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