From the Vault: Myth-Fleshed Fossil

Are the fossilized monsters of paleontology and the fantastic monsters of myth one and the same? Join Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick as they discuss the realm of of geomythology, entailing the possible ancient real-world origins of dragons, griffins, giants the cyclops and other wonders. (Originally published Jun 28, 2016)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to venture down into the darkness of the vault.
This time there are monsters in the vault, and perhaps
dinosaurs and previous dark creatures as well. This episode originally
aired June two thousand sixteen, and it is our episode
about geo mythology and the relationship between fossils of ancient

(00:28):
extinct organisms and the best mythical monsters of all time.
That's right. This is a perfect rearing of this episode
because we just published our new episode about the idea
of a Cambodian Steaga saucus. Oh yeah, that was a
lot of fun. Yeah, And and I believe we referenced
this episode in the Steaga Staris episode. Yes, we do.
So if you were wondering what are they talking about here,

(00:49):
you're about to find out. All right, let's dive in.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. The hunt grows tense. It's been three
days since you last caught the trail of deer through

(01:12):
the wilderness, and your hunger, the hunger of the tribe
mounts toward a breaking point. And so with bow and arrow,
fire and amulet, you've wandered beyond the limits of the
fall hunt. You've tracked your quarry into the rocky hills beyond,
and here, amid these strange rocky outcroppings, you happen upon
a cave. You know, animals sometimes venture into these places

(01:36):
for shelter, perhaps water or salt, so you venture in
as well. You find nothing in the cave save a
few dry sticks, but as night falls you build a
small fire against the cold. As the flames illuminate the
cavern walls, you suddenly make out the shattered form of
bones in the rock, bones as solid as the stone itself.

(01:56):
In the dancing glow, they describe a form you've never
seen before, and it instantly makes you wonder where the
deer have gone, What things beyond the scope of your
experience thrive here amid the stony hills you've dared to
hunt for. The bones describe a thing twice the height
of a man, hornet and clawed, a talent toothed, and
with a rib cage or large enough to swallow you,

(02:19):
your family, the entire tribe, all of it within the
dark hell of its hunger. Hey, welcome to stuff to
bloil your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick. And Robert. What were you getting at in
that little story there, Well, basically about finding some bones, uh,
not knowing what those bones are from, and having to
sort of fill in the holes, fill in the details.

(02:42):
Well maybe with a little myth making. Yeah, I want
to put you in just a strange frame of mind
you might not be used to. We we all know
about fossils. We we all know now that there are
things that lived a long time ago that sometimes undergo
a mineralization process where their remains become sort of locked
in stone and preserved in ways that can keep them,

(03:04):
keep them holding their holding their shape across the eons. Yea,
and inherently incomplete fossil record of what came before. Yeah,
but try to imagine. You don't know any of that.
You don't know how old the earth is. You don't
know anything about geology, sediment replacement or permanent mineralization, anything
about soil chemistry, any of that. You're you're just you know,

(03:26):
maybe a shepherd or something like that a few thousand
years ago, and you come across gigantic bones in the
ground that are bigger than any animal you've ever seen,
and looked nothing like it is for some animal with
a gigantic lizard like head and sharp teeth. What would
you think you were looking at? Well, as our character

(03:50):
in in our introductory piece here seemed to think that
perhaps this is an exactly an existing creature that's somewhere
out there in the world, and I should be afraid
of it. But then also I'm I'm probably gonna know
enough about bones, enough about actual organisms to realize there's
something fishy about this one. These bones are like like stone.

(04:12):
There's you know, there's something there's something unnatural going on
here as well. Yeah, I was having this thought recently
when my wife Rachel and I went to New York
and one of the places we went there was the
American Museum in Natural History, which is just an absolute delight.
If you've never been, it is wonderful. You should also

(04:33):
commit more than one day of your trip to it,
because there's no way you can see it all in
a day, and it's just absolutely wonderful. I recommended as
a pure experience just to go see, for example, the
dinosaur fossils and stuff like that. They're and they're charming
lye retro dioramas of old animals and all that. But

(04:53):
it's it's not only just a great visual experience, it's
also wonderful science education. And because the museum exhibits do
an excellent job of not just telling you what we
know about the things you're looking at, but also helping
you understand how we came to know what we know
about the things you're looking at, and what the what

(05:14):
the method behind and reasoning behind what we know is.
So it's it's a wonderful monument of scientific education for
for kids and people of all ages. Really. But anyway,
people wander in not knowing what fossils were, asking what
what dragons are these? I I don't think they did,
but only if only you could, because that I was

(05:35):
having that thought. I'm looking at at these bones walking
around and thinking, Man, if I didn't know anything, I
would think these were monsters. I would be like, where
are the live ones? I need to get away from them.
And so this is what we want to talk about today,
the idea that fossils and uh, not just fossils, but
remains fossilized or not bones of extinct animals would have

(06:00):
inspired visions of mythological creatures throughout history. We want to
essentially focus on the topic of geo mythology. Yes, now,
if you I just want to have a one quick
note about myths here, if you turned into the previous
episode of The Christian and I did Unraveling the Mythic,
you know that there are various ways to tackle mythology.

(06:20):
The most most agree that it's ultimately poly functional. Uh.
That that means that, you know, a myth, myth has
several simultaneous purposes Uh within a culture. Yeah, it's not
just uh you know, it's like it's like the Swiss
Army knife of of like cultural uh energies. I guess yes.

(06:42):
I I think that scientists and science minded people often
have a tendency to overrepresent the role of naturalistic explanation
when trying to think about the origins of myths. And
what I mean by that is, uh, if you're you're
you're a science e kind of person, you're more likely
to say, Okay, here's a myth about um a god

(07:04):
who throws thunderbolts. The This myth was created in order
to explain why lightning happens during storms, and I'm not
saying that's not part of our mythological structures. I think
it absolutely is. I think mostionally, most of the better arguments,
the more modern arguments to at least acknowledge that that
is part of it, that is one of the functions

(07:24):
and the poly functional um explanation. Yeah, that's the point
I'm making. I think myths are definitely truly meant to
be explanatory for natural phenomenon, but that's not all they are.
They're also about moralizing to people, and they're also about
representing social norms and all kinds of things that you know,
they're they're as you say, poly functional. Yeah, so you know,

(07:46):
it's important for us to to keep in mind that
a mythical monster, beast is all is almost always more
than a mirror, you know, proto scientific explanation in a
mirror geo mythological explanation. But the geo mythological explanations I
think can be very helpful. Uh at times that they

(08:07):
seem to just hit the nail right on the head.
Other times they at least raise some interests in questions
about how fossils, which which ancient people undoubtedly came across
as they as they they you know, dug in the earth,
as they farmed, as they explored their world, they would
they found these things. We know they found these things,
but then they had to somehow make sense of them

