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Elephant or Cyclops? The Mistaken Identity of Animal Bones - Ep 59
1.2k Plays1 year ago
From dragons, to unicorns and Divine Chickens, this episode is all about mythological creatures and how they may (or may not) have been inspired by fossilised remains of extinct species. Our friend Pliny the Elder makes an appearance once again, along with a peculiar extinct giraffe species.
Transcripts
For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/animals/59
Links and Sources
- Bressan, D. (2012) Early Paleoart: Of Prehistoric Monsters and Men. Scientific American.
- Bressan, D. (2019) Nineteenth-Century Fossil Discoveries Influence Sea Serpent Reports. Forbes.
- Christen, A. G., & Christen, J. A. (2011). The unicorn and the narwhal: a tale of the tooth. Journal of the History of Dentistry, 59(3), 135-142.
- Edmonds, P. (2018). The bunyip as uncanny rupture: Fabulous animals, innocuous quadrupeds and the Australian anthropocene. Australian Humanities Review, 63, 80-98.
- Hand, W.D. (2021). Magical Medicine: The Folkloric Component of Medicine in the Folk Belief, Custom, and Ritual of the Peoples of Europe and America. University of California Press. p. 298.
- Mayor, A. and Heaney, M. (1993). "Griffins and Arimaspeans". Folklore. 104 (1–2): 40.
Additional sources can be found at: https://www.archpodnet.com/animals/59
Contact
- Alex FitzpatrickTwitter: @archaeologyfitz
- Simona FalangaTwitter: @CrazyBoneLady
- Alex’s Blog: Animal Archaeology
- Music "Coconut - (dyalla remix)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2UiKoouqaY
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
You're
Welcome to Archaeo-Animals
00:00:01
Speaker
listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:15
Speaker
Hello
Mistaken Identity in Zooarchaeology
00:00:16
Speaker
everyone, and welcome to another episode of Archaeo-Animals, the show all about zoo archaeology. With you as always, it's me, Simona Falanga, and with me also, Out Swiss Patrick, and this is episode 59, elephants or cyclops, the mistaken identity of animal bones.
Folklore and Paleontology
00:00:39
Speaker
It's a very special episode because it's one of our all case study episodes, baby. If you do have that bingo card that never was, that's case study. You can take it off right there. I think it's funnier if we just never make a bingo card.
00:00:56
Speaker
And then we just keep saying it. I don't know. Just spitball in here. We're giving excuse to laziness. I don't know. So we're going to be looking at the mistaken identity of animal bones or more formally referred to by Adrian Mayer, who also coined this phrase.
00:01:17
Speaker
the folklore of paleontology. So basically it's the study of kind of folklore and mythology that's associated with fossils, you know, usually pre the formal development of paleontology and archaeology and it basically uses archaeology and folklore studies and anthropology and history to understand how past people's thought about animal remains
00:01:44
Speaker
And we like us a good like multidisciplinary discipline. We do like an interdisciplinary discipline. Interdisciplinary discipline. Do you know how hard it's so hard to spell that, huh? We do bingo and tongue twisters. Yeah, I have to always like word check it. What's the word? What do you call it on? Word? Spell check. I use computers.
00:02:14
Speaker
But yes, so we might as well get to it. And I feel like, and it's kind of the name of the title, the name of the title, doing really well today.
00:02:24
Speaker
The name of the episode. So it's probably not surprising. We're going to start with the Cyclops. Yeah, because I guess we're going to do this. Yes, it's an all case study episode because we're just going to cover a variety of mythological creatures from various parts of the world and just try to figure out where sort of the existence of these creatures may have originated from and whether it is from fossils or not from fossils or both.
00:02:50
Speaker
Yeah, and I think the Cyclops story is one that's very well known. It's a bit of a fun fact that kind of floats around. And I think even if you're not necessarily in classical studies or
00:03:05
Speaker
paleontology or archaeology, you people know about it? I should have heard if anything, probably like in sort of fantasy, sort of various sources, whether it's like novels or series, I'm sure there's Cyclops in there.
Cyclops Mythology and Elephant Skulls
00:03:19
Speaker
But the Cyclops we're going to be talking about is the one-eyed giant of Greek and Roman mythology specifically, arguably most famous from Homer's Theodicy. So of course, there's the whole story where Odysseus or Ulysses
00:03:35
Speaker
Which one do we go with? You know what? You are the the most closest to that. You do it. I'm just going to stick with Ulysses. Yeah, you're you're a Roman. You know that. Thanks, Roman. Same thing.
00:03:53
Speaker
So at one point, Ulysses encounters a cyclop called Polyphemus, which she does trick in a way, you know, like, no spoilers, go read it for yourself. Although spoilers were a very old piece of text. You may have had time to catch up, but we're spoiling it now. I'm so sorry.
00:04:14
Speaker
What i think the details of his name is no one and then he blinds and send with the cycle of tries to like help with the other cyclops is and tries to get. Ulysses apprehended keep saying like no one took my eye out no one took my eye out.
00:04:29
Speaker
So yeah, didn't work out too great. But fun fact, we don't know exactly where those events took place. But one like several of the locations have been put forward are in Sicily, one of which very, very close to where I'm from. We actually have a, it's about 20 minute drive at a push from where I'm from. But we have a grot like a cave called literally polyphemus cave.
