradition who don't believe in that, that's
Speaker 1: not really an option for them in in explaining where
Speaker 1: this comes from. But you don't have to go any
Speaker 1: kind of to any kind of contorted, uh third party
Speaker 1: external naturalistic interpretations. You can always just think, well, somebody
Speaker 1: thought something up. Yeah. Of course, we're always at a
Speaker 1: disadvantage because we're always looking back in hindsight on these examples.
Speaker 1: But what if we what if we dare to look ahead,
Speaker 1: what have we dare to imagine? What future commentators, future historians, uh,
Speaker 1: maybe even visitors from outer space would make of some
Speaker 1: of the uh, the mythical constructs that we have today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that is a fascinating question, and it's something
Speaker 1: that Adrian Mayer brings up in her Geomethology entry that
Speaker 1: I talked about earlier in the Encyclopedia of Geology. She
Speaker 1: points out the storage of transuranic radioactive waste. Have you
Speaker 1: ever heard about the intentional creation of geo myths with
Speaker 1: relation to this? No? I don't believe I have. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the problem is, once you have high level radioactive waste,
Speaker 1: after you know, it comes out of it comes out
Speaker 1: of a nuclear reactor, you've got to store it somewhere,
Speaker 1: preferably somewhere underground. And this stuff will remain dangerous for
Speaker 1: thousands of years, far far beyond the lifespan of of
Speaker 1: you know, the United States already, I mean, so much
Speaker 1: changes on the surface of the Earth in the amount
Speaker 1: of time that this stuff remains dangerous. How do you
Speaker 1: come up with ways of keeping people away from it
Speaker 1: that are going to last that long. You can lock
Speaker 1: it up in a building, but what if future people
Speaker 1: come across this building and say, hmm, something's locked in there?
Speaker 1: Might be valuable. Maybe we should get inside and then
Speaker 1: of course they sicken and die. Um. Or you could
Speaker 1: try to put up signs that say warning, this is poisonous,
Speaker 1: stay away from it. It will hurt you. Will the
Speaker 1: people of the future remember why those signs were there
Speaker 1: and believe you? Or will they even speak the same
Speaker 1: language as you, will they be able to read them? Uh?
Speaker 1: So this this is a problem, and so one solution,
Speaker 1: as mentioned by Mayor is uh. Some people have suggested,
Speaker 1: what if we create geo myths about radioactive storage sites,
Speaker 1: thus creating intentionally mythology that says, don't go near these
Speaker 1: places because they're full of curses that will destroy you. Well,
Speaker 1: that's it, like the like one idea that comes to mind,
Speaker 1: as you just go ahead and put out an image
Speaker 1: of Godzilla there, and then they'll think, oh, well, no
Speaker 1: one will come near because we'll see the image of Godzilla.
Speaker 1: But as a monster, I always go toward images of Godzilla, right.
Speaker 1: But then also they might think, oh, an image of
Speaker 1: a large dinosaur here, there must be a bunch of
Speaker 1: dinosaur bones in there, which gets into a whole other
Speaker 1: idea like how would you make sense of of Godzilla
Speaker 1: if you if you were taking a geo mythological approach,
Speaker 1: you might say, oh, they are inspired by dinosaurs and
Speaker 1: their love of dinosaurs, which is partially true. Godzilla is
Speaker 1: is undeniably informed by our love of something like a
Speaker 1: torontos arts rex. But in the other hand, there's a
Speaker 1: lot more to the fabric of Godzilla's identity as well,
Speaker 1: tying in the horrors of atomic war and radioactive anxiety. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely that That's a great example of the sort of complex,
Speaker 1: poly functional nature of myth, and the polygenic nature of myth.
Speaker 1: It comes from all over the place. Godzilla isn't just
Speaker 1: that somebody saw a t rex skeleton. Yeah. You gotta
Speaker 1: be careful when you're playing with myth, because if you
Speaker 1: approach it from a very you know, one dimensional framework,
Speaker 1: you're you're you're playing with a multidimensional object. Uh. I mean,
Speaker 1: I imagine even the Benny Jessriates have some problems with this.
Speaker 1: I mean, what else about today, apart from our radioactive
Speaker 1: waste storage facilities? What else about today? Can you imagine?