(08:29):
without a modern understanding of fossils. Yeah, so what is
the concept of geomethology. We should offer a definition. And
I'm going to read a quote from the Encyclopedia of
Geology that was an entry written by Adrian Mayer, who
is who is a name who's going to figure very
big into this episode because she's one of the biggest

(08:50):
names right now in the in the whole field of geomethology,
but especially in linking ancient mythological creatures to fossil evidence
and and remains of extinct animals. So she writes, quote,
geo mythology also called legends of the Earth, myths of observation,
natural knowledge, and physical mythology. I like that last is

(09:14):
the study of ideological oral traditions created by pre scientific
cultures to explain, in poetic metaphor and mythological imagery, geological
phenomena such as volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, fossils, and other natural features.
Of the landscape now in this century. She goes on

(09:34):
to relate stuff about all kinds of geology, like explanations
of myths that would explain why a volcano is erupting.
You know, at Mount Etna, there happens to be a
dragon underneath this volcano who's trying to escape, and that
might explain why sometimes melted stone comes out the top
of it, or you know, just one example of why

(09:54):
earthquakes are being caused by God's the way the landscape
is shaped, the topography of it has sometimes that has
a mythological explanation, like you know, the great the combat
creation myths, like the God slays a monster and then
the monster's dead body becomes the earth, and you know,
the ridges on its spine are the mountains and things

(10:15):
like that. So there's just a wonderful wealth of great
links between the earth and its geological features and the
mythology that people come up with. But fossils are a
big part of this, and so uh Mayor Mayor is
a Stanford folklorist and historian of science who studies ways
in which knowledge about the natural world, often knowledge that

(10:37):
we could consider scientific or proto scientific, appears in pre
scientific myths and traditions, and she's going to come up
repeatedly in this episode, so we thought we should establish
her um. She's written a lot on this topic. Yeah,
two of her key books, there's two thousand seven Fossil
Legends of the First Americans and then her two thousand
eleven book The First Fossil Hunters, Dinosaurs, Mammoths and myth

(10:59):
in Greek in Roman Times. So that's a reissue of
the book the too o Love and version is it's updated,
I think with some stuff. Okay, so that one actually
predates the America's book, but yeah, it tackles antiquity, you know,
looking at, for example, Greek legends. Yeah, and at times
she she points out that so many of these these

(11:20):
monsters that we discuss, they often what they break out
of the ground, they have origins in the earth or
perhaps under the earth. So that's just one of the
many different and it's gonna vary depending on what the
particular myth is, because certainly you have you have mythical
creatures that are terrestrial in nature, that are celestial in nature,
that are tied to the ocean or the rivers, or

(11:42):
to the caves. Uh, there's a lot of variety here.
Needless to say, there are so many different mythic creatures,
some related to one another, but they're all going to
have particular ties to their own time and place and
the people who dreamt about them, and we're not gonna
have time to cover them all here today, right, But
we should start looking at some examples of arguments that

(12:04):
certain mythological creatures and monsters are truly inspired by fossil evidence.
And one of the big ones, I think the one
we really need to start with is the griffin, because
this is this is something that's been widespread. I think
this has become sort of well known that there's an
idea that griffins are inspired by dinosaur bones, and so traditionally,

(12:27):
a griffin is a creature said to have the body
of a lion with the head, beak, and wings of
an eagle, and in ancient Greek sources, the griffin is
often mentioned in association with a tribe called the r
A Mosspi, which were traditionally said to all have only
one eye on their head, so they're kind of cyclopsis. Yeah,

(12:51):
the the r Mospy were like these, uh, these Central
Asian Scythian type people who who harvested gold from the
fields of the of the Griffins. And this is great,
the whole thing about them all having one eye on
on their head. Herodotus, the Greek historian Herodotus, expresses some
skepticism about this that I find really funny. I want

(13:13):
to quote Herodotus now, as translated by George Rawlinson, quote
the northern parts of Europe are very much richer in
gold than any other region. But how it is procured
I have no certain knowledge. The story runs that the
one eyed r a mosspy purloin it from the Griffins.
But here too I am incredulous and cannot persuade myself

(13:34):
that there is a race of men born with one eye,
who in all else resemble the rest of mankind. Nevertheless,
it seems to be true that the extreme regions of
the earth, which surround and shut up within themselves all
other countries, produced the things which are the rarest and
which men reckon the most beautiful. And so that's Herodotus
writing in the fifth century b c uh. And I

(13:56):
find it great that he's skeptical about the one eyed humans.
He's like, I don't buy it, but not necessarily about
the Griffins, And I wonder why could it be that
in ancient times people with a skeptical, fairly evidence based
epistemological framework might have reason to believe in some mythical creatures.
And if so, what could that reason be? One one

(14:19):
part of me says that it could just be not knowing. Right,
We've never been to the ends of the Earth. Who
knows what creatures live there. Yeah, the the understanding of
the time of of Earth's diverse um life forms was
was very incomplete. I mean it's still incomplete, but it
was even more incomplete at the time. So the idea
that something like a griffin existed, sure, that's not out

(14:40):
of keeping with our experience of other creatures. Uh. And
so a couple more ancient sources about the Griffins. The
Roman author Plenty of the Elder summarizes what he's learned
about the Griffins while talking about the R mos b
So writing in his Natural History in the first centuries CE.
Plenty says, quote many authorities, the most distinct wish being
Herodotus and r a status of proconnesus. Right that these

(15:04):
people and he's referring to the r Mosby or arm
posse sorry wage continual war with the griffins, a kind
of wild beast with wings, as commonly reported that digs
gold out of minds which the creatures guard, and the
r mosby tried to take from them, both with remarkable covetousness.