00:04:55
Speaker
that's located directly underneath where the castle sits. So before you think, I would quite like to see that. It's on private land and you can't. So there you go. I have seen photos of it. It's one of those things I remember very well from when I did my undergraduate in classical archaeology.
00:05:15
Speaker
I think there's several sort of, because Paul of Nemus is meant to be from the city or the city or the settlement of the Cyclopses. But it's not exactly specified where. So like several candidates have been put forward, I think some of the foothills of the Etna. And one of them is in this very large village slash small town called Milazzo. And yeah, there's this cave right underneath the castle where the castle sits in Citadel. But yeah, private land. So Sals.
00:05:44
Speaker
Going back to Cyclops proper, Athenia Abel, an Australian paleontologist, proposed in 1914 that the Cyclops may have actually come from finding dwarf elephant skulls, which, guess what, were found extensively in Sardinia and Sicily, mainly in cave deposits. And also, this is something we kind of talked about already in our last episode, for those of you who actually listen to all the episodes when we talked about Hannibal's elephants. Yes.
00:06:14
Speaker
Did you have to just remember that? No, sorry, my mind went back to the, was it the camels of this guy with elephants? Oh yes, well that was obviously the more important message that we got across in that episode. But yes, we also did talk about, because obviously Hannibal did bring his elephants over,
00:06:34
Speaker
Into the Italian peninsula and there was loads of elephant skulls that they found and one of the important things from that conversation was that it was kind of the first identification of elephants that were potentially extinct that they'd found.
00:06:50
Speaker
which is really cool. And it's actually stemming off of some of the investigations from the Cyclops kind of theory, where identification of the skulls that were found in caves that may have been seen as Cyclops.
00:07:08
Speaker
type creatures, was finally proposed by Italian archaeologists. I'm not going to say it, you say it, Simona. Giovanni Giustino Ciampini. Thank you. In 1688, who was actually like considered like a ecclesiastical archaeologist in his time. So yeah, the Italian archaeologists were really on top of kind of a lot of this early zoo archaeological investigation, which is very cool.
00:07:34
Speaker
has been determined whether the cyclop skulls derived from the finding of dwarf elephant skulls or just normal sized elephant skulls. I think it's specifically a species of dwarf elephant. I don't think they've actually got it down to a particular taxa.
00:07:56
Speaker
I guess it would make sense for cave deposits. So like a lot of the Pleistocene elephants found in Sicily were very, very much smaller in size than sort of the elephants that we have today due to sort of that island effect with the megafauna.
Giant Myths Worldwide
00:08:14
Speaker
got much much much smaller in not just in Sicily but just island environments due to it not being perhaps as much food to eat while the what we would consider so not necessarily the microphone but the smaller fauna being quite a bit bigger than you expect they're like the elephants were actually sort of the size of probably a very large dog
00:08:35
Speaker
But if you want to know more, we've done a whole episode on plasticine mammalian remains, so do check it out. So this actually leads in nicely, because even if they were dwarf elephant skulls, they were still much bigger than, say, human skulls, which conjures those ideas of a cyclops, a large giant. And again, just to also explain that,
00:08:59
Speaker
where the kind of nasal cavity ish area is where people would think is where the eye would sit because it's like so almost dead on in the skull but
00:09:12
Speaker
He also follows into our next kind of topic, which is giants. And we'll see a little bit of overlap as far as kind of fossil evidence for these kind of creatures. So giants, pretty self-explanatory. And we've also kind of talked about them, I think, in previous episodes, but they're really big guys that are found in lots of mythology all around the world, from Greek gigantes to Norse Jotunn. So...
00:09:39
Speaker
one of those things that you kind of just see it's not really specific to any culture and most likely like in the Cyclops case some evidence of you know appearances of giants is probably from people in the past seeing things like a dwarf elephant skull or other elephant skulls or mammoth skulls or you know even just random bones of mammoths or even whale bones obviously especially
00:10:09
Speaker
things like the vertebra are big and even though they are particular to the animal they're from as far as what they look like, they're still roughly kind of the similar regardless of what animal you're looking like. So it's kind of like if you know what a human vertebra looks like and you see a whale bone and you've never seen a whale or you've never seen a whale vertebra before, you can understand how that kind of logic
00:10:33
Speaker
leap goes forward. So for instance, in Crete, Bones of the Giant Orion was found and described by a good old friend, Pliny the Elder, who's going to make a lot of appearances throughout the episode. I also think we should be on the bingo cards.
00:10:50
Speaker
Bones of the giants Rapalas and Orestes were also found in Rome and Mesopotamia, which are based on Herodotus' writings. Going to Herodotus' place of birth, Greece, in Samos, massive bones were excavated that may have been traced back to a mythological battle between a camel, this guy, no, between the...
00:11:14
Speaker
you're never going to get over that. Never. Also on the bingo card. But no, then they thought they may have found the traces of a mythological battle between Dionysus and the Amazonians. Plutarch, on the occasion, says that some were identified as Dionysus' giant elephants, which to be fair were likely just mastodons, but still pretty cool.
