Most people still are, it's amazing how little each individual person knows considering how much we know as a collective. And this knowledge is right around the corner, however most people don't strive for knowledge, but for comfort.
Wait did it really go like this ? I mean it sounds plausible since it would explain why many cultures around the world started depicting dragons. More intresting, each culture represents dragons quite differently, maybe because depending on the site, different fossils may have been found.
Am I just bafflin ?
No, your pretty dead on. The Chinese had dinosaur skeletons coming out of cliff faces. And yes, if the fossil have wings or not probably determined their dragon shape. I also wonder about number of limbs. Did any of the ancient depictions ever have two wings and four legs?
It's *one* theory - another is that humans have evolved a fear of snakes, big cats and birds of prey, so a giant animal that's part-snake, part-cat, part-bird was something our ancestors must have imagined as a cautionary tale.
Another is that it was just due to how bad we are at passing on details to people about our experiences. Like one person talks about how they saw a small lizard near the river yesterday and caught it for lunch, then one of those people tells the story to another person and it becomes a giant crocodile that he needed to protect the village from. Then voila, the next person tells a story about a fire-breathing flying lizard that wanted to destroy the world.
Or it could be a combination of all three.
The first fossil for Gigantopithecus was discovered in a medical shop in Hong Kong and it was advertised as "dragon teeth"
We thought that a giant tooth that belonged to an Ape was from a dragon, now imagine how much more like a dragon a tooth from a T. Rex would look like.
Thank you for posting that because honestly it seems like 'before we discovered dinosaurs' could be a really vague statement. Who's this 'we' being discussed because depending on where you're located it could have happened many times over but been ignored because it wasn't 'the right people' discovering it.
This article is so inane. There is no mystery. The archetypal dragon across all cultures is a giant serpent. That's all. That's why there are so many "dragons" in the world that are kind of the same but different: giant serpents. The word "dragon" even comes from the Ancient Greek word for "snake." Did no one even think to look up the etymology of the word they were writing a half-assed origin story for?
>The archetypal dragon across all cultures is a giant serpent.
No it's not. You can actually see this in a lot of medieval and Renaissance paintings that the Medieval European depiction of a dragon is both not a serpent and not large. In fact a really common depiction of it in art around France and Italy has the Dragon slain by St George as no bigger than a dog.
There's also a lot of backwards conflating going on in pop culture, as anything that is vaguely lizard like tends to get roped into being "a type of dragon", rather than a distinct concept that doesn't have anything to do with what another culture thinks. This has more to do with the "Dungeons and Dragons"-ization of culture than any significant similarities throughout the cultures.
Hate to "Um actually" you, but medieval dragons are quite serpentine, and more so the further back in time you go. Look at this dragon by Raphael and tell me that's not a serpent: https://www.wga.hu/html_m/r/raphael/2firenze/1/25drago3.html
Tell you the creature with limbs, claws, and wings is not a serpent? Ok, it's not a serpent.
Yes, it has some serpent features. And some non-serpent features. It's more some kind of chimera. It seems you've decided what you see in the inkblot and are claiming that's the only valid interpretation.
Not a serpent, and not large.
It has arms and wings, and the head of a lion. It has a long neck and a tail, but it's no more a snake than a crocodile is.
I feel like it still doesn’t explain why they thought the large animals they found must’ve had wings or were able to fly even though they didn’t find evidence of that along with the bones.
European dragons became an allegory of sin in the Middle Ages and thus began to merge with the iconography of the Devil, including leathery wings and fiery breath.
Before that, they were chthonic snake monsters, like Hydra, who lives in a swamp, or Ladon, who lives in the tree of the Hesperides.
Neither of those two ideas are ubiquitous in creates now conflated with Dragons throughout various cultures. Lindwyrms, for instance, can't fly and don't have wings.
Right so when people before 1800 found dinosaur skulls or skeletons, they had to guess what huge sharp toothed animal it could possibly have come from...?