(15:25):
That's a nice sort of like moralizing. They're a little
bit right, adding some kind of motivations. But then here's
one more long one that will give you a pretty
good picture of the ancient view of the griffin. So
this is alien writing on animals, translated by Shoalfield in
his Greek Natural History second century a d. And I've

(15:46):
made a couple of illusions just for brevity, because this
is a long quote. But Alien writes. I have heard
that the Indian animal the griffin, is a quadruped like
a lion, that it has claws of enormous strength, and
that they resemble those of a lion. Men commonly report
that it is winged, and that the feathers along its

(16:07):
back are black and those on its front are red,
while the actual wings are neither but are white. It
has a beak like an eagle's and a head to
just as artists portrayed in pictures and sculpture. Its eyes
are like fire. It builds its layer among the mountains,
and although it is not possible to capture the full
grown animal, they do take the young ones. And the

(16:29):
people of Bactria, who are neighbors of the Indians, say
that the Griffins guard gold in those parts, that they
dig it up and build their nests with it, and
that the Indians carry off any that falls from them.
The Indians, however, denied that they guard the aforesaid gold,
for the Griffins have no need for it. And if
that is what they say, then I at any rate

(16:51):
think that they speak the truth, but that they themselves
come to collect the gold. While the Griffins, fearing for
their young ones, fight with the invaders, they engage too
with other beasts and overcome them without difficulty. But they
will not face the lion or the elephant. Accordingly, the natives,
dreading the strength of these animals, do not set out

(17:11):
in quest of the gold by day, but arrived by night.
For that season they are less likely to be detected. Now,
the region where the Griffins live and where the gold
is mind is a dreary wilderness, and the seekers after
the aforesaid substance arrive a thousand or two strong armed
and bringing spades and sacks and watching for a moonless night,

(17:32):
they begin to dig. Now, if they contrive to elude
the Griffins, they reap a double advantage, for they not
only escape with their lives, but they also take home
they're freight. So this is pretty outline into sounding. But
I am already seeing a connection here between this creature,
this fantastic creature, and the Earth with things mind from

(17:54):
the Earth exactly right. And you are not the first
person to notice that this figures in to Adrian Mayer's
theory about the Griffins and the and a specific type
of dinosaur will get into in a minute. So the
griffin head of an eagle, body of a lion lives
in a desolate or desert wilderness where gold can be found.

(18:14):
It's got wings, claws, scary as heck, screaming death, diving
at you out of the sky while you are blinded
by desert sun glinting off a mountain of gold. Pretty cool, uh,
And it builds its nests out of gold and just
jealously guards the golden treasures or not, maybe it doesn't
care about gold. But either way they're pilfering humans who
it does battle with. The Greek and Roman legends often

(18:37):
associate Griffins with the north and the east, so India
and northern Europe or Central Asia the land of the Scythians.
In real life, that was a group. The Scythians were
a large group of horse riding people who occupied Central Asia,
and the extent of their empire overlapped the desert in
Asia now known as the Gobi. And there's a curious
thing about the Gobi Desert. It is a place where

(18:59):
fosse tolls are not nearly as difficult to find as
they are in many other places. According to the paleontologists
within the archives of the American Museum in Natural History,
it was not historically uncommon to come across fossils of
the dinosaur proto Serratops peaking naked out of eroding hillsides

(19:21):
in the Gobi Desert. And this, of course one with
kind of a beaked apparience. So it's a saratopsid. It's
a four legged dinosaur, and it has so it's a
quadruped and it has yeah, I frill along the top
of its head and a beaked mouth. But here's one

(19:44):
account that was from the American Museum and Natural History
exhibit that they did on this comparison between dinosaurs and
griffin's and so it's an account related from when the
m n H paleontologist Michael knew A Check and paleontologists
Mark Noral were on an expedition in the Gobi Desert

(20:04):
in which they came across a skeleton of a dinosaur,
this Protoceratops dinosaur uh so nova. Check described the scene
in these words quote, We stopped at a low saddle
between the hills. Before I could remove the keys from
the ignition, Mark sang out excitedly. Several feet away, near
the very apex of the saddle was a stunning skull

(20:25):
and partial skeleton of a Protoceratops, a big fellow whose
beak and crooked fingers pointed west to our small outcrop,
like a griffin pointing the way to a guarded treasure.
We continued to pounce on precious specimens with remarkable consistency.
Mark would sing out skull, and almost on que I
would find one too. The surface of the gentle slopes

(20:47):
and shallow gullies was splattered with white patches of fossils,
as if someone had emptied a paint can in a
random fashion over the ground. So they're just tripping over
fossils and and it's not you don't to do a
detailed excavation to try to find one. Apparently in this
region they can be seen by the naked eye. Anybody

(21:07):
who had happened to come across them would see these
huge beasts with four legs and beaks. So Adrian may
Or has over the years developed a fairly strong argument
that these Protoceratops fossils have points of agreement with the
griffin legend. So their quadrupedal, they've got a beak, the

(21:29):
griffin has an eagle's beak, but a quadrupedal body like
a lion. Uh. That's sort of that that goes in
line with the shape of these dinosaurs. It's got the
bony frill uh. And and she argues that the bony
frill sometimes gets broken and leaves these stumps there, which
could have been interpreted as the crests you often see
on griffin heads or the ears you often see on

(21:50):
illustrations of ancient griffins uh. And sometimes the elongated shoulder blades,
the shoulder blades that if you look at a Proto
Serratop skeleton, they have shoulder blades that kind of poke
backward and look strange, and they look kind of like wingbones, honestly,
So that could explain griffin's being said to have wings.

(22:10):
And then of course there's the location. So these are
found in the bone beds of Central Asia and Mongolia
and China, near where the Scythians would have been mining gold.
These alluvial gold deposits are are near where Protos Saratops
fossils are found. And these these griffin descriptions seem to
appear in the ancient Greek literature around the time that

(22:33):
the Greeks would have been interacting and trading with the Scythians.
So I think that's a really interesting argument, And essentially
it goes not necessarily that there were no griffin ideas
before the the Scythians interacted with Protoceratops fossils, but that
if they came across these fossils, it could have very

(22:54):
much have shaped and steered the griffin legend to boot
to the strong version that we see of it repeated
so often in this ancient Greek literature. Yeah, and that's
a motif that we we come back to again and
again with these examples, And I think it's very important
to drive them because it's on one hand, you could
very much take the approach that like, oh, a primitive
person solve this bone, and then a myth was born

(23:16):
on it. But but as we probably not that, probably
not that simple. Myths are more complicated than that. It's
also not impossible, but not impossible. But it seems like
the the more believable version the of of the encounter
is that you have a pre existing myth that involves
some sort of fantastic beast or another. Then you find
these fossils, and without you know, and without a you know,

(23:40):
an actual understanding of how fossils work, without a without
a better explanation, you turn to that script as an
explanation for what you see here. So the myth informs
your interpretation of the fossils, and then the fossils may
enforce and and and change your interpretation of the myth itself,
and then you move into new a new age that's

(24:01):
informed both by the myth and the fossil. Yeah. So,
so I do think we should come back to uh
to exactly that idea later on about how how these
myths would be formed and what what level of explanation
we need for them as we encounter them. But for
this one specific example of Protoceratops fossils or other dinosaur

(24:23):
fossils in the Gobi Desert or in Central Asia more
generally inspiring the Scythian griffins that guard the gold, the
paleontologist and paleo artist Mark Witten wrote an interesting blog
post I read that essentially is a pretty well researched
disagreement with the idea that Protoceratops could have served as