00:11:37
Speaker
epic Macedon battle. It's not just Greece and Rome that we're looking at. More broadly in Europe, specifically Northern Europe and Central Europe, giant prehistoric bones such as mammoth bones often were collected by churches as proof of the kind of
00:11:57
Speaker
race that existed in the time before the Flood, specifically the Flood that was the event that Noah's Ark was created for. So it's not just that kind of mythology, it's also kind of religious events and lore as well. So
00:12:18
Speaker
In 1728, British physician Hans Sloane was finally able to debunk claims of giants by identifying most of them as whale and elephant remains. And interestingly, in the way that this fits into the kind of the development of not just osteology and human biology, but also bioarchaeology, this was kind of part of Sloane's
00:12:47
Speaker
work in early developments in comparative anatomy, as he kind of was like, hey guys, look at a human bone, and then look at an animal bone. They're slightly different, aren't they? And that's kind of how he was able to debunk these claims by showing off that the human bones didn't necessarily look that much like these massive bones they were finding, even though there were some similarities, they still looked very different. So they were from different species.
00:13:12
Speaker
was pretty cool. Which is like picturing like a tree tea, like this bone is not like the other.
Griffin and Dinosaur Mythology
00:13:19
Speaker
Yeah, and now that's like 90% of like zoo archaeology. Thanks to Hans Sloan. And to round off our first part of case study, we have a creature that we have discussed before, more with regards to his depictions in video games, but I guess we'll look at the actual mythological creature now. And that is the Grefin, which is, for those who are not
00:13:43
Speaker
heard of one before, first question is how. Well the griffin are a mythological creature with body, tail, back of the legs of a lion and the wings and the head of an eagle. Sometimes it has sort of lion-like digits and claws, sometimes it's depicted having an eagle's talons.
00:14:02
Speaker
Again, much like the creatures we've discussed previously, records of depictions of the griffin are found in several parts of the world and they go back as far as ancient Mesopotamia, classical antiquity and ancient Egypt, just to mention three. What sort of brings all these places together is that griffins were in general seen as powerful creatures that were often guarding treasures.
00:14:26
Speaker
And speaking of treasure, what a little friend Pliny has to say about it. Is that great? I thought you were referring to Pliny as the treasure. Sorry. Pliny is also a treasure.
00:14:38
Speaker
and natural history is absolute gold. Our friend Pliny describes griffins as well, specifically on their sort of laying habits, that griffins were said to lay eggs in burrows on the ground and these nests contained gold nuggets. So yeah, not only was it a treasure, as far as
00:15:05
Speaker
the creature that was hiding or protecting treasure. Its remains were also believed to have medicinal properties, which is also a recurring theme of this entire episode. So, for instance, in an Italian folktale, griffin feathers were believed to cure blindness. Now, as far as actual kind of fossils,
00:15:24
Speaker
It's been theorized that maybe what people thought were a Griffin or maybe it's something they saw and to help them kind of visualize what Griffin would look like is the remains of protoceratops, which is a Lacretaceous dinosaur.
00:15:39
Speaker
So if you actually, if you look what it looks like, at least in situ, you can kind of see what they mean. Obviously with dinosaurs, you get the little arms and the kind of big hind legs, which kind of fits in a little bit with some depictions of griffins. And I think it's a really interesting kind of connection if it was, you know, if it's true, is that it shows that kind of early linking of dinosaurs. Well, not what they thought were dinosaurs, but actually where dinosaur remains
00:16:07
Speaker
to avian species or at least avian attributes there's this idea that people in the past may have seen protoceratops and have been confused because obviously dinosaurs if you look at their bones they're kind of a mix they're not necessarily you know something you look at and go oh that's
00:16:24
Speaker
a reptile. Do you know what I mean? So I think there's this idea that people would find protoceratops and think, oh, is that a mammal? Is that a bird? Protoceratops has that kind of beak-like thing at the top of their mouth. So, you know, the conclusion would be, oh, it's both. It's a hybrid creature.
00:16:44
Speaker
that would make sense because especially at the time you find remains of a creature that large and you think like there is no bird that is that big. It's not a thing. Like so you think like, okay, but it's so it must be a mammal because all large animals are mammals of but it's got bird bits. So it's a mammal with bird bits.
00:17:06
Speaker
Yeah and like it has you know those kind of claws which could be seen as talons there were elements the body that people probably never seen before so you know protoceratops like you know the kind of stereotypical triceratops has that kind of like crest
00:17:22
Speaker
thing on its skull. Apologies, we are not paleontologists. I don't know how to describe parts of a dinosaur, but, you know, people would be able to kind of correlate that with, say, ears, you know, in a, in a griffin or even like bits of the wing if they found fragments. So it's a really interesting way of seeing the logic behind, you know, looking at this thing and visualizing it. And it's, it also, I think, fits in with what we're doing today, where we
00:17:50
Speaker
have kind of over the last 20 years, I've realized dinosaurs look a lot different than what has been popularized in popular culture. And I think that'll be something we also touch upon later in this episode. But I think we're going to take a break. And when we come back, we will do more case studies.
Tengu and Japanese Folklore
00:18:09
Speaker
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00:19:49
Speaker
And we're back with Archaeo Animals, episode 59. We're talking about the folklore of paleontology and zoo archaeology, I guess, but it's probably more heavily towards paleontology. Just basically what did the people in the past think of fossils when they found it? And we are finally kind of moving away from where we've been the last part of the episode, you know, in
00:20:13
Speaker
Europe, mainly in Greece and Rome, and we're moving to Japan to talk about the Tengu. Now, the Tengu is a Japanese creature or yokai found in Shinto and Buddhist beliefs. It's depicted as a hybrid creature with human, avian, and monkey features, and more commonly, at least today,
00:20:37
Speaker
depicted as a creature with a red face and a long nose. It was originally kind of seen as a demon, but nowadays it's kind of more like a trickster that can, you know, shapeshift and cause pranks, or maybe a bit more nefarious, kidnap kids and create national disasters like avalanches.