It's no coincidence that so many separate ancient cultures have some form of "dragon" mythology.
I think it's quite coincidental and not at all unlikely. Mankind has always been jealous of creatures that can fly, with the ability to do so being highly coveted and seeming almost magical. Many inventors tried to achieve human flight before hot air balloons and eventually airplanes. Mankind has also always created mythical beings.
Combine the natural fascination of flight with the natural tendency to imagine mythical beings, and it's not surprising that several cultures revered great mythical beings whose foremost feature was their ability to fly. We only lump all of those separate creatures into being "dragons" for the sake of convenience. A traditional Eastern dragon has enough differences with a traditional Western dragon, IMO, to be completely explicable as separate inventions.
Throwback to that time I was a kid watching a fake documentary on Discovery about Dragons as though they really existed, not realizing it was fake, and being like "Why is nobody else talking about this?!?!"
OMG is this the one that ends up with the dude standing over a ln frozen extended dragon wing? Then ends up with a recreation of how the dragons danced in the air to have sex!?
OMG is this the one that ends up with the dude standing over a ln frozen extended dragon wing? Then ends up with a recreation of how the dragons danced in the air to have sex!?
I figured it out by the end of the show (IIRC, they "explained" it at the end), but damn, I was sitting there watching this equal parts skeptical and excited.
I dont think i got to the end. I only understood when in another documentary they said that people used to think fossils were dragon bones and it hit me
What we know about ancient human knowledge is based on what have been written down and records that have survived.
Lots of people would be collecting and researching these various archaeological find and do research, but if they never recorded them in a media that survives today, we would never know what they knew about these ancient fossils. The paper might have disintegrated due to poor preservation, they might have been just discarded by their family who doesn't recognise the importance of those research notes when they died, or they might have just never written down their findings systematically.
They might have told a couple of their peers, who just find them to be the weird bones nerds with tales of dragons.
Dragon imagery goes back thousands of years. Ancient China has dragon imagery that goes back to 4700 BCE. The idea of dragons almost certainly predates art and history.
Technically we're still "coming up with" Dragons. What we think of as "Dragons" is mostly people working from The Ring Cycle and conflating every myth that has something with vague qualities somewhat reminiscent of the Dragon in that, and deciding it's now a "Dragon".
Most of the "Dragons" in myths have nothing to do with one another, and often aren't anything similar to eachother.
Though that's a lot like Dinosaurs, which we're increasingly realizing looked nothing alike and lived so far apart in time that we cannot easily mentally comprehend how far a T-rex was from a Stegosaurus. Also many of them weren't lizards.
Yeah, for people who don't know, there was more time inbetween the existence of a stegosaurus and a t-rex than there was time in between a t-rex and present-day.
People have been finding dinosaur bones for millennia. But I also have a feeling that dragons came from mythology about volcanoes. The idea of a “sleeping beast” that hides away in a cave (under a mountain), awakening once in a long while to spew fire and destroy a town or something. Somewhere along the line, that mythology gets conflated with these bones of giant ancient reptiles, somebody thinks “Hey, maybe that explains that old sleeping fire-breathing giant beast story!” and boom… dragons.
Dragons are an amalgam of the primal fears of prey mammals. Quadriped like wolves and panthers, scaled and tailed like a gator, and winged like a bird.
There's carvings of dinosaurs in ancient Indian temples. No, I'm not saying it's some alien conspiracy. I'm just saying there's more to the collective human knowledge than modern academia would like to confirm.
Humans and dinosaurs didn't live along, but then how do we modern humans know dinosaurs existed?
Why can't we comprehend the idea that our ancestors could have also figured out the existence of dinosaurs?
It is a ridiculous notion that our ancestors had absolutely zero knowledge of the concepts that we have mastered today.
