Unveil the Cyclops Myth! - Mythical Beasts - Documentary

The Cyclops. A mythical man-eating giant. With superhuman strength. And just one eye. He kills his guests and eats them. But what was the real world inspiration behind this tall tale? It was incomprehensible that human beings were able to build this. Why were the ancient Greeks so convinced that killer Cyclopes roamed the planet? If you looked at a skull like this and saw this opening, you would assume that this was a Cyclops. And is there more to the stories of fearsome giants than meets the eye? You can see that he has a huge head. Now investigators use the latest science and archaeology to uncover the truth behind the myth of the fearsome Cyclops. And why it has stalked our nightmares for so long. Greece. Thousands of years ago, people here warned of a monster with superhuman strength. It could construct huge buildings. And forge powerful weapons. The Cyclops was a giant of a man with an eye as big as a wheel. Terrifying in aspects. It was known for being savage. It was known for being a cannibal. And it would eat people. Six of them at a time. What inspired this terrifying myth? Is it more than just a legend? The first place to look for clues is in the original story itself. An ancient poem by Homer tells of a giant Cyclops trapping the hero and his men in a cave. Every day, the beast devours two of them. There is no escape from the terrifying creature. Today, experts continue to investigate the truth behind this ancient legend. You never know in paleontology what you find next moment. Professor Georgios Theodorou is a top dinosaur expert. He's digging a site near the Greek town of Pekermi and thinks giant prehistoric bones could have helped kickstart the Cyclops myth. This kind of animal that we have here in Pekermi probably became extinct 5.5 million years ago. We have part of a skull of a rhino. On the left, it's a bone from a giraffe. A massive bone. It's exciting, especially if we find bones that we don't see every day. The ancient Greeks wouldn't have been used to animals that had such big bones. They couldn't explain them. Today, the Greek islands look very different to how they did 3.5 million years ago. Back then, this wasn't water, but land. The Aegean Sea was a vast expanse of forest and grassland. Giant beasts like rhinos and giraffes all lived here. When these animals died, their bones lay buried for the ancient Greeks to find. The fragments of these strange and gigantic skeletons inspired myths and legends of monstrous giants. Imagine what people must have thought, you know, coming upon a skeleton or fossils that they had no idea or any previous knowledge about. They could construct any image that they thought would work, you know, around these bones. They didn't understand evolution. They didn't understand fossils. They were only finding these big bones, and it's not a surprise that they would try to interpret them in the way that they understood life to be. Huge fossils can help explain a belief in giants. But what could explain the belief in the cyclops? We know that in the southern Greece, in the Megalopolis Basin, there were living elephants, Apallologs and Antikyphs. This elephant was roaming all over Europe, and these elephants were quite large. Greeks in the past believed that these skulls belonged to giant humans, that is, cyclops. Could an elephant skull really be the inspiration behind the myth of the cyclops? What could have led to the idea that these beasts had just one terrifying eye? Comparative anatomist Dr. Joy Reidenberg believes she has found evidence to solve this mystery. What I have here are photographs of African elephant skulls. Now, these are actually quite large. But a smaller version of this actually lived in the Mediterranean area millions of years ago, and they were called dwarf elephants. And they would have been about half the size or maybe even a little bit smaller. But still a fairly large animal. If we look at the skull from the front, which is what this view is here, you see this nice double opening that's fused in the center. This is actually the opening for the nose. And all around this is where the muscles of the trunk. The eyes would have been on the side, very low, right about here. So when you look at the skull, it's not obvious right away that this is where the eye sockets are. If you looked at a skull like this and saw this double opening, you would assume that this was a cyclops. Something with eyes that are fused in the center, or maybe even just one eye in the center, but a very, very large head. So it would look like a giant human skull with only one eye in the middle. These fossilized elephant remains may go some way to explaining the belief in the one-eyed cyclops. But why did the Greeks believe in giants with superhuman strength? Just how big did they think they were? A clue lies southwest of Athens, amid the mysterious ruins of the hilltop fortress of Mycenae. Mycenae as a culture predates archaic Greece. It is thought to have lasted and flourished for about 500 years. The Mycenaeans are long gone, but all around this ruin are clues to the cyclops myth. Over 3,000 years ago, this was a mighty citadel, sheltering behind massive walls. The stones protecting it were colossal, impossible for mere mortals to lift. Myth has it that to build these mighty walls, the Mycenaeans recruited a gang of giants. Deformed, one-eyed beasts, the Cyclopes. Each had the strength of many men, and block by giant block, they built the citadel. A fortress unlike any seen before. The true origins of places like Mycenae