Before the dinosaurs, there were...
Fossils! Imagine you're a farmer in ancient Greece. After a landslide, you find a thigh bone as tall as you are. What would you think it was?
Over 2000 years ago, the Greek and Romans kept finding huge, strange bones in cliffs, caves and deserts. They didn't know about dinosaurs or extinct animals, so how did they interpret them? This article is inspired by the book The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor, a historian of science and folklorist. She suggests that some famous Greek myths may have started when people tried to explain real fossils!
The lands around the Mediterranean Sea are full of fossils. Over millions of years, the bones of mammoths, mastodons, giraffe-like animals and other creatures were buried and turned to stone. The bones were exposed after earthquakes, storms and floods, and Greece has plenty of all three!
The word fossil comes from a Latin word meaning "dug up". The ancient Greeks and Romans dug up plenty, and they were curious about what they found. Dinosaurs weren't really recognised until the 1840s, when the word "dinosaur" (meaning terrible lizard) was coined. The ancient Greeks and Romans had no concept of them, and no concept of "millions of years."
In Greek myths, the Cyclops was a giant with one big eye in the middle of its forehead. Where could that idea have come from?
Mayor points to caves on islands such as Sicily and Crete, where people found skulls of dwarf elephants. These small elephants lived on Mediterranean islands long ago. An elephant skull has a large hole in the middle where the trunk attached, and to someone who had never seen an elephant, it could look like one giant eye socket!
The Greeks also told stories about giants who lived before humans and fought the gods. People were finding enormous leg bones and teeth in places such as the island of Samos, and some thought they were proof the giants (called Neades) had been real. Greek myths said the giants were defeated by the gods and buried under mountains, so volcanoes and earthquakes were sometimes explained as the giants stirring. Many of these bones came from animals like mammoths and extinct relatives of giraffes. A mammoth's thigh bones looks a bit like a human's, only much bigger. It's easy to see why someone would think a giant human was buried there!
The griffin was another popular creature in ancient Greece, with a lion's body and an eagle's beak and claws, said to guard gold in faraway lands. Mayor suggests an explanation from the deserts of Central Asia, where ancient nomads travelled and mined gold, and where fossil skeletons of a dinosaur called Protoceratops, who lived about 70 to 75 million years ago in what is now Mongolia and China, were being uncovered. It was about the size of a sheep, walked on four legs and had a beak, and its bones lay near the surface. Greek storytellers may have heard traveller's descriptions and turned them into griffin legends. The Protoceratops had a frill at the back of its head, which fits with the way griffins were sometimes drawn with ears or a crest.
People kept the bones they found. Some were displayed in temples and treated as relics of heroes and monsters, and people liked to believe that the bones connected them to legendary ancestors. Roman writers say the emperor Augustus collected huge bones for a private "museum" at his villa on the island of Capri. That makes him one of history's first fossil collectors!
Some ancient thinkers did more than tell stories. They noticed clues and reasoned from them. Xenophanes, a Greek philosopher, noticed seashells and fish impressions in rocks far from the sea and concluded that those places much have once been underwater. Herodotus, the famous historian, thought the same thing when he saw seashells in the Egyptian desert and came to the conclusion that the sea had once covered the land! Marine fossils on mountains are still good evidence that land and sea have changed over time. These ancient thinkers didn't have the science we have today, but they were doing what scientists still do: observe, ask questions, and look for explanations.
So, are myths just "wrong science"? Or do they do other jobs, like teaching values, bringing communities together and making people curious? Mayor's ideas are suggestions, not proof. Some historians and scientists agree with parts of them and some don't, which is a normal part of science and history.
Think About It
Why do you think people made up stories to explain things they didn't understand?
Why might it be hard to guess what an animal looked like from just a few bones?
What strange object have you seen that looked like something else?
Until next time,
λεῖος πλόος!
Written by Eleanor-Scarlett Russell
Education and Programs Officer
Hellenic Museum
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