Realms of Myth Playlist, Part 2: The Myth-Fleshed Fossil

Explore the place where geology and mythology converge.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from housetop works
dot com. The Hunt Gross Tempers. 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

(00:23):
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,

(00:44):
perhaps water or salt, so you venture in as well.
You find nothing in the cave save a few dry sticks,
But as nightfalls you build a small fire against the cold.
As the flames illuminate the cavern walls, you suddenly make
out the shattered form of bone is in the rock,
bones as solid as the stone itself. In the dancing glow,

(01:05):
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,

(01:29):
all of it within the dark hell of its hunger. Hey,
welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is
Robert Lamb, and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert, what was
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,

(01:52):
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, hold their holding their shape across

(02:14):
the eons 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

(02:37):
years ago, and you come across gigantic bones in the
ground that are bigger than any animal you've ever seen,
and look 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

(02:58):
in the 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. Yeah, 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

(03:18):
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.

(03:40):
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, of the dinosaur fossils and stuff like that.
They're and they're charming, lee retro dioramas of old animal
and all that. But it's it's not only just a

(04:02):
great visual experience, it's also wonderful science education because the
museum exhibits to 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

(04:24):
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. No,
I'm asking what or 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

(04:44):
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 fossil les
and uh not just fossils but remains fossilized or not

(05:04):
bones of extinct animals could 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
wanna have a one quick note about myths here, if
you turn into the previous episode of The Christian and
I did Unraveling the Mythic, you know that there are

(05:25):
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 energies. I

(05:48):
guess yes. I I think that scientists and science minded
people often have a tendency to overrepresent the role of
naturalistic explanation and 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

(06:10):
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 most in most
of the better arguments, the more modern arguments to at
least acknowledge that is part of it. That is one

(06:31):
of the functions and the poly functional 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.

(06:52):
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 h you know, proto
scientific explanation in a mirror a geomethological explanation, but the
geo mythological explanations I think can be very helpful. Uh

(07:13):
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

(07:35):
make sense of them without a modern understanding of fossils. Yeah,
so what is the concept of geo mythology? 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

(07:56):
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.

(08:18):
I like that 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.

(08:41):
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 are you know, just one

(09:01):
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

(09:21):
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,

(09:44):
often knowledge that we could consider scientific or proto scientific,
appears in pre scientific myths and traditions. And she's gonna
come up repeatedly in this episode, so we thought we
should establish her um. She's written a lot on this topic. Yeah,
two over key books. There's two thousand sevens Fossil Legends
of the First Americans, and then our two thousand eleven book,

(10:04):
The First Fossil Hunters, Dinosaurs, Mammoths and myth in Greek
and Roman Times. That's a reissue of the book, the
two Ocean Loven version is it's updated, I think with
some stuff. Okay, so that one actually predates the American's book,
but yeah, it tackles antiquity, you know, looking at for example,
Greek legends. Yeah, and at times she she points out

(10:25):
that so many of these these monsters that we discussed,
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

(10:47):
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 going to have time to cover them
all here today, right, but we should start looking at

(11:08):
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

(11:30):
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

(11:54):
their head, so they're kind of cyclopsis. Yeah, the Rmspi
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,

(12:15):
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

(12:36):
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

(12:58):
most beautiful. And so that's Herodotous writing in the fifth
century b c. E 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

(13:20):
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 of Earth's diverse um life forms
was was very incomplete. I mean it's still incomplete, but

(13:43):
it was even more incomplete at a time. So the
idea that something like a griffin existed, sure, that's not
out of keeping with our experience of other creatures. Huh 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. Mosby. So,
writing in his Natural History in the first century ce

(14:03):
Plenty says, quote many authorities, the most distinguished being Herodotus
and r a status of proconesus 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

(14:27):
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 Scholfield in his Greek

(14:51):
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 rights. 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

(15:12):
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

(15:35):
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

(15:56):
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

(16:17):
strength of these animals, do not set out in quest
of the gold by day that 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 mined is a dreary wilderness, and the seekers, after
the aforesaid substance arrive a thousand or two strong, armed
in bringing spades and sacks, and watching for a moonless night,

(16:39):
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 understounding. But I
am already seeing a connection here between this creature, this
fantastic creature, and the Earth with things mind from the

(17:01):
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

(17:26):
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

(17:48):
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 of rerelapped the desert
in Asia now known as the Gobi. And there's a
curious thing about the Gobi Desert. It is a place
where fossils are not nearly as difficult to find as

