5 ms·

I have always wondered with how prevalent dragons are in human myths did some kind of dinosaurs survived long enough for homo to have interacted with them.

yesenadam 5y ago
"The earliest stories (among Westerners) of a dragon-like animal existing in the region circulated widely and attracted considerable attention. But no Westerner visited the island to check the story until official interest was sparked in the early 1910s by stories from Dutch sailors based in Flores in East Nusa Tenggara about a mysterious creature. The creature was allegedly a dragon which inhabited a small island in the Lesser Sunda Islands (the main island of which is Flores). ... The Dutch sailors reported that the creature measured up to seven metres (twenty-three feet) in length with a large body and mouth which constantly breathed fire. It burnt them and so they could not continue the investigation. It was believed then that the odd creature could fly." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_(island) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_(island) "The Komodo dragon was the driving factor for an expedition to Komodo Island by W. Douglas Burden in 1926. After returning with 12 preserved specimens and two live ones, this expedition provided the inspiration for the 1933 movie King Kong. It was also Burden who coined the common name "Komodo dragon."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon Your mention of dragons made me think of the Komodo dragon. I only noticed after pasting the first quote the strange coincidence that it mentions Flores! I thought it interesting that the very real Komodo dragon, 10 ft long with dragony teeth and nasty bite, produced traditional-dragon-like legends even into the 20th C.
Apocryphon 5y ago
There's a very interesting (but somewhat contrived) anthropological hypothesis that dragons are composites of various predator creatures that were a danger to our ancestors- birds of prey, great cats, and pythons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Instinct_for_Dragons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Instinct_for_Dragons
- kuhewa 5y ago
  The archetypal origin seems parsimonious to me. Consider that people that would never have interacted with large lizards still had dragony myths, see the mo'o among ancient Hawaiians.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
The Flight of Dragons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_of_Dragons_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_of_Dragons_(book)
kergonath 5y ago
We are still interacting with dinosaurs, we just call them birds. Seriously, though, I assume you refer to conventional dinosaurs, and those went extinct more than 60 millions years ago, at which point the thing closest to a human being was a small mouse-like mammal. It would be very, very improbable that a branch would survive for millions of years without leaving a single indication of its presence, either footprints, fossils, or eggs. There is also more and more evidence that at least some of these dinosaurs actually had feathers, which mythical dragons very rarely have. To some extent we created a representation of dinosaurs similar to how we saw dragons, rather than the other way around. There are still a lot of things we do not know about how dinosaurs looked. There are much less contrived explanations for dragons.

yesenadam 5y ago

"The earliest stories (among Westerners) of a dragon-like animal existing in the region circulated widely and attracted considerable attention. But no Westerner visited the island to check the story until official interest was sparked in the early 1910s by stories from Dutch sailors based in Flores in East Nusa Tenggara about a mysterious creature. The creature was allegedly a dragon which inhabited a small island in the Lesser Sunda Islands (the main island of which is Flores). ... The Dutch sailors reported that the creature measured up to seven metres (twenty-three feet) in length with a large body and mouth which constantly breathed fire. It burnt them and so they could not continue the investigation. It was believed then that the odd creature could fly." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_(island) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_(island) "The Komodo dragon was the driving factor for an expedition to Komodo Island by W. Douglas Burden in 1926. After returning with 12 preserved specimens and two live ones, this expedition provided the inspiration for the 1933 movie King Kong. It was also Burden who coined the common name "Komodo dragon."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon Your mention of dragons made me think of the Komodo dragon. I only noticed after pasting the first quote the strange coincidence that it mentions Flores! I thought it interesting that the very real Komodo dragon, 10 ft long with dragony teeth and nasty bite, produced traditional-dragon-like legends even into the 20th C.

Apocryphon 5y ago

There's a very interesting (but somewhat contrived) anthropological hypothesis that dragons are composites of various predator creatures that were a danger to our ancestors- birds of prey, great cats, and pythons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Instinct_for_Dragons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Instinct_for_Dragons

kuhewa 5y ago
The archetypal origin seems parsimonious to me. Consider that people that would never have interacted with large lizards still had dragony myths, see the mo'o among ancient Hawaiians.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

The Flight of Dragons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_of_Dragons_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flight_of_Dragons_(book)

kergonath 5y ago

We are still interacting with dinosaurs, we just call them birds. Seriously, though, I assume you refer to conventional dinosaurs, and those went extinct more than 60 millions years ago, at which point the thing closest to a human being was a small mouse-like mammal. It would be very, very improbable that a branch would survive for millions of years without leaving a single indication of its presence, either footprints, fossils, or eggs. There is also more and more evidence that at least some of these dinosaurs actually had feathers, which mythical dragons very rarely have. To some extent we created a representation of dinosaurs similar to how we saw dragons, rather than the other way around. There are still a lot of things we do not know about how dinosaurs looked. There are much less contrived explanations for dragons.