(24:44):
the inspiration for the griffin, and and he makes some
pretty decent arguments against it. For one thing, according to Witten,
the timeline is not very favorable to the proto Protoceratops
griffin hypothesis because he says it's sort of ignores evidence
of griffin lore from the for the seventh century b C,
when when the Scythians could have introduced this these Protoceratops

(25:05):
inspired ideas to the Greeks. For example, one one example
he gives is this fourth millennium b C. Depiction of
a griffin from the ancient city of Susa and what
is now iran Um. And so there's this long tradition
of griffin iron iconography predating the supposed Scythian interaction with
the Greeks Um. But then again there there could also

(25:26):
be a sort of like myth and fossil back and forth,
like we were just talking about. Whitten also argues that
Mayer's hypothesis is based on sort of a narrow selection
of griffin representation types, because he says they're actually, you know,
a lot of different ways to depict a griffin, And
he's saying that the proto Saratops griffin hypothesis is based

(25:47):
on selection bias in griffin imagery sampling, so sort of
cherry picking the Griffins that best fit the protoceratops, whereas
there are other types of Griffins that don't look very
much like that. Yeah, this, and this will come up
again too with some other monsters that we're going to
discuss here, uh huh, and then a few more one uh,

(26:07):
One thing, he says that the griffin doesn't really need
an explanation in Exotic Anatomy of Extinct Species, because it
will could well have been imagined simply by combining elements
of existing animals known to these cultures at the time.
You don't have to have seen a quadruped with a beak.
You can just imagine an eagle's head which you've seen
on the lines body which you've seen. So that argument

(26:31):
that makes some sense to me, and I do want
to come back to that idea also. Um. He also
argues that the earliest Greek accounts of griffin lore come
from semi mythical stories. Quote why should we consider griffin's
to have any more basis in reality than the gods,
monsters or strange human races also mentioned in these stories? Uh,

(26:51):
if griffins are based on actual phenomenon, do we need
to seek rationales for these other creatures too? And I
you know, one thing that comes to my mind is yeah, okay,
So if we need to seek a rational explanation for
the inspiration of the griffin myth, do we also need
it for the arm posse with the one eyed people? Um?
Do we have to figure well, where the people who

(27:12):
all had one eye from some genetic kind of condition?
I don't think so. But also I think this point
seems a little weak to me because everybody acknowledges that
Griffins are mythical and the stories about them are not
historically true. So the question is whether the myths are
pure imaginative fiction or fictions inspired by real world objects

(27:32):
and events. And I think either could likely be the case.
There's no way to automatically favor one or the other.
I think the fossil link is just an argument for
the latter. And another point he makes is that Protosterotops
fossils are you know, have not been found at the
sites of the Scythian gold mines, but rather within a
few hundred miles of them, so you know, it's not

(27:55):
like we saw them there at the gold mine. That
would be a pretty good argument. I think, yes, yes,
if we actually had seen them there. But yeah, so anyway,
there there are arguments for their arguments against that the
Protoceratops or another dinosaur quadrupedal dinosaur with a beak could
have inspired griffin ideas, and uh, I think, I don't know,

(28:17):
I'm not sure where I come down on it, but
I think it's still an interesting idea. But he wouldn't
make some some interesting arguments against it. Yeah, but that
is by no means the only mythical creature that has
been said to have been inspired possibly by fossils, right right,
I mean we've been talking about one eyed folks. So

(28:38):
that leads us, of course to the cyclops. Man. I
love a good cyclops. Yeah, I do too. And and and
you know, we see a lot of variety. That's the thing.
We always see more variety than than you might expect.
So like with the Cyclops, you see some artistic depictions
where there's just one um one orifice for the eye
in the head, just one one eyehole. Sometimes they are three,

(28:59):
and two of them are fleshed over. Uh. So there's
a lot of variety there as well. And indeed we
see a number of different explanations for where this might
have come from. I've read that this man might have
been informed by the forehead lanterns of Pellucidian miners, or
perhaps the protective eye patches that were worn by blacksmiths
was prevented sparks from blinding both eyes at once. You'd

(29:21):
always have one covered. Uh. But the theory that I
think most people have probably encountered, and you either probably
encountered this in a school textbook or perhaps at the
zoo um, and that is that the school that the
skulls of elephants, particularly the skulls of prehistoric Mediterranean dwarf elephants,
could have informed our idea of the psyclops because you

(29:42):
look at this skull and you see this massive hole
there in the middle, that of course is a nasal
opening is for the trunk, right, but you might think, hey,
that looks like an eye socket and the head looks
kind of humanoid. Maybe that's what's going on here. And
indeed Um mayor chi is in on this as well.
And uh, the argument here is that the myth may

(30:05):
have originated or at least gathered some some steam via
the discovery of elephant skull fossils, namely the prehistoric Mediterranean
dwarf elephants. Or another particular one is Dionithrum giagantum, which
had been a would have been a fifteen foot four
point six meter high elephant creature, but unlike modern elephants,

(30:26):
these guys had had a four four point five foot
one point three meter backward pointing tusks. Yeah so backward. Yeah,
you'll have to look at an image of this because
the tusk that they kind of look like a chin beard,
like some sort of a chin beard that has been
uh been shaped those braided devil beards. Yeah, like kind

(30:46):
of like a braided devil beard. Yeah, with the forks
and it's kind of turning backwards towards the individual's chest
chin fangs, chin kind of chin thangs. The elephant would
have probably used these two strip barks from trees or
possibly dig up plants. But no, only use them for
draining the blood out of enemies. But but but you

(31:06):
look at it, and it does look like a humanoid skull,
a very monstrous humanoid skull that for some reason has
a skeletal basis for its goatee. Uh. And it has
something like a third eyehole or a large central eyehole
in the middle of its head. Now, a geologist from
the University of Crets Natural History Museum believe these creatures

(31:28):
probably swam over from Turkey via the islands of Rhodes
and Carpathos to reach Crete. But yeah, these present one
possible idea of where the cyclops came from. Uh. Again,
If not an origin story, then perhaps something that informed
and strengthened existing beliefs along the way. Yeah. Again, that

(31:48):
seems like an interesting explanatory fit, but I guess there's
no way to know for sure. All Right, we're gonna
take a quick break and when we come back, we
shall get to the dragons. Hey, everybody, do you like TV? Well,
I have a feeling the TV likes you, because it's
about to give you the second season of the hit
show Mr Robot. Mr Robot follows Elliott Alderson played by

(32:10):
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of mine. Following the events of F Society's five nine
hack on multinational company Evil Corps. The second season is
going to explore the consequences of that attack, as well

