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Author suggests unicorns were after African/Asian rhinos, but there is another genus that better fits the description "forest-dwelling creatures with this monst

Author suggests unicorns were after African/Asian rhinos, but there is another genus that better fits the description "forest-dwelling creatures with this monstrous four-foot long horn that they used to stab the wombs of elephants, and they were regarded as the most dangerous beast in the forests” and may have existed alongside humans- https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-11-27-extinct-siberian-unicorn-may-have-lived-alongside-humans https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2018-11-27-extinct-siberian-unicor...

luxuryballs 8mo ago
yeah I don’t see why not, maybe they were hunted to extinction, maybe they even had medicinal properties, heck the most mythical part of the fable might be the virgin
- Retric 8mo ago
  Because 100,000 years is rather extreme to have any kind of myth survive. Instead the ultra long spiral horn likely comes from narwhal as in people could hold and sell “unicorn” horns. https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/01/23/in-medieval-europe https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/01/23/in-medieval-europe... Accounts of unicorns in antiquity had rather different horns.
  - adrian_b 8mo ago
    Woolly rhinoceroses (related to the Sumatran rhinoceros and a different species from the one from the link in the posting above) have continued to live in Europe and Asia until much more recently, i.e. until around ten thousand years ago (i.e. around the same time when humans were forced to switch from hunting to eating seeds, presumably because of the depletion of the big animals that made hunting profitable). That is certainly recent enough for their memory to persist in myths. As you say, the narwhal tooth is indeed the source used for most medieval illustrations of unicorns, but not the source of the legends about them.
    - Retric 8mo ago
      That’s more plausible especially when you consider people would find skeletal remains long after the animal went extinct. However, Occam's razor points to African rhinos as a more reasonable source for keeping this myth alive vs thousands of years of oral tradition. Even just goats seem useful here to explain the often depicted medieval unicorns beards compared to earlier sources.
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luxuryballs 8mo ago

yeah I don’t see why not, maybe they were hunted to extinction, maybe they even had medicinal properties, heck the most mythical part of the fable might be the virgin

Retric 8mo ago
Because 100,000 years is rather extreme to have any kind of myth survive. Instead the ultra long spiral horn likely comes from narwhal as in people could hold and sell “unicorn” horns. https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/01/23/in-medieval-europe https://www.thevintagenews.com/2017/01/23/in-medieval-europe... Accounts of unicorns in antiquity had rather different horns.
- adrian_b 8mo ago
  Woolly rhinoceroses (related to the Sumatran rhinoceros and a different species from the one from the link in the posting above) have continued to live in Europe and Asia until much more recently, i.e. until around ten thousand years ago (i.e. around the same time when humans were forced to switch from hunting to eating seeds, presumably because of the depletion of the big animals that made hunting profitable). That is certainly recent enough for their memory to persist in myths. As you say, the narwhal tooth is indeed the source used for most medieval illustrations of unicorns, but not the source of the legends about them.
  - Retric 8mo ago
    That’s more plausible especially when you consider people would find skeletal remains long after the animal went extinct. However, Occam's razor points to African rhinos as a more reasonable source for keeping this myth alive vs thousands of years of oral tradition. Even just goats seem useful here to explain the often depicted medieval unicorns beards compared to earlier sources.

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