{"id":281963,"date":"2018-10-05T07:35:42","date_gmt":"2018-10-05T07:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2018\/10\/05\/big-bones-dont-lie-griffins-2\/"},"modified":"2018-10-05T07:35:42","modified_gmt":"2018-10-05T07:35:42","slug":"big-bones-dont-lie-griffins-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2018\/10\/05\/big-bones-dont-lie-griffins-2\/","title":{"rendered":"big bones don\u2019t lie\u00a0– griffins"},"content":{"rendered":"

ahjareyn<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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brokenbuttbones<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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skittlesfairy<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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toffeecape<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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awed-frog<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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[If you found my blog because you\u2019re curious about Greek people mixing up prehistoric bears and demigods, this post is for you. I studied archaeology with a focus on other things, and the research on this topic goes back decades, but imo the best book on how dinosaur bones influenced mythology is Adrienne Mayor\u2019s The First Fossil Hunters<\/i><\/a>. I strongly <\/i>suggest you support this amazing historian and buy her stuff – she\u2019s a great writer and\u00a0she specializes in folklore and geomythology<\/a>, it doesn\u2019t get much cooler than that – but if you can\u2019t and you\u2019re interested in the subject – well, I believe scientific knowledge should be shared and accessible to everyone, so here are a few highlights. Part one of six.]\u00a0<\/p>\n

Griffins: a very mysterious mystery<\/b><\/h2>\n

\u201cA race of four-footed birds, almost as large as wolves and with legs and claws like lions.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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The one thing you need to know about griffins is that they don\u2019t really fit in anywhere.\u00a0They have no powers, they don\u2019t help heroes, they\u2019re not defeating gods or anything like that. Technically speaking, they\u2019re not even monsters – people thought griffins were legit <\/i>– real animals who lived in Central Asia and sat on golden eggs and mostly killed anyone who went near them. And okay, someone might say,\u00a0\u2018Frog, what\u2019s fishy about that? People used to be dumb as rocks and there\u2019s plenty of bizarro animals out there, anyway\u2019 and yeah, that\u2019s a very good point – except for one thing. See, what\u2019s creepy about griffins is that we\u2019ve got drawings and descriptions of them spanning ten centuries and thousands of miles, and yet they always. look. the. freaking. same<\/i>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Like, here\u2019s how people imagined elephants.<\/p>\n

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This is insanely funny and probably why God sent the Black Death to kill everyone, but also pretty common tbh, because a) people want to feel involved, b) people are liars who lie and c) it\u2019s hard to imagine stuff you\u2019ve never seen. So the more a story is passed around, the more it\u2019s going to gain and lose details here and there, until you get from dog-footed hairy monkey of doom to plunger-nosed horror on stilts. But griffins – art or books, they\u2019re consistently described as wolves-sized mammals with a beaked face. So that\u2019s what made Adrienne Mayor go, Uh<\/i>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And what she did next is she started digging around in Central Asia, because that\u2019s the other thing everyone agreed on: that griffins definitely <\/i>lived there and definitely <\/i>came from there. And this is where things get really interesting, because as it turns out, on one side of the Urals you\u2019ve got Greeks going,\u00a0\u2018Mate, the Scythians, you know – they\u2019ve got these huge-ass lion birds, I\u2019m not even shitting you rn\u2019 while on the other <\/i>side of the Urals – wow and amaze – you\u2019ve got Siberian tribes singing songs about the\u00a0\u2018bird-monsters\u2019 and how their ancestors slaughtered them all because they were Valiant and Good.<\/p>\n

(This according to a guy studying Siberian traditions in the early 1800s, anyway, because you know who writes stuff down? Not <\/i>nomads, bless them: dragging around a shitload of books on fucking horseback is not a kind of life anyone deserve to live.)<\/p>\n

And anyway, do you know what else <\/i>those Mighty Ancestors did? They mined gold sand, and <\/i>they kept tripping over dinosaur bones because that entire area is full of both things and some places are lucky like that. And in fact, the more excavations were carried out in ancient Scythian settlements, the more we started to realize that those guys were even more <\/i>obsessed with griffins than the Greek were.\u00a0Hell, some warriors even had griffins tattooed on their bodies?\u00a0<\/p>\n

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And it\u2019s probably all they ever talked about, because that\u2019s when griffins suddenly appear in the Mediterreanean landscape: when Greek people start trading (and talking) with the Scythians.<\/p>\n

(Another important note here, not that I\u2019m not bitter or anything: something else those excavations are showing is that Herodotus was fucking right <\/i>about fucking everything, SO THERE. Father of lies my ass, he was the only <\/i>sensible guy in that whole bean-avoiding, monster-fucking, psychopathic and self-important Greek \u2018intelligentsia\u2019 and they can all fuck off and die and we don\u2019t care about <\/i>temples Pausy you dumb bitch we want to hear about the tree people and the Amazons and the fucking <\/i>griffins goddammit<\/i>. Uuugh. \/rant)<\/p>\n

So anyway, Scythian nomads had been hunting for gold in places with exciting names like\u00a0\u2018the field of the white bones\u2019 and basically dying of exposure because mountains, so Herodotus (and others) got this right as well: that successful campaigns could take a long-ass time, and very often people just disappeared, never to be heard from again. What everybody got less <\/i>right: the nomads and adventurers and gold miners weren\u2019t killed by griffins, because by the time they started traveling into those mountains,\u00a0\u2018griffins\u2019 had been dead for hundreds of thousands of years. What they did <\/i>see, and what was sure to spook the fuck out of them, were fossils – and, more precisely, protoceratops <\/i>skulls, which can be found on all the major caravan routes from China all the way to Uzbekistan and are so ubiquitous paleontologists call them\u00a0\u2018a damn nuisance\u2019.<\/p>\n

And guess what they look like.<\/p>\n

Just fucking guess<\/i>.<\/p>\n

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[Left: a golden griffin, Saka-Scyhtian culture; right: psittacosaurus <\/i>skull, commonly found in Uzbekistan and the western Gobi.]<\/p>\n

Also, fun detail if you\u2019re into gory and painful ways of dying: many of the dino skeletons are found standing up, because the animals would be caught in sand storms and drop dead. So basically you\u2019d be riding your horse and minding your own gold-related business when all of a sudden you see the empty sockets of a beaked something staring at you and yeah – as a reminder, the idea of evolution was not a thing until Darwin, so any Scythian or Siberian tribesman seeing something like that would assume there was a fairly good fucking chance of a live whatever-the-hell-this-is<\/i> waiting for him behind the next hill. And that\u2019s what he\u2019d say to Greek traders over a bowl of fermented mare\u2019s milk: to stay the fuck away from those mountains, because griffins, man, they\u2019re fucking real <\/i>and there\u2019s hundreds of them and anyway, maybe write that down if writing\u2019s something you\u2019re into, never saw the point myself but eh, to each his own, right, and cheers, good health, peace and joy to the ancestors.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Man, don\u2019t you just love <\/i>mythology?<\/p>\n

(How fossils influenced mythology:\u00a0part two, Cyclops<\/b>, will be up soon.)\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Holy fuck, that was fascinating!!!!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ahjareyn: brokenbuttbones: skittlesfairy: toffeecape: awed-frog: [If you found my blog because you\u2019re curious about Greek people mixing up prehistoric bears and demigods, this post is for you. I studied archaeology with a focus on other things, and the research on this topic goes back decades, but imo the best book on how dinosaur bones influenced … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “big bones don\u2019t lie\u00a0– griffins”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[1361,7295,24877,24878,771,4],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281963"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281963"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281963\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281963"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281963"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281963"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}