(18:10):
they are in many other places. According to the paleontologists
within the the 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

(18:30):
one with kind of a beaked Yeah. 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. It's kind
of interesting. But here's one account that was from the
American Museum in Natural History exhibit that they did on

(18:51):
this comparison between dinosaurs and griffin's and so it's an
account related from when the m n H paleontologist Michael
nova Check and paleontologist 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

(19:13):
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

(19:34):
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 general slopes and shallow gullies was splattered with
white patches of fossils, as if someone had emptied a

(19:55):
paint can in a random fashion over the ground. So
they're just tripping over fossils, and and it's not you
don't have 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

(20:15):
and beaks. So Adrian Mayor 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

(20:37):
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

(21:00):
look at a Protoceratops 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, Mongolia, and China, near where the Scythians

(21:22):
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

(21:46):
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 ledge and too to the strong version
that we see of it repeated so often in this
ancient Greek literature. Yeah, and that's some motif that we

(22:07):
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 of it. But but
as we're 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

(22:30):
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

(22:53):
the fossils. And then the fossils may enforce and and
and change your interpretation and of the myth itself. Yeah,
and then he moved into a 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

(23:14):
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

(23:36):
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 he makes some pretty
decent arguments against it. For one thing, according to Witten,
the timeline is not very favorable to the proto Protoceratops

(23:57):
griffin hypothesis because he says it's so of ignores evidence
of griffin lore from before the seventh century b C,
when when the Scythians could have introduced this these proto
Sratops 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

(24:18):
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,

(24:43):
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

(25:03):
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

(25:25):
with a beak. You can just imagine an eagle's head
which you've seen on Alan's 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

(25:46):
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, well, yeah, okay, so if we need to
seek a rational explanation for the inspiration of the griffin myth,

(26:08):
do we also need it for the arm posse with
the one eyed people? Um? Do we have to figure
all 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

(26:30):
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,

(26:50):
have not been found at the sites of the Cythian
gold mines, but rather within a few hundred miles of them,
so you know, it's not like we saw them there
at 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 Protosratops or another dinosaur quadrupedal dinosaur

(27:15):
with a beak could have inspired Griffin ideas, and 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.
But that is by no means the only mythical creature
that has been said to have been inspired possibly by fossils,

(27:37):
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
you know, we see a lot of variety. That's the thing.
We always see more variety than than you might expect.
It's like with the Cyclops. You see some artistic depictions
where there's just one um one orifice for the eye

(27:59):
in the hedge 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 might have been
informed by the forehead lanterns of Pellucidian miners, or perhaps
the protective eye patches that were worn by blacksmiths has

(28:20):
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

(28:42):
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 openings 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 Mayor chimes

(29:02):
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 Dinithrum giagantum, which within a would have been a
fifteen foot four point six meter high elephant creature. But

(29:28):
unlike modern elephants, these guys had had a four four
point five ft one point three meter backward pointing tusks. Yeah,
so backward. Yeah, you 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 like they shaped those braided
devil beards. Yeah, like kind of like a braided devil beard. Yeah,

(29:51):
with a bid forks, and it's kind of turning backwards
towards the individual's chest chin thangs, chin kind of chin things.
The elephant would have probably use 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

(30:11):
like a humanoid skull, a very monstrous humanoid skull that
for some reason has a skeletal basis for its goatee
uh and 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

(30:32):
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

(30:53):
no way to know for sure. All Right, we're gonna
take a quick breaking. 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
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(31:17):
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of Mine. Following the events of F Society's five nine
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(31:38):
in perfectly with a number of topics we've discussed on
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(31:58):
USA Network. That's Mr Robot Season two Wednesday. Do you
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we're back. So one of the obvious things has got
to be dragons, right, I think about therapod dinosaurs like, uh,
you see a spinosaurus or Rannosaurus rex, alberto Saurus and

(32:21):
any kind of uh. I mean, they just look so
dragon like. Yeah, 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

(32:43):
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

(33:04):
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

(33:25):
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

(33:45):
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. About

(34:09):
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 you start trying to describe it, it just becomes
this amalgam of different biological influence. They are less large

(34:29):
lizards and more boundary crossing chimera animals. Yeah, and so
all you need is a large ribcage. 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

(34:50):
is attributed to so a story about the first centuries
Greek philosopher Apollonius of Tyana saying when he when he
traveled through the foothills of the Himalayas and went to
northern India. Philostrotis's story about this is that it was
just full of dragon skulls. Right, Yeah, we're not dragon skulls.