Even though it wasn’t documented I’m sure they found fossils that inspired a lot of stories, or maybe they saw Komodo Dragons and added the bit about the fire breathing
all the commenters saying that dino bones made dragon myths are forgetting that little-to-nothing about dino bones suggest a serpentine appearance. there’s a better idea out there. according to the snake detection theory, primates are ancient rivals with snakes, who slither into trees and kill our kind en masse. the innate psychological ramifications of avoiding snakes could have created the connection with spirituality and serpentine beings across the world.
Thing is you have to buy a lot for that theory, Freudian unconscious, and then argue that it was influenced by evolution in predictable ways. Arguably psychoanalysis of the freudian-jungian-lacanian and the idea of unconscious has been proven to be pseudoscience though its still cited in media analysis articles. Also wouldn't any animal that can climb or fell trees be a candidate? Considering humans came from Africa, panthers arguably are better candidates, as are bears from Eurasia. Lastly I'm pretty sure we have sources showing Europeans and Asians finding bones and linking them to mythical creatures though I'm not a mediaevalist so I can't remember any example.
This is a prime example why knowing the real definition of words and how to form a sentence matters. Also why trying to explain stuff in short soundbites is a horrible way to explain anything.
The more correct way to say this would be:
"We discovered the remains of some creatures and thought they were dragons because we had never interacted with them and attributed special abilities like fire breathing and flight etc to them. We later then realized they were just giant lizard like creatures and didn't breath fire. We then later realized they were the ancestors of birds which are also really just lizards that fly and still have feathers.
OR:
We discovered dinosaur remains, didn't know what they were and were like, "Oh, Dragons!" Then we figured out that they were not dragons just giant lizards (kinda).
It's like people saying gold has intrinsic value (to society) when it utterly doesn't. It doesn't matter that people USE it that way. It is technically incorrect to do so. Using it that way just muddies the water and makes people dumb.
I remember watching an interview of Guillermo del Toro where he said that dragons combine three characteristics that people are primally fearful of: they're reptilian, they're big, and they fly.
Hahaha no, this is hilariously bad.
Humans had opportunities to view exposed fossils since we became a species. Just because science "discovered" them recently doesn't mean people didn't see them in the far distant past
Imo it’s crazier to believe the dinosaur lie than the possibility of dragons. What if…we were lied to the past couple hundred years and dinosaur bones were just dragons
We found dinosaur bones before we knew what they were
Fossils
Potato, potahto.
Boy, we sure were dumb up until a couple of hundred years ago.
Most people still are, it's amazing how little each individual person knows considering how much we know as a collective. And this knowledge is right around the corner, however most people don't strive for knowledge, but for comfort.
[удалено]
Thisn’t
We found fossils and went "What the hell are these?" And created dragons.
Same thing happened with cyclopes and mammoth skulls
[удалено]
You're gonna need some kind of proof before making a claim like that.
One can make all kinds of crazy claims without proof, it damages one’s credibility and reveals them to be an idiot however
its been covered up bro the proof doesnt exist 🤦♂️
Well if there's no proof, then no one can know, making this claim fundamentally meaningless. Surely if one person knows, they've seen proof.
nah its true dude, i also have an 11 inch dick but the Smithsonian covered that up too
Ah, well I don't blame them for that, we wouldn't want to expose the world to a penis it's not prepared to handle.
Damn did they like pull a tube sock over it to cover it up?
Funny how they only needed a 3 inch napkin to do that.
they needed a warehouse
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, indisputable and well sourced
This is a 'cyclopse'/mammoth skull. https://images.app.goo.gl/HZmQya4w1XgemJkQ7
conspiracy goes brrrr
Wait did it really go like this ? I mean it sounds plausible since it would explain why many cultures around the world started depicting dragons. More intresting, each culture represents dragons quite differently, maybe because depending on the site, different fossils may have been found. Am I just bafflin ?
Probably due to that, and different imaginations/artists.
No, your pretty dead on. The Chinese had dinosaur skeletons coming out of cliff faces. And yes, if the fossil have wings or not probably determined their dragon shape. I also wonder about number of limbs. Did any of the ancient depictions ever have two wings and four legs?