00:20:59
Speaker
So mixed bag, I guess. But what is more interesting for us, at least, is the Tengu No Tsume, also known as the Tengu Claws, which have been identified as shark teeth, which includes species such as the Pliocene Great White Shark. Carcarrodon Carcarius. The Miocene Mackerel Sharks. Isaurus species.
00:21:34
Speaker
That's a great way to pronounce Megalodon. Which, because they're so big, have been identified as claws of the king of the Tengu. And this was actually really interesting because I've never really thought of looking at shark teeth, which I feel like is a very common, like, if you go to natural history museums and go to their gift shops, I feel like shark teeth are a very common thing they sell there.
00:21:51
Speaker
And, of course, even the megalodon.
00:22:00
Speaker
But I would never would have thought about them as being claws. Did they still sell those? I mean, this is me reaching back to like the 1990s, which was about a billion years ago now. So I remember definitely those being about in the 90s. Yeah, I don't know if they do it now, but they did when I was a kid because I definitely had some which explains a lot about me.
Bunyip and Colonial Impacts
00:22:23
Speaker
Well, next creature, what is a creature called the Bunyip?
00:22:26
Speaker
which is absolutely not just the cutesy name for a rabbit. Did you think it was a cutesy name for a rabbit? Like, did you know what the Bunyip was before? No. Oh, okay. No, but Bunyip is a, not sure if whether it's youth speak or what, but I believe that a cutesy name for rabbits is Bunyip as well, which is not at all related to the Australian creature from Aboriginal mythology that is the Bunyip.
00:22:56
Speaker
is actually an amphibious creature, which is said to lurk in riverbeds, swamps, creeks, waterholes. And you get records about the creatures throughout Australia. So there's actually several different regional varieties, which go hand in hand with a wide array of physical descriptions. So some accounts describe it as a seal like creature or like a dog like creature that lives in water, which is
00:23:22
Speaker
basically a seal again, or a long-necked creature with a small head. The interesting thing about this creature is that this is sort of where mythology and cryptids sort of intersect, because you have sort of, in the grand scheme of things, fairly recent accounts of sightings in the 19th century by European settlers that recorded sighting the bunny.
00:23:46
Speaker
Yeah, it's really interesting because actually I had heard of the bun yep and this is going to be me really exposing myself for the kind of weird nerd I am as a theme park nerd who likes animatronics. I watched a video about really creepy water animatronics. Please don't judge me.
00:24:11
Speaker
That's just a Tuesday for me. I'm allowed to have hobbies. But one of the things on this list, you know, because obviously people love making those top 10 videos and I am a sucker for them, folks. But one of the things mentioned on the list was Bunyip animatronics, which is apparently there's more than one throughout Australia.
00:24:33
Speaker
And I get why they'd be there. They're very horrifying. If you feel like going to give yourself nightmares, look it up on YouTube. There's still some and they're in various states of rotting because people have just forgotten about them. But it's like a, you know, it is. It's a cryptid that's kind of still in the pop culture.
00:24:53
Speaker
there in Australia. It's been, you know, it's being made into animatronics. It's really, it's an interesting one to talk about in this episode, because I don't think you really say the same for a lot of these. Obviously, a lot of these mythical creatures we're talking about are well known. They're in stories and fantasy, but I wouldn't necessarily call them cryptids.
00:25:15
Speaker
the Pentagon who you talk to, I guess. Yeah, true, true, true. But yeah, feel free to look that up on YouTube if you'd like to really freak yourself out a bit. But a bit more seriously, though, is the Bunyip's also a bit of a kind of representation almost for the colonialism that has occurred in Australia.
Unicorns and Narwhal Tusks
00:25:39
Speaker
And particularly there is
00:25:41
Speaker
a Bunyip head at the Maclay Museum that I believe is in Sydney that was quote-unquote found in 1841. Turns out it was actually a fetal horse cranium and when it was originally found, European settlers thought that it was
00:26:00
Speaker
a megafauna creature that was actually what the Bunyip was. So this was on display, but, you know, it was actually a horse cranium that was, had clearly had some kind of genetic disorder. So it was a bit.
00:26:14
Speaker
deformed and so it didn't look like a horse at all. But interestingly, horses were a colonial import into Australia. So it's this weird kind of poignant clash that represents that whole horrible and continuing state of colonialism in that it's a colonial import
00:26:38
Speaker
made to be a part of Aboriginal mythology in a way. So that's apparently still on display at the Maclay Museum. And they also have a version that they've made that's like taxidermied as well. But yeah, it's really, well, yeah, that one is pretty horrible to look at.
00:26:56
Speaker
But still, it's, again, it's a less serious note. It's also representative of that cryptid thing where, as we've talked about in a previous episode, people making fake cryptids. And we'll actually talk a bit more about this in a second with our next bit of this episode, because we are going to talk about unicorns. Have we talked about unicorns on the show?
00:27:22
Speaker
I don't think so. They're so, I guess, we haven't really done an episode on bestiaries yet, have we? You mean the National Animal of Scotland. Very proud of it up here. Very proud of it. Why? It's a luncheon animal. It's not real.