became lost to later generations of Greeks. Archaeologist, professor Christophilis Megidis, investigates the citadel's construction, to find out why they claim that monsters, not men, had built it. I mean the walls must have been about 12 meters in height, 5 to 8 meters in thickness. But it's the sheer weight, basically, that keeps the whole thing in place. These were the days before the winch or the crane. But still this wall of massive boulders had been built to a height of 40 feet. Each of these boulders may weigh a ton or more, sometimes even 20 tons. That's about a meter and a half. A meter in height. It looks like it would take superhuman strength to construct these walls. The size of everything built, the size of the fortification walls, the size of the fortress itself, these proportions were unprecedented. It was incomprehensible that human beings were able to build this. The actual gate is a marvel. It is constructed of four monolithic pillars, each weighing about 20 tons. You have to imagine that there was probably another 4 or 5 meters of wall on top of this. The Lion Gate relief is the oldest royal emblem in Europe, actually, and the first monumental sculpture in mainland Greece. There would be no structure like it in Greece for hundreds of years. These places were truly amazing, just beyond imagination. So it makes sense that some people would think that they could only be built by giants. How big would these monsters have to be to build such a huge wall? Ancient writers are largely silent when it comes to the precise proportions of a cyclops. Mathematician Dr. Katie Stoeckles is going to try to calculate its size with the help of a modern-day strongman. One of the problems with Greek myths is that they're not very big on exact numbers or giving precise values for things like people's heights or distances. So we're going to need to get some real-world values. Bob McStay is a weightlifter and uses heavy stones like these in competition. These are Atlas stones, right? So what have we got here today? This is a 100 kilo. This Atlas stone is just for starters. That would be my warm-up weight. Once Katie knows how heavy an Atlas stone Bob can lift, she can work out how big the cyclops would have to be to pick up the huge stones in the Mycenae Citadel. That's the 140 kilogram stone. That was my last warm-up stone before the 160. Bob tops out at 160 kilograms. Yeah, that's about it. With this figure, Katie can scale up to calculate the size of the Cyclopean builders. Here's our Atlas stone. Comparing that to our giant blocks that make up our wall. The biggest stones of Mycenae weigh up to 20 tons each, or a massive 20,000 kilograms. 125 times more than Bob's heaviest. How big would Bob need to be to lift one? We don't need to scale Bob up by 125 times, because when you scale someone up, their strength increases much more quickly than their height. So in fact, we only need to scale Bob up around about 11 times. And Bob is exactly 6 feet tall, which means that our giant Bob is going to be 66 feet tall. This is a huge increase in size. 66 feet is incredible. It's the height of a seven-story building. In fact, it's so high, it's pretty much dinosaur territory. But how was this monumental edifice actually built? When the ancient Greeks rediscovered the old citadel, its construction was a distant memory. Now, archaeologists are finally uncovering the engineering secrets of these monster walls. These types of sizes and weights would be impossible to lift with the then known devices. So most probably these were put in place with the use of soil ramps. It's a technique called parbuckling. It involves building soil ramps against the walls, and placing a sturdy anchor point at the top. Strong rope is looped from the anchor, under the boulder and back to the top. Now a team of men can roll the boulders up the slope and place them into the wall. Using this technique, the builders could lift heavy stones onto towering walls, and then remove the ramps without a trace. With no evidence left of the soil ramp, it was left to the imagination of the ancient Greeks to fill in the gaps. Greeks looked at structures from the Mycenaean world and said, how was that created? The stones are so massive that they actually inspired the term Cyclopean wall, which means walls that have stones that are so large that only a monster like a cyclops could have moved them. The strength and size of the cyclops builders would have been awe-inspiring. At first sight, only someone with monstrous power and strength could make these massive cuts in the stone. The material is very hard limestone conglomerate. The cut is very, very long, as you can see, very sharp, deep and very smooth. It's almost like being polished here. It's just a straight cut down. In reality, new technology, not brute strength, carved up these blocks. The only tool that could make this cut, of this size, this sharpness and this straight line, would be the pendulum saw. The pendulum saw was advanced engineering used for cutting large blocks of stone. Workers tied a curved bronze blade to a wooden pole and mounted it on a frame so they could swing the blade back and forth like a pendulum to cut through the block in a perfectly straight line. Is the use of this tool also a clue to where the actual builders of Mycenae came from? This is something that probably came from Anatolia. We have plenty of evidence for a pendulum saw there. Intriguingly, the idea that the device came from Turkey fits well with the original building legend. In the myth, the seven Cyclopes are expelled from their