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Um, my thought would be because like unicorns, Leprechauns, pegesus', little
garden fairies...
they do exist, but on a different level, plane, dimension...sometimes
that veil has been lifted and they have been seen by sensitive people...like
seeing our departed loved ones...and we can still see them in our
so-called dreams...when we apparently
visit the Astral plane.
I would have felt more comfortable saying this in the Unexplained
Mysteries Section, tho!
What is it about dragons that they appear in human carvings, statues, old tales and history of human cultures that had no contact with each other for thousands of years?
From Europe, to Asia to the native tribes in pre-Columbian America the dragon form is seen in artifacts. How is it a creature that never actually existed could be in all these cultures separated from each other with little or no contact?
The dragon-like figures in Central American pre-Columbian art are serpents. Serpentine figures appear in Central American mythology and in parts of Asia because they're associated with the sun (sky-serpents, or sky-dragons). They're associated with the sun because they can coil into a spiral, and ancient man around the world has represented the sun as a spiral.
Actually, Indo-Europeans did have contact with Asians for thousands of years. They migrated into Asia after the Ice Age, and set up civilizations in Inner Asia and Central Asia. Indo-European languages and culture first developed in Asia. They had tremendous influence on Asian cultures. That's where the dragon image came from; first from Indo-Europeans, who had a number of sacred animals, including an eagle-type figure, to Asians. An image of a sword in a stone, as in the legend of King Arthur, can be found etched into stones all over Mongolia and southern Siberia, and is part of the mythology of Turkic, Mongol and Tibetan peoples. It originated with early Indo-Europeans in Asia.
What is it about dragons that they appear in human carvings, statues, old tales and history of human cultures that had no contact with each other for thousands of years?
From Europe, to Asia to the native tribes in pre-Columbian America the dragon form is seen in artifacts. How is it a creature that never actually existed could be in all these cultures separated from each other with little or no contact?
I think because they are big, strong, with powers than make anyone stand in awe of their very existence and they add to the drama of any situation.
Sometimes, the simplest explaination is the correct one. We have evidence that dinosaurs lived. Like someone else said, maybe that some species existed a lot longer than previously thought.
Sometimes, the simplest explaination is the correct one. We have evidence that dinosaurs lived. Like someone else said, maybe that some species existed a lot longer than previously thought.
Indeed - To quote Ptolemy:
"We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible."
But you do not offer a simple explanation. Rather, you offer an extraordinarily problematic one.
We have identified over 2000 species of dinosaurs. From among those species, we have thousands of complete or near-complete skeletons, and tens thousands of other lesser complete skeletal portions, and millions of unmatched individual dinosaur bones.
Dinosaur bones exist in extreme abundance. And we find them in geologic strata right up until the K-Pg boundary, 66 million years ago. After that? Not a one.
How do we explain this, within the framework of the hypothesis that some dinosaur survived until recent times, not just here and there but around the globe, inspiring dragon tales before disappearing without a trace? We don't. We cannot. For it is inexplicable. The totality of the evidence shows, with virtual certainty, that dinosauria - save for the birds, for strict cladists who will include them (and they cannot account for the so-called dragon myth) - came to a very abrupt and very complete end of the Cretaceous.
We have countless fossils from all the epochs since the K-Pg boundary. The Paleocene. The Eocene. The Oligocene. The Miocene. Some epochs produce more fossils than others, particularly in regards to certain lineages, but they all produce fossils in great numbers. The idea that dinosaurs somehow persisted through the 66 millions years of Earth's most recent history, and were seen in abundance by early tellers of tales, but left nary a physical trace, is not a simple solution to solving the common occurrence of dragons in mythology. Rather, it is an idea that cannot possibly comport with the available data.
The simplest explanation is one I noted earlier in this thread - that the so-called pervasive myth of dragons are, in fact, just vaguely-similar myths of anthropomorphized lizards. In the case of considerable regional similarities, they are explainable by cultural diffusion. In the case of less specific similarities over greater distances, they are explained by the fact that cultures commonly anthropomorphize animals, and that almost all cultures are familiar with reptiles. This explanation is simple because it relies on no more than established facts and commonly-observed cultural practices.
Um, my thought would be because like unicorns, Leprechauns, pegesus', little
garden fairies...
they do exist, but on a different level, plane, dimension...sometimes
that veil has been lifted and they have been seen by sensitive people...like
seeing our departed loved ones...and we can still see them in our
so-called dreams...when we apparently
visit the Astral plane.
I would have felt more comfortable saying this in the Unexplained
Mysteries Section, tho!
You could add bigfoot, UFO's, sea serpents, and a host of others to the list.
I'd be willing to bet in the 250,000 years humans have been around, long before recorded history, they came across a few dinosaur skulls lying about and tried to make the best sense they could of them.
This is just wild speculation but maybe early humans concluded the occassional wild fires they came across and couldn't explain were made by the same creature who owned the skull they also couldn't explain?
They only saw the skulls and bones and never the living animal so perhaps one conclusion they drew was an animal with wings that flew in the sky where humans could not track or follow it. Because they never saw it alive, perhaps they also concluded it only flew at night when it would be difficult to spot in the sky?
Last edited by Shankapotomus; 12-06-2014 at 06:04 PM..
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