00:27:40
Speaker
Yeah, but have you seen some of the state animals and state minerals and state whatever is in America? I think ours is a blue jay. No, that's the state bird. What is the state animal? Well, look, it's not what I'm saying is there's no nothing in the rules to say that state animal or country's animal or, you know, it has to be real. There's no there's no there's nothing in the rules. So.
00:28:08
Speaker
I thought your natural animal was the wild haggis. No, that's the national dish. Oh, is it? But I would love to eat unicorn as well if I had a chance. Did you know that in America, each state, we don't have like a state animal. We have like a state bird, mammal, fish, insect, ball, a tree, wildflower, fossil and mineral.
00:28:32
Speaker
Molosk, like what about the base scallop by the way is the New York Molosk. Well what's Idaho's Molosk? Who cares about Idaho? Yeah I'm just saying how can you have a landlocked country with a state Molosk? We're not a very serious country. A state Molosk? No, it's a potato net.
00:28:57
Speaker
No, I believe it might be the Bruno hot spring snail. Of course. I mean, it's a mollusk. It's a mollusk. Idaho about that. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. OK, right. Thanks to the show. Thanks to the show. Unicorns. Not real. But.
00:29:26
Speaker
their horse with a horn. I mean, it's not really much else to it, is there? It's one of those ones where you're kind of like, I can see how someone made that. It's like, oh, but this horse is pretty neat. Let's add this novel tusk perfection. Yeah. And that is basically kind of what they did. So unicorns again, kind of found in a lot of other folklore.
00:29:52
Speaker
The way that we kind of understand unicorns in the Western countries seems to have originated with the Greeks, who actually didn't believe them to be kind of mythological creatures, but they saw them as actual animals found mainly in India.
00:30:08
Speaker
And like I said, they're found basically in lots of other folklore. I believe Japan has a unicorn equivalent, but I think unicorns are probably most famous, perhaps, in European folklore, particularly medieval and post-medieval kind of mythology. AKA how to swindle someone out of their money. I mean, you got to respect the grift, you know?
00:30:36
Speaker
Of course, part of the myth surrounding unicorns were in fact the medicinal properties of its horn, referred to as the alicorn, which was originally described by the ancient Greek physician Ctesias in 400 BC as a remedy against poison. Although, you know, like in folklore, other powers soon grew out of the unicorn horn, which includes disease resistance and water purification to mention a few. Eventually,
00:31:04
Speaker
powdered quote-unquote unicorn horn or alicorn would be lucratively traded in European marketplaces. Apparently this went for big bucks. It was very well sought out for. And finally in 1638, which feels a bit late for this,
00:31:22
Speaker
Danish duologist Ole Worm. Yes, that's his name. We respect Ole Worm for doing this important work. He recognized, hey, guys, this is not a unicorn. This is actually powdered narwhal tusk. I also want to say we worked it out.
00:31:40
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, apparently he did, like, literally, like, examine it and everything, but apparently no one really listened to him for, like, another hundred years. Like, it kept being very much traded in European marketplaces. And it also did not stop German naturalist Otto von Gerich from attempting to reconstruct the unicorn verum, the true unicorn,
00:32:06
Speaker
by using, you know, a variety of Pleistocene mammals like mammoths and a woolly rhinoceros. So, yeah. I did not know how powerful the myth of the unicorn was, to be completely honest. I feel like I kind of heard that, like, in reading various texts on alchemy, as you do when you're in your early 20s. I feel like I'd seen that mentioned, but I don't think I ever really thought it was a literal thing.
00:32:34
Speaker
I'm still going back on how Oliver worked out that it was a narwhal tusk and not a unicorn horn. Did he taste it? It's like, oh no, this doesn't taste like powered unicorn horn. This tastes like a narwhal tusk. The resource that I looked at didn't go too much into detail, but I think it
00:32:54
Speaker
was more of him tracking down people who were trading in narwhal tusks and then were like just powdering it down and selling it off. So probably less of a intensive chemical kind of investigation of properties and more of like, oh, what's that guy doing with narwhal tusks? I mean, to have heard archaeology, people were sort of licking the artifacts until very scaringly recently to work out whether it was a pot or a stone. Listen, Simona,
00:33:22
Speaker
don't make fun of me just because I was tricked into doing that on my first dig. Tricked? Yeah sure. Like we have to keep this secret from the public if they find diet. Okay listen it sounds completely when you are on site for the first time it's so hot in the Orkneys and someone says hey you know what you don't make your time easier.
Luan and Dinosaur Pathways
00:33:46
Speaker
It'd be just blistering in Scotland yes a country known for its
00:33:51
Speaker
how dare you it was actually it gets really warm in the orc knees in the summer yeah yeah yeah i got some sunburned well i mean you need to use sunscreen you know
00:34:06
Speaker
Yeah, well, that was before I moved to a notoriously cloudy, rainy place, and it's just kind of destroyed my skin. That's how science works. I mean, yeah, but no, I mean, the bone thing. I mean, we'll joke about it. But like, I think a lot of people have accidentally or done it on purpose. It's just our little secret, isn't it? As a group as a group of archaeologists,
00:34:34
Speaker
Don't do it, people. You don't know what you're putting in your mouth. No, don't lick the artifact. No, no, no, no, no, no.