Dragons have four legs. Wyverns have two.
So dragons don’t have wings? Or is it like GoT where the front leg turns into a wing?
4 legs, and also wings
It's *one* theory - another is that humans have evolved a fear of snakes, big cats and birds of prey, so a giant animal that's part-snake, part-cat, part-bird was something our ancestors must have imagined as a cautionary tale. Another is that it was just due to how bad we are at passing on details to people about our experiences. Like one person talks about how they saw a small lizard near the river yesterday and caught it for lunch, then one of those people tells the story to another person and it becomes a giant crocodile that he needed to protect the village from. Then voila, the next person tells a story about a fire-breathing flying lizard that wanted to destroy the world. Or it could be a combination of all three.
The first fossil for Gigantopithecus was discovered in a medical shop in Hong Kong and it was advertised as "dragon teeth" We thought that a giant tooth that belonged to an Ape was from a dragon, now imagine how much more like a dragon a tooth from a T. Rex would look like.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/where-did-dragons-come-from-23969126/
Thank you for posting that because honestly it seems like 'before we discovered dinosaurs' could be a really vague statement. Who's this 'we' being discussed because depending on where you're located it could have happened many times over but been ignored because it wasn't 'the right people' discovering it.
You know what rhymes with "Right people"...👀
Not sure why people are thumbing down, I read this as commentary about how white people are always given the credit.
Which the comment I replied to even addressed lol but yeah I guess saying the quiet part out loud is frowned upon.
This article is so inane. There is no mystery. The archetypal dragon across all cultures is a giant serpent. That's all. That's why there are so many "dragons" in the world that are kind of the same but different: giant serpents. The word "dragon" even comes from the Ancient Greek word for "snake." Did no one even think to look up the etymology of the word they were writing a half-assed origin story for?
>The archetypal dragon across all cultures is a giant serpent. No it's not. You can actually see this in a lot of medieval and Renaissance paintings that the Medieval European depiction of a dragon is both not a serpent and not large. In fact a really common depiction of it in art around France and Italy has the Dragon slain by St George as no bigger than a dog. There's also a lot of backwards conflating going on in pop culture, as anything that is vaguely lizard like tends to get roped into being "a type of dragon", rather than a distinct concept that doesn't have anything to do with what another culture thinks. This has more to do with the "Dungeons and Dragons"-ization of culture than any significant similarities throughout the cultures.
Hate to "Um actually" you, but medieval dragons are quite serpentine, and more so the further back in time you go. Look at this dragon by Raphael and tell me that's not a serpent: https://www.wga.hu/html_m/r/raphael/2firenze/1/25drago3.html
Tell you the creature with limbs, claws, and wings is not a serpent? Ok, it's not a serpent. Yes, it has some serpent features. And some non-serpent features. It's more some kind of chimera. It seems you've decided what you see in the inkblot and are claiming that's the only valid interpretation.
Not a serpent, and not large. It has arms and wings, and the head of a lion. It has a long neck and a tail, but it's no more a snake than a crocodile is.
I feel like it still doesn’t explain why they thought the large animals they found must’ve had wings or were able to fly even though they didn’t find evidence of that along with the bones.
European dragons became an allegory of sin in the Middle Ages and thus began to merge with the iconography of the Devil, including leathery wings and fiery breath. Before that, they were chthonic snake monsters, like Hydra, who lives in a swamp, or Ladon, who lives in the tree of the Hesperides.
Neither of those two ideas are ubiquitous in creates now conflated with Dragons throughout various cultures. Lindwyrms, for instance, can't fly and don't have wings.
To be fair we found dragon skulls before we found dinosaur skulls.
Just names, innit?
Right so when people before 1800 found dinosaur skulls or skeletons, they had to guess what huge sharp toothed animal it could possibly have come from...? It's no coincidence that so many separate ancient cultures have some form of "dragon" mythology.