Speaker 1: Let's say, you know, mad Max scenario happens, and we
Speaker 1: lose a lot of the connection with with history and
Speaker 1: culture and future generations. Are just dealing with our remains
Speaker 1: and our artifacts to try and figure out what happened,
Speaker 1: What geo myths might they have about the present day,
Speaker 1: What what mythological creatures would would they invent when coming
Speaker 1: upon a Google server farm? Oh m hmm, Man, I
Speaker 1: don't know. I mean maybe transformers. Yeah, I mean transformers
Speaker 1: are either robots that turn into cars or cars that
Speaker 1: turn into robots. I mean they're real world technological objects
Speaker 1: that become unreal sentient robot creatures. So that might be
Speaker 1: a complex one for for future commentators to figure out
Speaker 1: what is the transformer and why? Well? Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's so when I think about a server farm, and
Speaker 1: I imagine, okay, so I have no scientific knowledge, I
Speaker 1: have no technological knowledge. I've just come across this facility.
Speaker 1: The one thing that seems to be clear about it
Speaker 1: is it's a gigantic building and nobody lived inside it,
Speaker 1: and so it must Okay, Yeah, so you're talking specifically
Speaker 1: about such like the server farms that show up and say,
Speaker 1: still look on Valley where it's just a massive, massive
Speaker 1: room with just rows upon rows of these boxes. Right, Sure,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I mean, surely you can think of
Speaker 1: something strange about that. Oh yeah, I mean instantly, maybe
Speaker 1: it's amazed for a minuteur and yeah, or you are
Speaker 1: a tomb of some kind. Um, maybe it is a
Speaker 1: tomb because the people of the past have uploaded their
Speaker 1: consciousness into these servers and that's where they still exist.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's running in there and they're just having
Speaker 1: imagine how detached from reality their simulations are at this point.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm really curious now to hear what y'all
Speaker 1: out there, what you listeners are going to have to
Speaker 1: say about the geo myths of the present. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: because I'm sure we're missing some really key ones because
Speaker 1: there's there's just so much there's so much weird stuff
Speaker 1: that we have in our pop culture these days that
Speaker 1: is much like a myth. It is, it is poly functional.
Speaker 1: It's not just you know, the cartoon image that it portrays.
Speaker 1: It's informed by all these other ideas. And uh uh
Speaker 1: And certainly when we get into some of the strange
Speaker 1: memes out there, memes that continually evolve, uh, both intentionally
Speaker 1: and just as a byproduct of life online. Absolutely, uh so, Robert.
Speaker 1: One last question, how convinced are you looking at these
Speaker 1: arguments for mythological creatures inspired by fossils and and remains
Speaker 1: of extinct animals. What what do you think do they
Speaker 1: figure in the creation of this, these mythological creatures, and
Speaker 1: if so, how often I tend to buy more. I'm
Speaker 1: not saying that that they never play into the creation
Speaker 1: of myths, but I tend to favor that midpoint argument,
Speaker 1: where where some version of the myth is pre existing
Speaker 1: and then fossils are observed and the to inform each other.
Speaker 1: I think that makes a lot of sense. Um. I
Speaker 1: think I'm somewhere in the middle too. I'm not I'm
Speaker 1: not wholly on board, but I really love these ideas.
Speaker 1: I very much want them to be true because I
Speaker 1: love the idea of people reckoning with the geo facts
Speaker 1: of their surroundings by using the darkest parts of their imagination. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know it ties in nicely with the episode
Speaker 1: we also recorded this week on our desire for complete
Speaker 1: narratives and complete understandings, Like there's a there's a beautiful
Speaker 1: simplicity to geo mythology that that is so attractive and
Speaker 1: that you could just so succinctively explain this fantastic creature. Uh. However,
Speaker 1: it seems. It seems very rare that such a succinct
Speaker 1: explanation would be the only explanation for for something that
Speaker 1: that has so many facets to it. I think they
Speaker 1: convince me on the Golden Chicken. Golden chicken with the chicken. Yeah, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a good one, all right. So hey, if you
Speaker 1: want to check out some of the some links to
Speaker 1: some of the things we're talking about here, maybe an
Speaker 1: image or two, heading over to stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind dot com. That's the mothership. That's where you'll find
Speaker 1: all the podcast episodes, including the landing page for this
Speaker 1: episode with those cool, outgoing links. And you'll also find
Speaker 1: links to our social media accounts, which is Facebook as Twitter.
Speaker 1: We are blow the Mind on both of those. Follow
Speaker 1: us on Instagram, follow us on tumbler. We maintain all
Speaker 1: those social media accounts. And if you want to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us to let us know your ideas
Speaker 1: about the future, geo mythology of the present, or any
Speaker 1: other reactions to this episode, you can email us at
Speaker 1: blow the Mind at how stuffworks dot com. Well more
Speaker 1: on this and paths of other topics. Is that how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com? Say the people the first fist
Speaker 1: first start,