Possible origins of Greek mythological beasts

Hi, this video is based on a lesson I prepared for one of my students and she was really fascinated by Greek mythology and so this lesson was looking at some of the possible origins of some of the beasts, the creatures we find in Greek mythology. There's something very human about trying to find an explanation for the things that they see around them. So we find that cultures all around the world have creation stories, they have stories to explain the birds, the animals, the geological features that they see around them. So what we're going to do in this lesson is look at some of the possible explanations for the creatures in Greek mythology. We're going to start off by looking at the Cyclops. Now there are several versions of these in Greek mythology but they are all depicted as giants with a single central eye in their face. On the right we can see a sculpture which has got the head of a Cyclops and we can see it's large with a central eye in the centre here. On the vase we can see a depiction of the scene from the Odyssey where they are blind in the Cyclops. So we can see that there where they're poking that spear into his eye. It's possible that the story of the Cyclops came from these skulls here. So these are from some of the islands in the Mediterranean and as we can see there is a large hole in the centre of the forehead and they're about 60 centimetres high. And we're thinking what type of creature could have this skull? And the answer is it's from an elephant but not from the types of elephants that we have nowadays. There used to be dwarf elephants in the Mediterranean and this is something called island dwarfism or insular dwarfism which is when you have large animals on an island and over many generations they end up smaller and smaller and smaller. And the reason for this is that smaller animals are going to be able to survive with less food resources and less territory. They are losing the advantage of being very large because it's not needed on an island and in fact it's an advantage to be smaller. And so what we see is that on several of the different islands there were little dwarf elephants about a metre high. We know that they were adults and not juveniles from looking at the bones, that the growth plates in the bones are sealed and because they had tusks which is an indicator of a mature elephant. This picture is from an Egyptian tomb and what we can see is that there are several people and on the right they have a bear on a lead with a collar on it and to the left they've got what looks to be a small elephant. It's an adult because we can see the tusks here and it's possible that they could be depicting some of these small elephants from the Mediterranean. Next we're going to talk about griffins and griffins are actually seen in several different cultures. They've got the front half, the head and the wings of an eagle and the back half, the body and legs of a lion. And in Greek mythology they had a couple of different roles. They were described as pulling Nemesis's chariot or Dionysus's chariot. They're a symbol of wisdom and the stories are that they laid eggs or they had nests of gold along the Silk Road and it's possible that the stories of the griffin came from finding skulls which looked like this. And we can see that it has what appears to be like a beak but it's actually got teeth in here. We can see a crest behind the head. Now some of you will be recognising this and going, that is not from an eagle because A, the beak is bone and not from keratin like a modern bird and modern birds don't have anything like this bony crest here because it would be too heavy for them for flight. And you would have noticed and gone, this looks much more like a dinosaur skull and it is. From a type of dinosaur called Protoceratops, they were herbivores and we could see those teeth that were made for grinding there, that we have, they're four legged, about the size of a sheep, they laid eggs in nests as did many of the dinosaurs and their fossils were found near gold-bearing areas. So this map here is showing us locations where fossils of Protoceratops have been found and we can see that it's in Mongolia coming down into modern China. And the map here on the right is showing us gold deposits and we can see, oh, there's a fair overlap, that areas with gold deposits are also in the same general region as the areas where the Protoceratops fossils were found. So here we have a possible explanation. So the fossils and the gold are up here, here we have the silk robes which were carrying goods and in this case probably stories back to Greece over here. Next we'll have a talk about the Hydra. So the Lernian Hydra was one of the tasks of Hercules and the story was that with a nine-headed beast and one head was immortal, every time you cut a head off it grows back. And here we have two Greek pieces of pottery showing the Hydra and Hercules and we can see that they're depicted very much as the heads are like snakes' heads. So we can see the body of it is kind of like a large snake here with a whole lot of snakes' heads. This one though is a bit more interesting, the body has got scales on it, a bit like a fish, but it's a lot wider than a snake body. Let's have a look at a giant squid. Now we can see their body like this, obviously they don't have scales because they're not reptiles, they're part of Mollusca. They have eight shorter and two longer tentacles, so that's ten rather than the nine described with the Hydra. But you know, maybe it had lost one. It's quite common actually for the squid to lose tentacles to things like whales biting them off. Now the big question is, would the ancient Greeks have come into contact with them? And the thing is that giant squid are deep sea dwellers. The Mediterranean isn't a deep sea. The Mediterranean is over here and it's not a particularly deep sea. However we do find giant squid for example around the coast of Spain here, could sailors have possibly brought back stories of the giant squid to Greece? Or maybe a drawing or something like that. We don't know. There's no direct connection, however it is a possibility. We don't know. Who knows, this was two and a half thousand years ago? We don't know. The last example we'll look at is the Minotaur. So the Minotaur was described as having the head of a bull and the body of a human. And we can see a Greek bath with the Minotaur here and this is another piece of Greek pottery showing it here. The story was that it lived at the centre of the labyrinth on the island of Crete and it would shake the island with its bellowing and that the Minotaur was killed by Theseus after he used a ball of string to find his way through the labyrinth. Now Crete lies right on the border of tectonic plates here and because of that it has a lot of periods of seismic activity, earthquakes, as the two plates move past each other it causes earthquakes which cause loud rumbling noises, maybe bangs and the ground shakes. The geological record shows that that was one of those periods with a lot of earthquakes during the time that we see the myth of the Minotaur first starting. So a possibility is that the Minotaur bellowing and shaking the ground was actually the earthquakes that the people on the island of Crete were experiencing and that in order to try to explain it they had a creature living underground who would shake and bellow and that was causing the noises and the shaking that they felt. When we think about these, to us sometimes these stories seem a real stretch, however you've got to think about people back then who perhaps hadn't travelled, they didn't have the knowledge that we have, obviously they did not know about tectonic plates, they didn't know about fossils, that they were actually from extinct animals and so what they were doing was trying to find an explanation for the things that were around them and that is something which is very, very human but we're still trying to do. Now they're usually trying to find that explanation through observations with science. Back then they were trying to do it with their observations of the world around them. Thank you.