00:34:42
Speaker
Right, so move swiftly away from not licking artifacts. Our last mythical creature are several in a way, all known as divine chickens. Yes, the divine chickens, also known as the Luan. They are mythological birds in China. And I was trying to figure out if because
00:35:06
Speaker
The words for chicken and rooster are kind of interchangeable when you translate it from Chinese to English, but I think it's funnier to refer to them as chickens.
00:35:17
Speaker
I think technically they're closer to a rooster. But yes, the Luan are mythological birds in China, and they include Jin Ji, which is the golden chicken, and Tian Ji, which is the heavenly chicken, or the celestial chicken. So folklore from the Yunnan, the Guizhou, and the Yao Ning provinces point to
00:35:43
Speaker
ancient secret pathways that are made by these chickens and you can see them in the ground in the stone themselves that the pathways they made walking around when in actuality they're basically dinosaur tracks which you know you can see in some sites there's famously places in england where you can see dinosaur tracks really well
00:36:05
Speaker
And obviously people who are unfamiliar with how kind of these tracks are made, you know, unsurprisingly, you would think with some things very strong and very powerful must have imprinted into stone. So that kind of instituted the logic leap into thinking these were probably divine beings and the way that dinosaur feet look, you know, again, they're chickens. So, yes.
00:36:33
Speaker
divine chicken tracks and they are actually used in certain rights depending on which region you're in. One of them in particular is a local right with dinosaur tracks that are believed to be from Jinji where you would actually follow the track during a funeral procession as it believed that the tracks led to heaven. So yeah, chickens are dinosaurs and dinosaurs are chickens confirmed. Only truths on archaeo-animals.
00:37:02
Speaker
Yeah, this is a kind of hot-hitting, breaking news story as you hear from archaeo-animals. And this is why people tune in to listen about divine chickens. And hilariously, when I was looking up about the divine chickens, I kept getting chicken recipes. Were they divine? No, yeah, they did look divine.
00:37:26
Speaker
So as you think about eating, I'm sorry, I don't want to say eating the golden chicken. I feel that that's going to insult my ancestors because we respectfully think about Jinji and Tianji. We will take a break and be back with our final segment of case studies.
Dragons and Fossil Influences
00:37:42
Speaker
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00:38:02
Speaker
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00:38:17
Speaker
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00:38:41
Speaker
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00:39:01
Speaker
And we are back with Archaeo-Animals, episode 59. We're talking about the folklore of paleontology and zoo archaeology. And normally would say, this is the case studies part, but this whole episode has been case studies. So you should be in great ecstasy this whole time because it's the best. It's been the best part of the podcast this whole time.
00:39:22
Speaker
What more do you want to say? Right so I mean we've covered some pretty like well-known heavy hitters in mythology and I think we're probably going to keep it that way because along this with cyclops and unicorns we have the mythological creature that's found literally in every part of the world throughout history and that is the dragon yeah literally anywhere from medieval England to China dragons are everywhere although they're mostly dinosaur fossils
00:39:52
Speaker
So, for instance, in China, dragon bones, long used for traditional Chinese medicine, refer to mine fossils from China's massive fossil beds, usually of various prehistoric species which are collectively called long. In Europe, dragon remains are likely dinosaur tracks in places like the Rhine Valley in Germany, which were, again, interpreted as dragons. Speaking of Europe in Austria,
00:40:19
Speaker
Aemon the Giant was said to have killed a dragon and have kept the dragon tongue as a trophy. And this was actually held in a local monastery for years. And then it turned out it was a swordfish nose. So. Well, nose as in the the actual sword bit of the swordfish. Yeah, yeah. Which I couldn't think of what it was called, so I just wrote nose.
00:40:44
Speaker
How does that look like a tongue? I can see it, especially if the idea is that it's so old, it's desiccated, you know? I think even if people don't know, you know, the process of taphonomy and the process of decomposition, I think you...
00:41:01
Speaker
would make that connection in your head of like, oh, it's old, so it's like a little shriveled and smaller, maybe. And it's just the tongue. It's like, it could be. I know, like the, the, the saltfish things, they're really long. I mean, also, you know, conceptualizations of dragons have, even though they're more or less the same, they've changed over time and throughout cultures, it could be that, you know, it was a bit more of a serpentine type of dragon they were thinking about.
00:41:25
Speaker
I mean, yes, when you do say dragon, it does conjure up mostly the images of dragons in medieval England, I guess is what it's in the common imagination, what tends to pop up. There again, also in Austria, in the later medieval period, a dragon skull was found in the 14th century and eventually used to make a like as a model to make a dragon statue statue in Claggenforth in the 16th century, which actually turned out to be a woolly rhinoceros.
00:41:55
Speaker
I could see that as well, the big mandible, big chunky skull. And again, depending on the depictions as well, dragons do sometimes have little tusks and horns at the end of the snout, which again, the woolly rhino kind of matches up.
Giraffocerix and Sea Serpent Myths
00:42:19
Speaker
You get in ancient Greece, take it back a couple of thousand years somewhat. Apollonius of Tiana traveled to modern-day India and described dragon skulls. You've seen a pattern now, like the Greeks tend to think that a lot of the mythological creatures are actually living in India somewhere.
00:42:35
Speaker
This seems to be a thing. But the dragon skulls that he was describing are likely coming from a variety of extinct species of elephants and giraffes, including Elefacy Soudricus, just the extinct elephant species, and two extinct species of giraffes, the Giraphocerix and the Cibatherium.