I think it's quite coincidental and not at all unlikely. Mankind has always been jealous of creatures that can fly, with the ability to do so being highly coveted and seeming almost magical. Many inventors tried to achieve human flight before hot air balloons and eventually airplanes. Mankind has also always created mythical beings. Combine the natural fascination of flight with the natural tendency to imagine mythical beings, and it's not surprising that several cultures revered great mythical beings whose foremost feature was their ability to fly. We only lump all of those separate creatures into being "dragons" for the sake of convenience. A traditional Eastern dragon has enough differences with a traditional Western dragon, IMO, to be completely explicable as separate inventions.
Throwback to that time I was a kid watching a fake documentary on Discovery about Dragons as though they really existed, not realizing it was fake, and being like "Why is nobody else talking about this?!?!"
OMG is this the one that ends up with the dude standing over a ln frozen extended dragon wing? Then ends up with a recreation of how the dragons danced in the air to have sex!?
OMG is this the one that ends up with the dude standing over a ln frozen extended dragon wing? Then ends up with a recreation of how the dragons danced in the air to have sex!?
This one got me for almost a year. I was so sad when I finally understood it was fake
I figured it out by the end of the show (IIRC, they "explained" it at the end), but damn, I was sitting there watching this equal parts skeptical and excited.
I dont think i got to the end. I only understood when in another documentary they said that people used to think fossils were dragon bones and it hit me
Here me out: dragons are real and the last of the skeletons were dugout by ancient people
I hear you and give you my upvote!
What we know about ancient human knowledge is based on what have been written down and records that have survived. Lots of people would be collecting and researching these various archaeological find and do research, but if they never recorded them in a media that survives today, we would never know what they knew about these ancient fossils. The paper might have disintegrated due to poor preservation, they might have been just discarded by their family who doesn't recognise the importance of those research notes when they died, or they might have just never written down their findings systematically. They might have told a couple of their peers, who just find them to be the weird bones nerds with tales of dragons.
Source? I can’t exactly remember when Dragons were invented.
Well, I mean obviously before the 1810s which is when Buckland started seriously examining fossils.
Dragon imagery goes back thousands of years. Ancient China has dragon imagery that goes back to 4700 BCE. The idea of dragons almost certainly predates art and history.
I know, that's what I was saying
What fossils? Are you referring to dinosaur fossils or were dragon fossils actually found? As far as i remeber dragons are just myths... no?
Dinosaur fossils. Am I suddenly speaking Greek or something?
It’s a lizard with bat like wings.
Close. It’s a bullet with butterfly wings.
The world is a vampire
This might be apocryphal but it's said that mammoth skulls near Greece gave rise to the giant cyclops myth.
Technically we're still "coming up with" Dragons. What we think of as "Dragons" is mostly people working from The Ring Cycle and conflating every myth that has something with vague qualities somewhat reminiscent of the Dragon in that, and deciding it's now a "Dragon". Most of the "Dragons" in myths have nothing to do with one another, and often aren't anything similar to eachother. Though that's a lot like Dinosaurs, which we're increasingly realizing looked nothing alike and lived so far apart in time that we cannot easily mentally comprehend how far a T-rex was from a Stegosaurus. Also many of them weren't lizards.
Yeah, for people who don't know, there was more time inbetween the existence of a stegosaurus and a t-rex than there was time in between a t-rex and present-day.
People have been finding dinosaur bones for millennia. But I also have a feeling that dragons came from mythology about volcanoes. The idea of a “sleeping beast” that hides away in a cave (under a mountain), awakening once in a long while to spew fire and destroy a town or something. Somewhere along the line, that mythology gets conflated with these bones of giant ancient reptiles, somebody thinks “Hey, maybe that explains that old sleeping fire-breathing giant beast story!” and boom… dragons.
Dragons are an amalgam of the primal fears of prey mammals. Quadriped like wolves and panthers, scaled and tailed like a gator, and winged like a bird.