(35:12):
Dragons Well, he basically reported his 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 that kept

(35:33):
his trophies, right, but like the predator, Yeah, kind of
like the predator in 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 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.

(35:56):
But either way, it could have been inspired by accounts
of the region independent and of Apollonius. Yeah, there's some
speculation that it might match up with with the Peshawar
in 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.

(36:18):
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
areas just strewn with the impressive Pleo Pleistocene era vertebrate fossils,
so they would have had their pick of pretty impressive

(36:39):
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 tales
of the gems that are embedded within the dragon's heads.
Oh man, Yeah, that's a crazy myth. Gym's inside the
dragon head? Yeah, like the gyms are its brain or

(37:00):
you know, some component, maybe some cybernetic component. 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

(37:20):
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

(37:44):
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 Gear, Michael uh Dermissouts and
John de Vos, and this was published in the journal

(38:05):
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

(38:25):
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're elephants that are war elephants
that are said to have fought and died. So that

(38:46):
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 battle. And look at all the
strange things that died here. Some of these are clearly elephants,

(39:07):
because you would have seen a number of prehistoric elephant
type species. But also you would have four horn a horn,
giraffe creatures, giant tortoises, sabertooth 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 and influence

(39:32):
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 um. Yeah,
let's talk just a little bit about the the Chinese unicorn,

(39:55):
the the the quillan, a creature that is often known
nefer to by Westerners as the Chinese unicorn. And it's
worth noting that the that the 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

(40:15):
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 the 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

(40:38):
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.

(40:59):
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 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

(41:20):
case UH fourteen fourteen, the unit commander ching Ho would
have returned with a giraffe as a tribute to Emperor
Yung below. And the Somali name for giraffe is also gearon,
which might have sounded like quillen and so, which is
a word that also is a nymblem of justice to

(41:40):
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 equillent. 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

(42:03):
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 and more recently, it's

(42:23):
been in the news recently because uh, it's been discovered
that you actually had humans and elasmo theory ms living
side by side in modern day Kazakhstan a mere twenty
nine thousand years ago. Uh. 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

(42:46):
year run of human history. The Elasmotherium did not look
like at western unicorn. It did not really look like
any of the depictions we see of an Eastern unicorn
or the quillon. Uh. It really looked like a large
rhistoric rhino with a really awesome horn. But there is
the idea that if not direct human observation of this creature,

(43:10):
then perhaps memories and stories in oral tradition of encountering
or crewe illustrations yea, our crewed illustrations informed our knowledge
of of of what it is um. Now. Of course,
there are also arguments to be made that the quillon
is in what was informed by actual rhinos, more modern rhinos,

(43:31):
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

(43:51):
artistic traditions. So there does seem to be a divide
between the the the pure real world rhino camp and
equillent 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. Do you want
to look at a not a vase, a mixing bowl.

(44:12):
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.

(44:35):
Presumably this dragon is the monster of Troy or the
Catos troyas uh. This this illustration is crazy looking Hercules
and Heracles. He looks like a robot, straight up robot right,
and then uh, hecon of course is kind of standing

(44:55):
there between him and this monster, and I don't know.
We'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.

(45:19):
So what's going on in this story? Well, in the tradition,
Poseidon has a beef beef with Laomadon, 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. Keitas is like, okay, maidens are tasty.

(45:42):
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 daughterson
to the monster, and then Hercules Saveson by killing the
sea beast. But in two and two Adrian Mayor authored
a paper in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology about this

(46:05):
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.

(46:27):
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 ce 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

(46:47):
a snake, or something like that. Instead. Features on the
illustration caused Mayor to think that the image was inspired
by a quote a large fossil skull of a prehistoric mammal,
possibly a sam Motherium, which was a giant Miocene giraffhoid.
Back to giraffes again, I know that they're so terrifying
in the mythic tradition Hu and having looked at both myself,

(47:10):
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 same 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

(47:30):
the skull, it's sort of right behind where the eyes are,
and it's the same in the picture. So u Mayor
also points out the 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

(47:51):
earliest artistic record of such a discovery. So the idea
here is that the image in the painting UH 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,

(48:13):
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

(48:35):
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. You 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 the elongated skull in this case and
the bony horn lumps on the top of the head.