(32:31):
as the illusion of control. Now, obviously, the show ties
in perfectly with a number of topics we've discussed on
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(32:55):
USA Network. That's Mr. Robot Season two, Wednesday July thirteen,
ten nine Central, only on USA Network. Alright, we're back.
So one of the obvious things has got to be dragons, right,
I mean you think about therapod dinosaurs like, uh, you
see a spinosaurus or Terrannosaurus rex, alberta Saurus and any

(33:19):
kind of Uh, I mean they just look so dragon like. Yeah. Uh,
as soon as you see them, you're like, that is
a thing that Yeah, it guards golden treasure, kind of
like the griffin, I guess, and it will bite you
in half if you look at it cross side. Yeah,
it's it's kind of hard, like I find with with
a four year old at times, it's been a little

(33:41):
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

(34:02):
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

(34:22):
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

(34:42):
you also, in fact, and I think I agree with
this may Or makes the point that you wouldn't necessarily
have to see dinosaur fossils to dream up dragons. In fact,
the fossils or or just skeletal remains of many large
mammals could easily be taken as dragon like in nature. Yeah,
especially when you start thinking outside of the box of

(35:06):
about what a dragon is. We discuss this a little
bit in our Chinese Zodiac episode, because in the in
the the Asian traditions, you strip away this sort of
cliche Western idea sort of dungeons and dragon's view of
a dragon. And he's try trying to describe it. It
just becomes this amalgam of different biological influence. They're less
large lizards and more boundary crossing chimera animals. Yeah, and

(35:30):
so all you need is a large rib cage. All
you need is, uh, you know, a few bones that
clearly don't match up with anything in the world that
you have seen, or some huge skulls in ancient India,
that's right. So uh so there is a tradition of
dragons in India that is attributed to so a story

(35:51):
about the first century CE Greek philosopher Apollonius of Tyana
saying when he when he traveled through the foothills of
the Himalayas and went to northern India. Philostratus's story about
this is that it was just full of dragon skulls. Right, Yeah,
we're not dragon skulls. Dragons. Well, he basically reported as

(36:12):
fact that, hey, dragons are everywhere in this area, and
I've seen the skulls to prove it. Um. And and
indeed there seemed to have been just a number of
different skulls or heads that were laid at the base
of a mountain in a place that referred to as
a paraca. They kept his trophies, right, like the predator. Yeah,

(36:33):
kind of like the predator and the skull and some
of these are like, you know, not only are they skulls,
but they have crystals inside them in some cases, which
seems to have represented you know, the supernatural powers perhaps
of these these creatures. Yeah. Now, so who knows where
this was actually supposed to take place or if there's
any truth to the story of this journey at all
about Apollonius, But either way, it could have been inspired

(36:55):
by accounts of the region independent of Apollonius. Yeah, there's
some reculation that it might match up with with Peshawar
and modern Pakistan, uh and In and indeed in later
times according to Mayor, a famous of Buddhist holy place
near Peshawar was known as quote the Shrine of the
Thousand Heads. So what could these heads have been if

(37:18):
they were not truly dragon heads? Well, as you as
you mentioned, they could have been just about anything. Um
in this area is just strewn with the impressive Pleo
Pleistocene era vertebrate fossils. So they would have had their
pick of pretty impressive dragon heads. And and what's more,

(37:39):
calcite and uh selenite crystals are very common in the
fossilized bones in this area, So this would have led
to perhaps to the tails of the gems that are
embedded within the dragon's heads. Yeah, that's a crazy myth.
Gym's inside the dragon head? Yeah, the gyms are its
brain or you know, some component, maybe some cybernetic opponent.

(38:02):
Oh man, that's great. That's another one that that sounds
like a very interesting historical explanation. But then again, we're
just sort of like fitting what we know now onto
the details of history. So it's it's hard to know
for sure if if an explanation like that was true.
I think, yeah, it's interesting, this very same region just

(38:25):
below the Himalayas. UH. It's also been argued that this
may have informed and molded some understandings of of of
an of a very important event in in Hindu mythology,
specifically the dynastic war between the Carabas and the Pandavas
in the epic mahabarata Um and this UH. This idea

(38:48):
comes from the paper Fossil Folklore from India The Sea
Wala Hills and the Mahabarata by Alexander van der Geer, Uh,
Michael Dermissoats and John DeVos. And this was published in
the journal Folklore in two thousand and eight. But they
basically point out that you have you have a number
of fossil ammonites, for example, that are worshiped as the

(39:14):
disc or chakra of the Hindu god Vishnu. Oh I
didn't know that and that Uh, And then indeed, this
is an area that's rich invertebrate fossils. And the authors
argued that this region was seen as perhaps the historical
stage for this legendary battle that's described in the Mahabaratah,
during which hundreds of mighty and sometimes gigantic heroes or

(39:35):
are engaging in battle with each other. They are elephants
that are war elephants that are said to have fought
and died. So that kind of makes sense. How if
you were to find a bunch of fossils all in
the same place, you you might not having an understanding
of how things get deposited over geological time, you might
very well assume that something big went down here. Yeah,

(39:58):
surely this was the side of some epic attle and
look at all the strange things that died here. Some
of these are clearly elephants, because you would have seen
a number of prehistoric elephant type species. But also you'd
have four horn horn giraffe creatures, giant tortoises, sabretooth cats,
different camels, and on top of this, you would have
also found lots of ancient bronze javelins and spears. So

(40:21):
the archaeological artifacts plus the uh the paleontological remains would
have equaled an influence over the setting and context of
the great battle that occurs in this Indian epic. That
is really interesting. And I think the the idea of
the density of fossils leading into the differential mythical interpretations

(40:42):
and stuff like that, that that's something to keep in mind.
But let's go farther east, right, shall we. Okay, let's
do Yeah, let's talk just a little bit about the
the Chinese unicorn, the the the quillan, a creature that
is often known referred to by Westerners as the Chinese unicorn.

(41:06):
And it's worth noting that the that that Western unicorn
depictions vary a lot on their own. So you have
some Western unicorns that look more like a goat, some
look more like a horse. Sometimes within the same work
or series of works, such as the Lady in the
Unicorn Tapestries. Um. But the the Chinese quillon, and it's
various incarnations that you find throughout East Asia. They vary

(41:29):
even more so. It's it's essentially a mystical sacred forest creature,
but there are elements of a deer and other herbivores,
and the details vary beyond that. Um there's um you know,
sometimes it's it's sometimes it has one. Sometimes there's two
or three fleshy horns. Sometimes they're more distinctly antlers. Um

(41:49):
So you can well imagine that in looking at the
fossil record, you could easily pick and choose what you
want this thing to resemble in the fossil record. Um So.
There are a couple of interesting arguments that are made
about it. One is that is that this might that
the origin of this might have been a giraffe. Um So,

(42:09):
essentially you would have had travelers that and this is
not even fossil related, but the idea that you would
have had travelers who ventured out to the coast of
Africa and returned with not only stories of giraffes, but
in one case UH fourteen fourteen, the unit commander ching
Ho would have returned with a giraffe as a tribute

(42:31):
to Emperor Yunglow. And the Somali name for giraffe is
also gearing, which might have sounded like quillen and so um,
which is a word that also is an emblem of
justice to the Chinese. So there's a possibility that that
the giraffe might have played some role in the formation
or the evolution of the idea of equilling. That's interesting now.