00:43:00
Speaker
Simona, can you do me a favor and are you able to look up what your Phocorix looks like? We just need a live reaction to this if possible. It's just a big chunky giraffe.
00:43:22
Speaker
Just technical music while we're waiting for the reaction and it's a chunky giraffe. Can you send it? I want to see the chunky giraffe. How do you spell it? It's G-I-R-A-D-O-L-F-O-K-E-R-Y-X. Okay. Y-E-X.
00:43:42
Speaker
It looks like a mix between a giraffe and this extend animal that looks like it should be extinct. So I'm describing it very poorly. It's like a giraffe in like high gravity. Yeah, it's like, you know, when you get those like inflatable animals, that's what it looks like. Yeah, it's like, it's like, it's like a giraffe that you haven't like, yeah, you haven't blown up the whole way. Like it's a deflated giraffe.
00:44:10
Speaker
It's amazing. I love it. I've never seen this before in my life, and I'm so happy that I have. It's made my day, truly, to look at that. And I just wanted to share it with you all and all you out there listening to this episode, also look it up and have a little treat. But yeah, I mean, clearly you can understand why that would look like a dragon skull.
00:44:30
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I can see that. So I'm trying to find out the name of the animal that it reminds me of. Is it also a giraffe? Partially. So while you think about that, I'll move on to the next one. I was trying to find this animal and I ended up on bush babies instead, which is really not what I'm after. So please.
00:44:52
Speaker
So yeah, similar, pretty similar actually, to dragons. We have sea serpents, the dragons of the water, as folks like to say. No one, no one says that, that's just me. And it's also like dragons, they're found in a variety of folklore around the world, from Scandinavia to Mesopotamia. I believe we've talked a little bit about it in our episode, Odd Norse Mythology. So we'll go listen to that.
00:45:18
Speaker
But yeah, there's a couple of instances of sea serpents found in antiquity. It's believed that maybe fake serpents were made in antiquity by stretching out and combining several snake skins. Apparently, you can stretch a snake skin out really long. It's a very useful thing I learned today about that, but I guess it makes sense. There was a bit of a kind of tourism in antiquity that that could have been a bit of a grift for.
00:45:49
Speaker
with the unicorn horns. Also, Pliny the Elder, he's back, he's better than ever, folks. Are you okay? Just thinking about how the Vesuvius robbed us of Pliny the Elder.
00:46:11
Speaker
Anyway, as always, his writings are illuminating, as usual. And he described the discovery of the remains of the serpent that Perseus killed to save Andromeda in 58 BC, which of course was probably a whale or shark bones. It was about 40 feet in length.
00:46:32
Speaker
It may have also been a hybrid creation of whale and other fossil bones. It's not really sure. And there's loads of other kind of stories in antiquity of kind of serpent sightings that were probably, you know, beached whales, carcasses like that, that people haven't really seen before.
00:46:50
Speaker
But interestingly, this kind of phenomenon of sea serpents isn't just something that happened in the past. Even in close, not modern day, but kind of closer to contemporary times, like the 19th century, there were still reports of sea serpent sightings. And kind of recent research has been done on this.
00:47:13
Speaker
it suggests that sea serpent sightings may have actually been influenced by the discovery of fossilized marine reptiles such as plesiosaurs in the 1800s. So kind of a reverse of what we've been talking about this whole time. So rather than people seeing a fossil and making up
00:47:34
Speaker
or using it to support the development of a folkloric creature, a mythological creature. Sea serpents, which have already kind of existed in lore before, have actually kind of melded into this kind of popular conception because of the widespread discovery of
00:47:57
Speaker
plesiosaurs and creatures like that because, you know, in newspapers and reports, they were described as ancient marine reptiles with long necks. So this research that was done
00:48:13
Speaker
saw that over time, after the discovery of these fossils was publicized, sea serpent reports were less about describing them as eel-like creatures, which was apparently what they used to be described as prior to the 1800s, but they soon were described as having long necks. A-la, you're kind of messy.
00:48:35
Speaker
which is really interesting. Because I guess the scientific discoveries have sort of found their way into like people's imagination. So as you said, we see the reverse, where the evidence was molded almost to fit the theory. Yeah, no, it's really interesting. And what's also interesting is at the same time, Richard Owen, he was a British paleontologist, probably more well known for being the person who coined the word dinosaur, had actually theorized at this time,
00:49:05
Speaker
that maybe people's sightings of sea serpents were actually evidence that there were still surviving extinct animals like plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and mosasaurs, which, I mean, sounds silly, but, you know, you don't know.
00:49:23
Speaker
Yeah. We have one more hybrid hoax here. So to kind of wrap this up in 1845, Albert Koch came to New York city and claimed to have a sea serpent that he caught near New England.
00:49:42
Speaker
called the Hydra Acos or something. I don't know. Say, Samara, you say it nice. Hydra Acos? I don't know. It's not real. That's the point. It's not real. It was a hoax. It was made up. They took a prehistoric whale and said that was a sea serpent. Apparently even like the flippers were made out of shells.
00:50:03
Speaker
I mean, he tried. He tried. And I believe this was not his only hoax. I think he did another hoax. So, I mean, again, you kind of respect the grind to the grift, grift grind, but didn't really. Well, we'll move on any further. I have some answers with regards to the giraffotics.