(48:59):
All right, we're gonna return to China for for I
think of 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

(49:22):
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

(49:43):
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 supernat must 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,

(50:05):
or sometimes referred to as the golden chicken. They 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

(50:26):
make it a prime candidate for deification, and it's also
associated with the feng Long, which is a mythological bird
similar to the western phoenix. So without the knowledge of
fossil making, than 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

(50:48):
and Buildings Um the Gingi Stones from Zizo Area, Northern
shawn Zi, China. It's a two thousan paper, um, but
it's yeah, it's a more interests thing 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.

(51:09):
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 I 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 explanation, because um, I mean, with with

(51:32):
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

(51:53):
the evidence together for them, but at the same time,
they can feel less solid than a lot of other
scientific high A potheses 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 geomethology,
I feel like I'm shaking, I'm nodding my head and saying, yeah,

(52:13):
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

(52:33):
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,

(52:56):
whatever psychogenic origins. Um because as 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

(53:17):
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. In the 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

(53:38):
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

(53:59):
lay it are starting 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

(54:23):
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, h 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

(54:45):
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 a similar principle is at play.
Right when we counter an ancient account of a vision
or a myth, or anything that seems fantastical in any way,

(55:06):
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

(55:27):
mindset where they have no creative thought, they have no
pre existing stories of the fantastic or ideas of the fantastic,
and are not susceptive 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,

(55:49):
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 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 that came

(56:11):
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 the beak. Yeah, because I mean, ultimately, if you
take a skeptical approach, more even skeptical approach, you can
basically say that this person is describing a bunch of

(56:32):
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

(56:53):
to the world. Yeah, if you're going to go with
a naturalistic explanation, yeah, or it's God, I mean, just clearally,
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

(57:14):
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 they were always looking

(57:35):
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. Is something that

(57:57):
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

(58:18):
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 you know,

(58:38):
the United States already, I mean, so much changes on
the surface of the Earth in the amount of time
that the 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 something's locked in there might be valuable.

(59:00):
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

(59:20):
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,

(59:41):
like the like one idea that comes to mind, as
you just go ahead, put out an image of Godzilla there,
and then they'll think, oh, well, no one will come
here 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, there's an image
of a large dinosaur here, there must be a bunch
of dinosaur bones in there. Uh, which gets into a

(01:00:02):
whole other idea like, how would you make sense of
of Godzilla if you if you're taking a geo mythological approach,
you might say, oh, they are inspired by dinosaurs, and
they're a lot of dinosaurs, which is partially true. Godzilla
is undeniably informed by our love of something like a
torontos arts rex. But on the other hand, there's a
lot more to the fabric of Godzilla's identity as well,

(01:00:25):
tying in the horrors of atomic war and radioactive anxiety. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
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 got
to be careful when you're playing with myth, because if
you approach it from a very you know, one dimensional framework,

(01:00:48):
you're you're you're playing with a multidimensional object. Uh. I mean,
I imagine even that Benny Jessrits 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,

(01:01:10):
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.

(01:01:32):
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 un
a real sentient robot creatures. So that might be a
complex one for for future commentators to figure out what

(01:01:54):
a 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 mu's okay, Yeah,
so you're talking specifically about such like the server farms

(01:02:15):
that show up and so they 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, see it's amazed for a minute.
Our Yeah, or you are a tomb of some kind. Um,

(01:02:37):
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

(01:02:58):
of the present. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure I'm 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

(01:03:18):
get into some of the strange memes out there, it
means 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

(01:03:39):
extinct animals? What what do you think do they figure
in and 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 pre existing and

(01:04:01):
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

(01:04:22):
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,

(01:04:46):
it seems it seems very rare that such as succinct
explanation would be the only explanation for for something that
that has so many facets to it. I think they
convinced me on the Golden Chicken, the Golden I'd like
to go up. Yeah, um, yeah, that's a good one,
all right. So hey, if you want to check out

(01:05:08):
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. Itch just Facebook is Twitter, We are blow
the mind on both of those. Follow us on Instagram,

(01:05:28):
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, geomethology
of the present, or any other reactions to this episode.
You can email us at blow the Mind, at how
step words dot com, or more almost empathons of other topics.

(01:05:55):
Does that house stop works dot com? Let them five
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