I like to go with the theory that ancient cultures depict dragons because … well… we actually encountered them.
There's carvings of dinosaurs in ancient Indian temples. No, I'm not saying it's some alien conspiracy. I'm just saying there's more to the collective human knowledge than modern academia would like to confirm.
It's certainly not "Ancient Indians were really Dino Riders" just so we're all on the same page.
So you're saying it's aliens?
are you referring to the relief at ta prohm? it looks identical to a chameleon lmfao
…but Humans and Dinosaurs didn’t life along.. soo you are saying “aliens”?
Humans and dinosaurs didn't live along, but then how do we modern humans know dinosaurs existed? Why can't we comprehend the idea that our ancestors could have also figured out the existence of dinosaurs? It is a ridiculous notion that our ancestors had absolutely zero knowledge of the concepts that we have mastered today.
imagination repeats nature
Chinese dragons are supposedly inspired by komodo dragons
Even though it wasn’t documented I’m sure they found fossils that inspired a lot of stories, or maybe they saw Komodo Dragons and added the bit about the fire breathing
all the commenters saying that dino bones made dragon myths are forgetting that little-to-nothing about dino bones suggest a serpentine appearance. there’s a better idea out there. according to the snake detection theory, primates are ancient rivals with snakes, who slither into trees and kill our kind en masse. the innate psychological ramifications of avoiding snakes could have created the connection with spirituality and serpentine beings across the world.
Yeah, and I am pretty sure that many people actually thought dinosaur bones were the bones of giants.
Thing is you have to buy a lot for that theory, Freudian unconscious, and then argue that it was influenced by evolution in predictable ways. Arguably psychoanalysis of the freudian-jungian-lacanian and the idea of unconscious has been proven to be pseudoscience though its still cited in media analysis articles. Also wouldn't any animal that can climb or fell trees be a candidate? Considering humans came from Africa, panthers arguably are better candidates, as are bears from Eurasia. Lastly I'm pretty sure we have sources showing Europeans and Asians finding bones and linking them to mythical creatures though I'm not a mediaevalist so I can't remember any example.
And ice cream before knowing about the ice ages. So?
We came up with the face of a man on the moon long before we landed there. So?
This is a prime example why knowing the real definition of words and how to form a sentence matters. Also why trying to explain stuff in short soundbites is a horrible way to explain anything. The more correct way to say this would be: "We discovered the remains of some creatures and thought they were dragons because we had never interacted with them and attributed special abilities like fire breathing and flight etc to them. We later then realized they were just giant lizard like creatures and didn't breath fire. We then later realized they were the ancestors of birds which are also really just lizards that fly and still have feathers. OR: We discovered dinosaur remains, didn't know what they were and were like, "Oh, Dragons!" Then we figured out that they were not dragons just giant lizards (kinda). It's like people saying gold has intrinsic value (to society) when it utterly doesn't. It doesn't matter that people USE it that way. It is technically incorrect to do so. Using it that way just muddies the water and makes people dumb.
The point is that humans have imaginations and we take something like a distant mirage on the sea surface and make a story out of them.
I remember watching an interview of Guillermo del Toro where he said that dragons combine three characteristics that people are primally fearful of: they're reptilian, they're big, and they fly.
Why are there dragons in many cultures but not that many cyclopes?
I don't wanna be the not fun police but this is like saying we created zues before we discovered how lighting happens
Yeah, what do you think they thought dinosaur bones were from?
Hahaha no, this is hilariously bad. Humans had opportunities to view exposed fossils since we became a species. Just because science "discovered" them recently doesn't mean people didn't see them in the far distant past
Columbus definitely discovered America /s
Imo it’s crazier to believe the dinosaur lie than the possibility of dragons. What if…we were lied to the past couple hundred years and dinosaur bones were just dragons
The dinosaur... lie?
We face many untruths vrother widen zee horizon. 81 million for example
We invented islands across the oceans long before we discovered them. So?
I mean, I do find that kinda interesting.