00:50:24
Speaker
Cute. Cute. Breaking news. Breaking news. Because what it reminded us is a giraffe and a nocapi and a baby. Okay, that makes sense. Look it up. I very mean of me described it as an animal that looks like it should be extinct. Because just the way it looks is sort of like the colouring in the stripes. It looks like a depiction of an animal that's gone extinct due to over hunting 200 years ago. But thankfully, the nocapi is still alive and relatively well, maybe.
Fossils and Mythology Debate
00:50:52
Speaker
Is your copy the one that looks like they put on a zebra pants? Yes, and interestingly even though it does look zebra like in terms of colouring. It's closely related to the giraffe. The giraffe is as close as relative. So you want to know how I know that?
00:51:12
Speaker
because I have gone multiple times to Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park. And that's a fun fact that I tell you a lot on the safari ride. Thank you, Disney. PhD. It turns out the Ocapi is actually quite endangered, mainly due to habitat loss. So please bear a thought for the Ocapi. They're very, they're beautiful. Maybe not as beautiful as that chunky giraffe that's extinct, but you know.
00:51:41
Speaker
Not everyone can be perfect, and that's fine. So yeah, we've talked this whole episode about all these wild mythical creatures, all these really interesting stories and theories of how people in the past may have made these connections and have used the past fossils to kind of develop and support mythologies and things like that. So that's great. That's amazing.
00:52:09
Speaker
Was it actually this influential on mythology though? Apparently this was actually a bit not necessarily contentious like other subjects in these fields but there seems to be some pushback. I didn't actually know that before we did this episode. I mean it's just one of those things of like how long is a piece of string? Yeah it makes sense and I- How do you quantify that?
00:52:35
Speaker
So yeah, not everyone is convinced. I think everyone agrees for the most part that, you know, there was definitely some inspiration and it makes sense and that, you know, someone would have found something and be like, oh, that looks like XYZ.
00:52:50
Speaker
But there are some academics, specifically classicists and also paleontologists who've kind of called for maybe a bit of caution in subscribing all folklore to this, you know, not necessarily going to the full extreme of, you know, all folklars based off of
00:53:09
Speaker
fossils or whatever. Because I mean, as we discussed it before, like, if it is related to the discovery of skeletal remains of say, like extinct megafauna, I mean, it could also like go one or two ways, you could be, you find an elephant skull, you find that bazaar, so you decide that it's a cyclops, and here the mythos of the cyclops is born, or it could well be the other way around, as it was sort of the case for sea serpents,
00:53:38
Speaker
in europe where actually like the belief was already there and originated elsewhere and then the discovery of remains is almost bent to fit the theory you already had so that mythology was already in place and then you find the skeletal remains and you go oh you see that is proof of something that was already there.
00:53:57
Speaker
Yeah, so kind of real quickly to kind of not necessarily debunk some of the fossil associations we talked about, but just to provide some counter evidence. So with regards to the Cyclops, you know, people have pointed out that there's no written record of ancient Greeks.
00:54:14
Speaker
actually finding the skulls that we've assumed they would also assume to be cyclops. And also there's this notion that depictions of cyclops in other artwork and in descriptions are often too human-like to account for all features of an elephant skull like tusks and whatnot. And also not every cyclops actually had just one eye, so it could be again that kind of the other way around that
00:54:43
Speaker
Simona was talking about as far as the Griffin theory with protoceratops. The problem with that theory is that it ignores earlier lore from Western Asia, from as early as the fourth millennium BC.
00:54:59
Speaker
And these kind of depictions of griffins don't actually match the fossils. So there's one suggestion that maybe the Greeks picked up on Western Asian more rather than fossil evidence. And there's also this idea that griffins are better explained as being developed from hybrid creatures of living animals instead. And you don't necessarily need to have fossils to explain them. And again, like Cyclops, there doesn't really seem to be ancient Greek writings
00:55:23
Speaker
referencing these fossils. And finally, with dragons, the main issue is that modern day assumption of dragons equaling dinosaurs mainly depend on modern day conceptualizations of dragons. As we discussed earlier, ancient depictions of dragons were way more varied and not always very dragon-like. So at the end of the day,
00:55:45
Speaker
Who knows? But it's interesting. I think it's, regardless, I think it's an interesting thought experiment. And I think it's also an interesting way to think about how people in the past looked at stuff that they may not necessarily had the tools and knowledge to kind of investigate.
00:56:00
Speaker
Yeah.
Closing Remarks
00:56:01
Speaker
So what do you think? Let us know. Yeah, because we are on Twitter at RKO animals. We are on the archeologypodcastnetwork.com slash animals. That's where you can find us online, but you can also find us wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure you like, you subscribe, you tell your friends to subscribe and you let us know if there are any other episodes that you'd like us to cover. We love doing recommendations, which our last episode was one and yeah.
00:56:29
Speaker
I think that is it. I'm going to think about the divine chicken and get hungry. I don't know about you guys but as always it's been Alex with Patrick and we will see you next time. Bye!
00:56:50
Speaker
Thank you for listening to RQ animals. Please subscribe and rate the podcast wherever you get your podcasts from. You can find us on Twitter at rqanimals. Also, the views expressed on the podcast are those of ourselves, the hosts and guests, and do not necessarily represent those of our institutions, employers and the opioid podcast network. Thanks for listening.
00:57:15
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.