(42:54):
I know. One thing I think I've heard is that
different unicorn legends would have to be traceable back to
the rhinoceros. Is there anything to that, Well, possibly, you know,
there's no This is one of another one of those
areas where you can't really say for sure, and I
tend like, personally, looking at the information, I tend to

(43:15):
doubt some of the connections that are made a lot
of people, both for western and Eastern unicorns. They pull
they point to the elasmotherium um, which were particularly more recent.
It's been in the news recently because Uh, it's been
discovered that you actually had humans and elasmo theoriums living

(43:36):
side by side in modern day Kazakhstan, a mere twenty
nine thousand years ago. This according to a recent study
published in the American Journal of Applied Sciences. Previous estimates
would have placed it outside the two hundred thousand year
run of human history. The elasmotherorium did not look like
at western unicorn. It did not really look like any

(43:57):
of the depictions we see of an Eastern unicorn or quillan.
It really looks like a large prehistoric rhino with a
really awesome horn. But there is the idea that if
not direct human observation of this creature, then perhaps memories
and stories in oral tradition of encountering or crew illustrations. Yeah,

(44:20):
our crewe illustrations informed our knowledge of of of what
it is. Um Now. Of course, there are also arguments
to be made that the quillan is in what was
informed by actual rhinos, more modern rhinos, particularly sue Matron
Rhinoceros is that that once lived throughout China and still
live in in parts of of Asia today. Um And

(44:44):
there's some interesting arguments on both sides here, but you
definitely see realistic depictions of Sumatran rhinos in Chinese artistic traditions.
So there does seem to be a divide between the
the pure real world rhino uh camp and the Quillen camp.

(45:04):
So again it remains an open question. Well, Robert, I've
got another one, and I want you to take a
look at a vase with me. Okay, do you want
to look at a not a vase, a mixing bowl.
Put your eyes on it. Okay, I'm looking at it now. Okay.
So this is a This is an object in the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that is a late
Corinthian mixing bowl from about five fifty BC, and it

(45:29):
is it is described as Heracles, or also known as Hercules,
firing arrows while he Sion hurls rocks at a dragon.
Presumably this dragon is the monster of Troy or the
cats troyas uh. This this illustration is crazy looking Hercules

(45:50):
and Heracles. He looks like a robot, straight up robot,
right and then uh he Sion of course is kind
of standing there between him and this monster. And I
don't know, I'll get to the monster in a second.
But if you're able to look this up, do so,
because it is weird. The monster does not look like

(46:10):
a normal monster as you would expect it to be
depicted in classical Greek art. It looks like a big
black mass with some sort of white animal skull jutting
out of it. So what's going on in this story? Well,
in the tradition, Poseidon has a beef beef with Lawmadon,
the king of Troy, and so Poseidon to get back

(46:32):
at Lamadon sends a key TOAs a sea sea beast
to attack the city, and the Trojans keep the sea
monster at bay by sacrificing maidens to it. Keytas is like, okay,
maidens are tasty, I can I can make this work, um.
But at some point Hercules rolls up to Troy around
the same time that the Trojans are about to sacrifice

(46:54):
Lamadon's daughter Heson to the monster, and then Hercules saves
Hecon by killing the sea beast. But in two thousand two,
Adrian Mayor authored a paper in the Oxford Journal of
Archaeology about this illustration on this mixing bowl, and the
paper was called the Monster of Troy vase, the the

(47:15):
earliest artistic record of a vertebrate fossil discovery, and Mayor
argues that this illustration of the legend of Hercules rescuing
from the Monster of Troy was likely visually inspired by
a large fossil skull, so here it's not necessarily the
myth itself, but at least this illustration of it um.

(47:35):
So the key toss in this illustration does not conform
to the Greek style of sea monster art, which was
usually created kind of like the griffin tradition by mixing
attributes of various different known animals like the head of
a lion, body of a snake or something like that. Instead,
features on the illustration caused Mayor to think that the

(47:56):
image was inspired by quote, a large fossil skull of
a prehistoric mammal, possibly a Samotherium, which was a giant
Miocene giraffhoid. Back to giraffes again, that they're so terrifying
in the mythic tradition, and having looked at both myself,
I can definitely see the resemblance that would cause somebody
to say this, including both the skull the skull monster

(48:20):
in the picture and the sam ethereum have this l
shaped lower jaw that protrudes from beyond the upper jaw
in the front, and then when it hooks up in
the l shape uh to connect with the rest of
the skull, it's sort of right behind where the eyes are,
and it's the same in the picture, so uh Mayor
also points out that quote. Numerous literary accounts describe exposures

(48:44):
of these and similar large mammal fossils in antiquity along
the Turkish coast, on the Aegean Islands, and on the
Greek mainland. I conclude that this vase painting is the
earliest artistic record of such a discovery. So the idea
here is that the image in the painting is inspired
by a giant samotherium or other large extinct mammal skull

(49:07):
jutting out of a cliff, which you may well have
found at that time in that place. It's it's almost
as if the the artist here they said, all right,
what does this monster look like? And then someone said, oh,
you see that skull up on the cliff, that that
might have been when its head was like and then
he did like a direct drawing of and they're like,
your bonehead, that's not what it actually looked like. That's
just the skull. Oh bonehead by accident. But seriously, you

(49:32):
should look up this mixing bowl. It looks it looks
so weird and so great. Yeah. Both the both the
illustration of the monster of the of Troy and the
the actual fossil skull both look very metal, like they
could either one could be on the cover of a
heavy metal album. You do usually don't think of giraffes
as being very metal, but I guess they are, especially

(49:52):
when you take all their flesh off. Yeah, and they
have the elongated skull in this case and the bony
horn lumps on top of the head. All right, we're
gonna return to to China for for I think we
have our last specific example here. So in many regions
of China you will find track bearing fossil slabs that

(50:14):
are used. They're either sometimes they're used as building materials
or at least they're they're integrated into houses, yards, uh
in older traditions, cave dwellings. Uh. And they serve as
auspicious symbols or just mere decorations. But they are essentially
the footsteps of dinosaurs. And there are records of these
going back hundreds and hundreds of years of individuals finding

