This might be the origin of mythical creatures

These days i dont find enough motivation and energy to make something creative. Instead I am writing about what i like to read. My most recent posts have been in Turkish language, with this one I go back to my international readers ^^

Mythical creatures, fantasy worlds, stories, planets, anything other then this world excites me. I love all kind of fantasy settings. But my heart is always in medieval fantasy. As you may know from my previous posts I am a huge fan of Prof. Tolkien's works. Especially hobbit and lord of the rings. Tolkien wrote the stories because he thought England does not have a proper mythology.

When we read about mythologies we often find creatures that out of this world. Half man half horse centaurs, horses with wings, horses with horns - yeah lots of horse variation - dragons - lots of dragons too - there are chinise dragons and western dragons. werewolf, cyclops, you know there are too many to count. But I am not here to talk about mythological creatures from the stories. I am here to talk about what might be the origin of those stories. How come someone believed there are werewolves out there for the first time. Half man Half wolf. When someone start to tell stories about one eyed giants or flying fire breathing dragons. Those are the things I want to explore in this post.

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Werewolf

I love werewolves. In fact in my my endlessly going on and never will be finished book writing adventure I include a type of werewolf in the story. The main character has a special soul bound to a wolf which he can sense his thoughts and even see from his eyes as if he become the wolf. This is kind of turning into wolf but not literraly like in the underwold movies ( by the way watch them if you havent already they are great werewolf vampire movies)

What is this werewolf? I know I know everybody already know what is werewolf but for the sake of this post I want to describe it anyway.

Werewolf, in European folklore, a man who turns into a wolf at night and devours animals, people, or corpses but returns to human form by day.

I recently found an image of a decaying corpse of a bear. If you see bears only with thick fur and fluffy you might think that they are "fat" but believe me when I say so. They are not fat. They are more like a dog then a panda. Type "hairless bear" and see what I mean.

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I think anybody can agree that this doesnt look like a bear at first glance. This "animal" suprisingly looks like a werewolf. This might be the case all these years ago, early civilizations came across a bear corpse and think that this is some kind of man-wolf hybrid. After seeing this image I went to internet and see what other animal remains might be mistaken for a mythical creature and as I expected there are more.

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Cyclops

Cyclops, (Greek: “Round Eye”) in Greek legend and literature, any of several one-eyed giants to whom were ascribed a variety of histories and deeds.

This one surprised me the most. I want aware how an elephant skull look like before researching this subject. Todays technology and knowlede and tools we used in archeology is far more advanced then earlier hunter-gatherer homo sapiens. We can examine bones and map out entire genom of the creature. We can determine its age origin species and so on.

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Now tell me that this elephant skull does not look like some one eyed giant creature ^^ I am waiting. Be honest. When I first saw it, I immediately thought this is a cyclope. Of course hunter-gatherers probably hunt mammoths and some of the people knew what the elephant skull look like but it only takes one man to spread the word . The word became stories and stories became legends and legends became myth ( yes Lady galadriel ) There are many more examples of this but I wanted to give you one more example of this misunderstanding of animal skeletons.

Dragons

There is a theory that Dragons and their existence are based on Dinosaur fossils. And I want to belive this theory because its very convincing. Some of the dinosaur skeletons match perfectly the description of dragons in some cultures. And I want to expand the subject and go beyond the dinosaur skeletons and want to give you more examples from other creatures as well but let start with dinosaurs.

For example when we look at the skeleton structure of stegosaurus we can see the resembless of a modern day dragon description. I often use dinosaurs as a reference point when I sculpt dragons in zbrush. Bone structure is pretty similar. I gave you one dinosaur species as an example but this can be any dinosaur that lead people believes there were dragons.

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Final thoughts

I wanted you to leave this post with more curiosity then when you click on it. Because of that lets see some other examples of what people could think when they see an ordinary animal skull and construct a mythical animal based on the skull . This is very interesting belive me.

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if we didnt already knew what hippos looks like we might think the creature look like something similar to the middle one. But its a cute animal who likes to chill in water and is fat :))

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One more example is this cute hamster. When you dig this kind of skull from the ground you might think this is more dangerous creature then it orginaly is.

The thing I want say is this confusion may lead people to believe such creatures. Maybe its from their pure imagination we cant know for sure. But I believe ancient animal fossils and some animal corspe and skeletons may confuse some early humans. Back then when there we lightning, people would believe the lightning god got angry. When there is a decese, they came up with another god. It was easy to create something to explain things.

People are confortable when they know the explenation of the things they dont understand. Its not important whether the explenation is true or not. Unkown is unacceptable for humans. Maybe thats why they created such stories or creatures based on these bones.

What do you think? See you next time