homes in Thrace, which in part is now known as Turkey. Called Belians, they build the citadel in exchange for food. But it wasn't just the Greeks who thought supersized creatures were building monster structures. In Ireland, myths of giant builders were also rife. Could it be because real-life giants once walked among us? In Northern Ireland, a strange section of coastline stretches out into the sea towards Scotland, the Giant's Causeway. Just like Mycenae in Greece, it was once thought to be the work of giants. Geologist Kirsten Lemon investigates the bizarrely shaped stones. The columns themselves are really unusual. To be honest, they actually look man-made. They all fit together a bit like honeycomb fits together. I suppose people, when they first saw them, thought they can't possibly be natural. Surely these are made by man, and only somebody as big as a giant could have possibly made a rock formation like this. The huge causeway inspired a giant myth. It tells of Finn McCool, the biggest giant in Ireland, who picks a fight with Scottish giant Benandonner. The giants build a causeway across the sea so they can meet face to face. But when Finn McCool sees that the Scot is far bigger than him, he disguises himself as his own baby. Terrified of how gigantic baby McCool's father must be, Benandonner flees back across the causeway, smashing it to pieces. The story of the Giant's Causeway is another example of humans trying to make sense of the natural world. You have what clearly looks like a man-made structure, but it's of huge proportions. How do we explain that? It must have been made by a giant. Today, geologists give us a different explanation for this extraordinary looking phenomenon. These uniform rocks were made from volcanic lava that cracked into multiple segments as it cooled 60 million years ago. Of course, now geologists know that we find these practically on every continent in the world. In the Paleocene Epoch, this was a place of intense volcanic activity. Lava flowed into an existing valley and became a river of molten rock. As the lava cooled, it turned into tough basalt. Over time, erosion scoured away the top layer of rock, exposing a walkway of basalt columns that looks like it was made by giants. It's such a strange geological formation that it makes sense that people hundreds of years ago would have needed to have a way of explaining how it came to exist. The tale of how Finn McCool created the causeway may only be a myth, but is there still more to old legends of Irish giants than meets the eye? Endocrinologist Dr Marta Korbenich examines the remains of what appears to be a super-sized human. This is a photograph of Charles Byrne. He was a giant living in the 18th century, growing to a height of 7 foot 7. Charles Byrne was born in 1761, around 80 kilometres from the giant's causeway. You can see that he has long bones in his legs as well as his arms, a very long torso and a huge head compared to a normal skull. He had a disease which we call gigantism and he had a tumour in his pituitary gland behind the eye making too much growth hormone. Charles Byrne died of the complications of gigantism at the age of 22. Could this condition have played a role in creating the myth that giant creatures once lived in Ireland? And could the same condition have existed in ancient Greece, land of the cyclops? Marta looks for answers. She begins by investigating DNA of other oversized people. A few years ago a family was referred to this hospital because two members of that family both had gigantism. One of them actually was very tall, over 2 metres. Marta analyses blood samples and isolates the genetic mutation that is behind the family's excessive growth. It's such a rare disease, would it be possible that this family of young giants living today could be related to the Irish giant, Charles Byrne? Marta looks to see if these cases are in fact connected by some kind of giant gene in this part of the world. If so, could other mutant giant genes have existed further afield at the time of the cyclops myth? We removed two bactis from the giant skeleton and extracted DNA. Does Charles Byrne's DNA have the same genetic mutation as the modern family? And if so, is it more than a coincidence? Can Marta find this shared genetic marker that will prove their distant relations? The results are in. Without any doubt, the families have the same disease and the same mutation and are related to the giant Charles Byrne. It turns out that Charles Byrne and the family share a common ancestor. From about 60 generations ago. We found altogether 18 families with exactly the same mutation. Oversized people here are not one-off cases. They are part of a phenomenon, one that stretches back for centuries. So this part of Ireland has more giants probably than anywhere else in the world. These tales, these legends are probably based on real people who suffered from this devastating disease. Oversized people helped fuel myths of giants living here. Is it possible that the same condition also existed in Greece? And if real people were behind some of these tales, why were the cyclops considered to be man-eaters? One of the interesting motifs about giants is frequently they're cannibalistic, or they eat the flesh of men. One of the most famous stories of man-eating giants, and one that gets told to kids today, is Jack and the Beanstalk. In many different cultures, there are stories of monsters eating people who venture into the wrong place. In Greek mythology, a cyclops lives inside a cave. He traps Odysseus and his men in his home, eating