(50:37):
these uh. People are fascinated with them and they hold
onto them because when you encounter these footsteps, it's kind
of like encountering the bones. Here are some some footsteps
in the stone, and you know what footsteps are. You
can you can look at these and go, oh, that
kind of looks like the footsteps of a bird. But
they're set in stone. There's something weird going on here,
there's something supernaturalust have been a magical bird, right, So, uh,

(51:02):
this is where we end up with the idea that
these are the footsteps of the golden pheasant or sometimes
that referred to as the golden chicken, like golden chicken,
the gingi or um the or the golden chickens claw
gingi za, and it's regarded as again an auspicious symbol. Uh. Now,

(51:23):
the golden pheasant is of course a real bird, but
it's elusive nature, it's beautiful colors make it a prime
candidate for deification, and it's also associated with the feng Hong,
which is a mythological bird similar to the western phoenix.
So without the knowledge of fossil making, the maker of
these tracks clearly had to be divine. So so it's

(51:46):
an interesting tradition I read about this in a paper
titled Dinosaur Tracks Myths and Buildings Um the Gingi Stones
from Zizo Area, Northern shawn Zi, China. It's a two
fifty paper, um, but it's yeah, it's a more interesting
insight into it. And again it doesn't specifically involve bones,
but involves just the the fossil footsteps. Oh, that's still

(52:09):
be geomethology typically, yeah, totally. But but this one I
feel like it's more of a direct case because it's
individuals saying and cultures saying, here are the footsteps, and
this is why they're important to us, this is what
they mean. Well, that would actually be a really good
example than of, um, what it looks like when you
have a very solid case in geo mythology explanations, because um,

(52:34):
I mean with with this whole subject, it's very fascinating.
I love reading about this stuff. It's super fun. But
very often we're coming up with it's kind of like
evolutionary psychology explanations that you encounter that can be very
cleverly devised. Oftentimes there there's some very compelling kind of
it makes sense fitting the evidence together for them, but

(52:58):
at the same time they can feel less solid than
a lot of other scientific hypotheses, because it's hard for
you to make predictions with them. At the end of
the day, even the best examples of either evolutionary psychology
or a geomethology, I feel like I am shaking, I'm
nodding my head and saying, yeah, I feel like that
could be part of the explanation. So while I don't

(53:20):
mean to downplay the work people have done on this
at all, like I think that a whole lot of
really really intelligent research has gone into this subject, and
I love reading about it, but it definitely does feel
like a softer, squishier science than than much other science.
And one issue that follows from that is this, I've
been thinking about this question, how hard should we be

(53:41):
looking for scientific historical explanations for ancient myths and legends
before we conclude that they're most likely explained just from
forces inside the mind of the creator, whether that's conscious
imaginative fiction writing, or visions or hallucinations, whatever psychogenic origins.

(54:02):
Um Because if you try to explain every myth by
external facts about the world that we can find evidence
of now, it's sort of it can end up taking
you to crazy extremes. Right. Yeah. One thing that definitely
comes to my mind is have you ever heard what
the ancient aliens people say about the Bible? Oh? How? How?

(54:25):
How have I not? Oh? Yeah, I mean it's crazy.
So in the uh quick one, the Book of Ezekiel,
but the Bible, chapter one, the author says he sees
a vision of God. Right. He says, quote, as I looked,
a stormy wind came out of the north, a great
cloud with brightness around it, and fire flashing forth continually,
and in the middle of the fire something like gleaming amber.

(54:46):
In the middle of it was something like four living creatures.
This was their appearance. They were human, of human form.
Each had four faces, and each of them had four wings.
Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet
were like the soul of a calf's foot, and they
sparkled like burnished bronze. And then later, starting a verse fifteen,
as I looked at the living creatures, I saw a

(55:06):
wheel on the earth beside the living creatures, one for
each of the four of them. As for the appearance
of the wheels and their construction, their appearance was like
the gleaming of Beryl, and the four of them had
the same form, their construction being something like a wheel
within a wheel. Obviously flying saucer aliens. Right, ask the Internet,
it will tell you the author of this passage encounter

(55:28):
to flying saucer aliens. Four aliens got out of it there.
I don't know their shape shifting, uh, nanomaterial suits, whatever
you want, it's all there. Now. This is a very
different and much more extreme hypothesis than fossils explaining mythical creatures, right,
because whereas we actually know that fossils exist, we do
not know whether aliens or flying saucers exist. And there

(55:51):
are some good arguments concerning interstellar distances, etcetera to make
us think that even if they do exist, that it's
unlikely they visited Earth. But them or principle is at play. Right,
when we encounter an ancient account of a vision or
a myth or anything that seems fantastical in any way,
do we need to find a naturalistic external explanation for it,

(56:14):
apart from psychogenic origins? Is it just the person writing it?
Is that their imagination or a vision they saw in
their head? Yeah, because otherwise you're limiting an ancient individual
to some to some sort of really really ultimately alien
mindset where they have no creative thought, they have no
pre existing stories of the fantastic or ideas of the fantastic,

(56:39):
and are not susceptible susceptible to hallucination of any sort,
and they can only they can only make create a
written account or a or an oral tradition based on
something they directly saw as it is written. Yeah. Then again,
people definitely do take inspiration in the fiction and the
fantasy they create from events and objects in the real world.

(56:59):
So I don't think it's a fool's errand to be
looking for these kind of explanations. But how hard should
we look? I guess as the question like, when should
we just be satisfied that, well, you know, this person
probably just had an active imagination and they came up
with the with the lion's body and an eagle's head.
Wouldn't that be weird? You know? Do they need to

(57:20):
have seen something that made them think of a quadruped
with a beak? Yeah? Because I mean, ultimately, if you
to take a skeptical approach, more even skeptical approach, you
can basically say that this person is describing a bunch
of um, sort of psychedelic craziness, and the religious script

(57:40):
for it that they had to play with says, oh,
well this is God. Our modern supernatural script is that
it's aliens, and both are essentially just um, you know,
fictional scripts that we have to describe something that does
not conform to the world. Yeah, if you're going to
go with a naturalistic nation, yeah, or it's God, I

(58:03):
mean just literally, it's just that's the actual God appearing
before well, I mean, of course, for people who believe
in whatever God is figuring into this particular story, that's
obviously an option for them. For people on the outside
of that belief tradition who don't believe in that, that's
not really an option for them in in explaining where
this comes from. But you don't have to go any

(58:25):
kind of to any kind of contorted, uh third party
external naturalistic interpretations. You can always just think, well, somebody
thought something up. Yeah. Of course, we're always at a
disadvantage because we're always looking back in hindsight on these examples.
But what if we what if we dare to look ahead,