two of them each morning. Did man-eating giants once stalk the earth like in these old folktales? Fred Coolidge, from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, is on the trail of a real-life monster. This network of caves in southern England is a treasure trove for anthropologists. They've found thousands and thousands of items, all kinds of stone tools. Experts have concluded that these caves were once inhabited by our distant cousins, the Neanderthals. It's fair to say it's a Neanderthal cave, because it was probably occupied from about 90,000 years ago to up to about 40,000 years ago. Like the cyclops, the Neanderthal was cave-dwelling. Anthropologists used to think that Neanderthals were a primitive stepping stone in the evolution of Homo sapiens. But it turns out that both species sit side by side on two branches of the same family tree. They evolved together, but in different ways. Homo sapiens grew lean and tall, whereas Neanderthals were short and stocky, but incredibly strong. This is the Neanderthal skull. This is kind of scary, you know, this overhanging brow ridge. These people were very, very strong, tough in a fight. They took about 35% more calories just to walk, because of their thick, stocky, heavy bodies, and heavily musculature. So they needed meat, they needed big meat. About 80% of their diet was meat. Archaeologists discovered a gruesome truth about the source of some of this meat. The evidence was found on the bones themselves. One interesting aspect of these bones, the striation marks, the cuts on the bones are made with a stone tool. Very sharp along the edges, made by a Neanderthal. And this would have made these marks. Very rhythmical, clearly to remove flesh from the bone. Scraped and eaten. Like the Cyclops, the Neanderthal was a man-eater. We've got a clear history of Neanderthal cannibalism on other Neanderthals for almost 100,000 years. In one case, the largest Neanderthal ever found was cannibalized, along with a baby. They were two little juveniles, and they even show scrapes in the baby's skull, how the tongue was ripped out. Among the 80,000 items found in the debris of this ancient cave, archaeologists made a remarkable discovery. One that might throw light on the myth of the Cyclops itself. This is part of a human jawbone, with teeth. The original is very fragile, so this is an exact replica. Clearly identified as Homo sapiens 41,000 years ago. This extraordinary find reveals something startling about our ancestors' history in these very caves. Since this dates to about 41,000 years ago, it's proof that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens overlapped in this cavern. And that there was an interaction between the two types. It raises an astonishing possibility. If our ancestors met Neanderthals, were these hulking flesh eaters the original source of the myth of man-eating giants? If Neanderthals had this predilection, greater predilection for cannibalism, it would not be surprising that Homo sapiens would make up stories, to protect their young and juveniles from being eaten, and saying, stay away from dark places. That's where these myths might have started, with people in the dark who are going to eat you. For around 5,000 years, Neanderthals lived alongside our ancestors in Europe. Although the last ones died out around 40,000 years ago, stories of man-eating cave dwellers have survived for millennia. But there was more to the Cyclops than a man-eating ogre. It was said to be a hugely skilled craftsman who created powerful weapons for the gods. Did this aspect of the myth also have its origins in the real world? And what can it reveal about the most well-known feature of the Cyclops? Its petrifying single eye. The Cyclops myths describe how these beasts were blacksmiths working for the gods. The god of the forge had his workshop in the volcano of Mount Etna on the island of Sicily. His blacksmiths were tree cyclopes. Shaking the earth with their hammer blows, they forged weapons for the gods. A helmet of invisibility for Hades, god of the underworld. A trident for Poseidon, god of the sea. And for Zeus, they forged a deadly thunderbolt with the power to shake the world. So the Cyclopses were actually forging these amazingly powerful lightning bolts, wielded and hurled by the head god. I mean, the most powerful deity they had. So they definitely had a mysterious or supernatural component to them, a magical thing. What lies behind the story of this hulking monster as the god's blacksmith? Archaeologist Joanna Palermo specializes in the Greek Iron Age. Iron becomes the most prominent metal across the Mediterranean. And so it really ushers in a whole new age in the ancient world. The blacksmith was central to the new Iron Age economy. Blacksmiths were so important. This was manual labor. It was dirty labor. But these people were so pivotal to the new beginnings of Greek society. Today, Joanna investigates a working forge that uses Iron Age techniques. She wants to see what it reveals about the Cyclops myth. Blacksmith Rod Hughes is making a replica Iron Age sword using the methods from over 3,000 years ago. You have to get a very large lump of material suitably hot for long enough to be able to change its shape. And changing its shape by applying force. The melting point of iron is over 1,500 degrees centigrade. Ancient Greek furnaces couldn't reach temperatures that high. So brute force was needed to beat the hot metal into shape. So from what I can see, it's a very, very physical process. It requires repetitive hammering. You have to be physical with