(58:45):
what have we dare to imagine? What future commentators, future historians, uh,
maybe even visitors from outer space would make of some
of the uh, the mythical constructs that we have today. Yeah,
I think that is a fascinating question, and it's something
that Adrian Mayer brings up in her Geomethology entry that
I talked about earlier in the Encyclopedia of Geology. She

(59:08):
points out the storage of transuranic radioactive waste. Have you
ever heard about the intentional creation of geo myths with
relation to this? No? I don't believe I have. Okay,
So the problem is, once you have high level radioactive waste,
after you know, it comes out of it comes out
of a nuclear reactor, you've got to store it somewhere,

(59:30):
preferably somewhere underground. And this stuff will remain dangerous for
thousands of years, far far beyond the lifespan of of
you know, the United States already, I mean, so much
changes on the surface of the Earth in the amount
of time that this stuff remains dangerous. How do you
come up with ways of keeping people away from it

(59:54):
that are going to last that long. You can lock
it up in a building, but what if future people
come across this building and say, hmm, something's locked in there?
Might be valuable. Maybe we should get inside and then
of course they sicken and die. Um. Or you could
try to put up signs that say warning, this is poisonous,
stay away from it. It will hurt you. Will the

(01:00:14):
people of the future remember why those signs were there
and believe you? Or will they even speak the same
language as you, will they be able to read them? Uh?
So this this is a problem, and so one solution,
as mentioned by Mayor is uh. Some people have suggested,
what if we create geo myths about radioactive storage sites,

(01:00:34):
thus creating intentionally mythology that says, don't go near these
places because they're full of curses that will destroy you. Well,
that's it, like the like one idea that comes to mind,
as you just go ahead and put out an image
of Godzilla there, and then they'll think, oh, well, no
one will come near because we'll see the image of Godzilla.
But as a monster, I always go toward images of Godzilla, right.

(01:00:58):
But then also they might think, oh, an image of
a large dinosaur here, there must be a bunch of
dinosaur bones in there, which gets into a whole other
idea like how would you make sense of of Godzilla
if you if you were taking a geo mythological approach,
you might say, oh, they are inspired by dinosaurs and
their love of dinosaurs, which is partially true. Godzilla is

(01:01:18):
is undeniably informed by our love of something like a
torontos arts rex. But in the other hand, there's a
lot more to the fabric of Godzilla's identity as well,
tying in the horrors of atomic war and radioactive anxiety. Yeah, yeah,
absolutely that That's a great example of the sort of complex,
poly functional nature of myth, and the polygenic nature of myth.

(01:01:40):
It comes from all over the place. Godzilla isn't just
that somebody saw a t rex skeleton. Yeah. You gotta
be careful when you're playing with myth, because if you
approach it from a very you know, one dimensional framework,
you're you're you're playing with a multidimensional object. Uh. I mean,
I imagine even the Benny Jessriates have some problems with this.
I mean, what else about today, apart from our radioactive

(01:02:03):
waste storage facilities? What else about today? Can you imagine?
Let's say, you know, mad Max scenario happens, and we
lose a lot of the connection with with history and
culture and future generations. Are just dealing with our remains
and our artifacts to try and figure out what happened,
What geo myths might they have about the present day,

(01:02:24):
What what mythological creatures would would they invent when coming
upon a Google server farm? Oh m hmm, Man, I
don't know. I mean maybe transformers. Yeah, I mean transformers
are either robots that turn into cars or cars that
turn into robots. I mean they're real world technological objects

(01:02:45):
that become unreal sentient robot creatures. So that might be
a complex one for for future commentators to figure out
what is the transformer and why? Well? Yeah, I mean
it's so when I think about a server farm, and
I imagine, okay, so I have no scientific knowledge, I
have no technological knowledge. I've just come across this facility.

(01:03:09):
The one thing that seems to be clear about it
is it's a gigantic building and nobody lived inside it,
and so it must Okay, Yeah, so you're talking specifically
about such like the server farms that show up and say,
still look on Valley where it's just a massive, massive
room with just rows upon rows of these boxes. Right, Sure,
I don't know, I mean, surely you can think of

(01:03:30):
something strange about that. Oh yeah, I mean instantly, maybe
it's amazed for a minuteur and yeah, or you are
a tomb of some kind. Um, maybe it is a
tomb because the people of the past have uploaded their
consciousness into these servers and that's where they still exist.
Oh yeah, it's running in there and they're just having
imagine how detached from reality their simulations are at this point.

(01:03:54):
You know, I'm really curious now to hear what y'all
out there, what you listeners are going to have to
say about the geo myths of the present. Yeah, yeah,
because I'm sure we're missing some really key ones because
there's there's just so much there's so much weird stuff
that we have in our pop culture these days that
is much like a myth. It is, it is poly functional.
It's not just you know, the cartoon image that it portrays.

(01:04:17):
It's informed by all these other ideas. And uh uh
And certainly when we get into some of the strange
memes out there, memes that continually evolve, uh, both intentionally
and just as a byproduct of life online. Absolutely, uh so, Robert.
One last question, how convinced are you looking at these

(01:04:37):
arguments for mythological creatures inspired by fossils and and remains
of extinct animals. What what do you think do they
figure in the creation of this, these mythological creatures, and
if so, how often I tend to buy more. I'm
not saying that that they never play into the creation
of myths, but I tend to favor that midpoint argument,

(01:04:59):
where where some version of the myth is pre existing
and then fossils are observed and the to inform each other.
I think that makes a lot of sense. Um. I
think I'm somewhere in the middle too. I'm not I'm
not wholly on board, but I really love these ideas.
I very much want them to be true because I

(01:05:22):
love the idea of people reckoning with the geo facts
of their surroundings by using the darkest parts of their imagination. Yeah,
and you know it ties in nicely with the episode
we also recorded this week on our desire for complete
narratives and complete understandings, Like there's a there's a beautiful
simplicity to geo mythology that that is so attractive and

(01:05:43):
that you could just so succinctively explain this fantastic creature. Uh. However,
it seems. It seems very rare that such a succinct
explanation would be the only explanation for for something that
that has so many facets to it. I think they
convince me on the Golden Chicken. Golden chicken with the chicken. Yeah, um, yeah,

(01:06:06):
that's a good one, all right. So hey, if you
want to check out some of the some links to
some of the things we're talking about here, maybe an
image or two, heading over to stuff to Blow your
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(01:06:28):
We are blow the Mind on both of those. Follow
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blow the Mind at how stuffworks dot com. Well more

(01:06:56):
on this and paths of other topics. Is that how
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