the tools in order to get iron to behave the way you want it to. In ancient Greece, only the strongest men would have been capable of working in this way, day in, day out. There'd be dusk to dawn, moving very heavy bits of metal, and then grinding and shaping. It's just very, very arduous. The work of the blacksmith was not just tough. It was dangerous. He could maim, and even blind. Some scholars have suggested that ancient blacksmiths would have worn an eyepatch to protect their vision from sparks coming up from the forge. In the day, they would have no goggles. They would have sparks flying around. A stray spark hitting them in the eyes. Being a blacksmith was loud and dirty work. The forge was located away from the city centre. The blacksmiths were powerful and strong. But working with red-hot metal was dangerous, causing many burns and scars. Some people think that to protect their eyes from flying sparks, the blacksmiths wore an eyepatch. They looked like one-eyed, hulking monsters. It may be that the Iron Age blacksmith was the real-life inspiration for the Cyclops. The Cyclops are imbued with the attributes of strength and brute force. Elements that would have been pivotal to work with in the blacksmith shop. Does the Iron Age forge hold other clues about the myth of the Cyclops? The outsider beast with supernatural powers. One of the things we have to remember about these monster legends is that they're coming out of a place where humans have only recently learned how to do metalwork. These techniques would have been relatively secretive amongst the people who practiced them. The blacksmith's magic was to turn an ordinary-looking rock of iron ore into something that would inspire fear and wonder. One way to explain for people who didn't know this almost magical art of taking these strange stones in the ground and making them into a shield or a plate or a sword or something like that would be to create the idea of mythical creatures doing it. Like never before, new iron weapons transformed the potential of the ancient Greeks on the battlefield. Over the early Iron Age, we develop a whole new form of warfare. And one of their key items is not just the spear but the sword that came along with it. So both would be made out of iron. The Cyclops was a supremely skilled weapon maker. But in Greek mythology, he is often portrayed as a hulking monster of little brain. The Cyclops in the ancient world really represented brute force. And if you think about the Cyclops in the Odyssey, there's something very primal about it, pre-civilization about it. The kind of antithesis of culture, sort of barbarian-like state of existence. Despite his many skills, this giant is depicted as slow-witted and easily tricked. In Homer's epic poem, The Odyssey, a giant Cyclops traps Odysseus in his cave and then eats his men two at a time. But Odysseus cleverly plies the Cyclops with wine and pretends to join in until the giant falls over blind drunk. Odysseus heats a huge splinter from the Cyclops' club and stabs him in the eye. With the beast blinded and outwitted, the hero and his men can escape. Odysseus is able to outwit the Cyclops through brain power rather than brute force or even magic. So why is the Cyclops always a loser? Archaeologist Christophelis Megidis believes it could have been a device to promote the power and sophistication of Greek society. The Cyclops were believed to be mythical creatures that were excellent in metalsmiths, great builders, but with crude force, crude power, without refinement, without too much of the aesthetics that were so highly valued by the later Greeks. The ancient Greeks used myths and legends to reinforce the ideals they held dear. Myths often are conveying powerful messages about society. They're letting people know what is considered right and wrong, who's righteous, who's sinful, who is considered the hero and who is considered the monster. Christophelis thinks the Parthenon of Athens, the most famous temple in ancient Greece, could hold the secret to understanding how the Greeks really viewed the Cyclops. This is a great vintage point. We can actually compare the two different approaches in masonry and architecture. The embodiment of crude strength and force in the Cyclopean wall and perfection and high-end aesthetics on the Parthenon of Athens. The Parthenon is designed with precision and beauty in mind. Every aesthetic detail has been considered. The structural columns are tapered and tilted, enhancing the view from a distance. With architectural brilliance, the ancient Greeks have designed the Parthenon to look perfect from every angle. The Athenian Acropolis is generally regarded as the pinnacle of world architecture. It epitomises the ancient Greek spirit. It reflects and symbolises all the great ideals by which we live today. Philosophy, theatre, intellect, science, art and, above all, democracy. The ideals built into the very fabric of the Parthenon represent everything that the hulking, ugly and slow-witted Cyclops was not. The barbarian Cyclops is one of the most memorable and enduring monsters in Greek mythology. But for all its brutish power, human ingenuity outwitted it. In the end. Experts have shown the Cyclops is not just myth alone. Elephant fossils. Real-life giants. And Iron Age blacksmiths may have all been real-world inspirations behind its powerful legend. And our close relatives, the Neanderthal, could have been the reason it was thought to be a man-eater. The ancient Greeks created the monstrous Cyclops to show how their values of beauty and intellect reign supreme.