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Mugwump101
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To the roots of DRAGON...
« on: Oct 22nd, 2003, 7:12pm » |
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We were learning Ancient China a two years ago or so I just wanted to address something that's been bugging me for years. In my sixth grade textbook it said that the Chinese believed in Dragon and used their bones to write messages in calliography (sp?), and well scientists researched and found out that the bones founds were really pig, chicken or cow bones of the animals that were either mistaken for Dragon or the emperor decided upon that.
However, my question exactly is why and how did the chinese come up with a picture of a lizard-fire breathing dragon? It's VERY popular in mythology, and fantasy. But Could there be a time where they were like dinosaurs or something?
(Note: I'm a very unqualified student for knowing alot of things. Learning is the key to my life, and I learn everyday...so I'm REALLY SO SORRY if I'm beening igornant in asking this question. But I thank you all the same for taking your time into reading this ^_^)
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"When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come to the conclusion that the gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge. "~ Albert Einstein
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towr
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #1 on: Oct 23rd, 2003, 4:49am » |
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It's a good question, and I've wondered it myself..
A good guess imo would be that ancient chinese people found dinosaur bones, and simply imagined the dragon around them. Obviously the bones belonged to some large strange creature the likes of which they had never seen alive. Magical qualities would simply be ascribed to it as stories develloped..
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Icarus
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #2 on: Oct 23rd, 2003, 5:26pm » |
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That has been my guess as well. China has some very rich fossil beds with dinosaurs. Some of the bones are exposed.
Now suppose you are a chinese peasant 4000+ years ago (probably longer than that). You have to travel in the desert for some reason, and one day you come across a gigantic skull sticking out of the sand. Being well versed in the local zoology, you recognize that it is a some sort of lizard skull, but far bigger than any skull you've seen before. Further investigation shows that the skull is not bone, but rock! What sort of creature has rock for its bones? You hunt for more of the creature, or maybe more is exposed, and you discover that the thing was huge!
You travel on, telling everyone about your fantastic discovery. It is only natural to speculate on what sort of creature it was. Soon stories of this giant lizard spread through the countryside. People wonder, what else is peculiar about them, other than stone bones? Perhaps they breath fire. Perhaps they can fly. They must live out in the deep desert, since no one has seen a live one.
And so the Dragon came to be.
Of course, this is only speculation. Maybe it was just a fanciful creature some story teller made up for a particular story, and its similarity to a dinosaur just a coincidence. The story was popular, so other story tellers created more dragon stories.
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Mugwump101
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #3 on: Oct 23rd, 2003, 6:02pm » |
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Prodigious! Your Scientic theories are truly extraordinary! Thanks a lot for yours philosophes! I'll put more research on it later...
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Kazn
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #4 on: Apr 17th, 2004, 7:12pm » |
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Today we imagined martians to be little green guys with big heads. I suppose we got that idea from the same place as the Chinese got the dragons from. We may never know.
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John_Gaughan
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #5 on: Apr 17th, 2004, 11:51pm » |
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We got the idea of Martians from a weird place called "Hollywood" where nothing is scientifically accurate.
Icarus' explanation of dragons is very plausible, but Hollywood's ideas of aliens are generally stupid. "Independence Day" had someone uploading a Microsoft virus onto alien computers... yeah right, that would work. Green Martians are a step above that.
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towr
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #6 on: Apr 18th, 2004, 7:02am » |
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I'm pretty sure they used an Apple in independence day..
Besides, what kind of device generates the virus-signal doesn't matter, as long as it is a virus to the receiving computer. (What kind of signal would consititute such a virus is something they could have learned from the two alien crafts they had)
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Icarus
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #7 on: Apr 18th, 2004, 3:21pm » |
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The idea about dragons is plausible, but that is all it is. (It is not even all mine - note that towr posted it first. I had come up with the same idea myself, and fleshed it out a bit.) I have no evidence whatsoever for or against it. It just seemed to me to be a likely way for the myth to develop.
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #8 on: Apr 18th, 2004, 11:23pm » |
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I like the fossil idea, and the stone bones is a nice bit of information that pushes right into the "sounds-like-fact" area. I have heard similar ideas about the cyclops. The cyclops was a one eyed giant. It seems that the skull of an elephant was presented (someplace, to a king or at a fair) a long time ago. Because the nasal cavity on the elephant is so large, and the eyes so small, it looks like the skull of a one eyed giant.
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Icarus
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #9 on: Apr 20th, 2004, 5:55pm » |
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Possibly, but I think the king would have to have been fairly ignorant of the anatomy of skulls not to have realized that this big central hole is where the nose is on animals, not the eye. In olden days, kings (and everyone else) usually had more exposure to what skeletons of beasts look like than people do in our modern sanitized society. All large herd animals have a much larger sinus cavity than we do. I would expect ancient peoples to be aware of this.
I.e. I am even more skeptical of this theory than I am of the one of my own creation!
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #10 on: Apr 20th, 2004, 6:11pm » |
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Anyway, I am just repeating a theory that I heard a long time ago. It is fairly well known, although I do not know how much credibility it is given by the scientific community.
A lot of strange things were (are) displayed as authentic artifiacts of bizarre things. But, these things are actually artificial, created for some motive less than honorable. And, these things have been accepted, at least for a while, before they were found out.
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Icarus
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #11 on: Apr 21st, 2004, 8:11pm » |
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Some of those things are still widely accepted. One example is the belief that embryos repeat "earlier stages of evolution" (there is a well-known phrase for this belief, but I can never remember the exact words, and will not attempt to mangle it). This belief was engendered by one man's work in the late 1800's in examing embryos of various species with a microscope and drawing what he observed. However, he gave particular attention to everything that supported this idea, emphasizing it, and in some cases greatly exagerating the resemblance. This bit of scientific fraud was caught not long after it was accomplished, but it was so provocative that the idea became widespread, and to this day is still widely repeated and taught. Every so often, I see or hear someone repeat this, over 100 years since it shown to be a fraud.
For the record: No, human embryos do not go through a stage with gills and a tail. The so-called gills are simply folds of flesh that form during throat formation. The only thing they have in common with gills is a superficial resemblance. The tail is not a tail at all, but the backbone, which grows first before the pelvic bones form and attach to its end. The pelvis and legs first form forward of the extended tail, but migrate down to its end before they attach. If this extended backbone were truly a tail, then the pelvis would attach in the middle and the rest of the backbone would have be "re-absorbed" when the "tail" is lost. This is not what happens.
It is possible to be overly skeptical as well. When the English were first exploring Australia, people in England ridiculed the idea that such a thing as a duck-billed, web-footed, mammal that laid eggs could possible exist. Even when stuffed platypuses (platypi?) were sent back to England, some were sure that it was a hoax, with parts of different animals sewn together.
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| « Last Edit: Apr 21st, 2004, 8:12pm by Icarus » |
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towr
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #12 on: Apr 21st, 2004, 11:32pm » |
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on Apr 21st, 2004, 8:11pm, Icarus wrote:| This bit of scientific fraud was caught not long after it was accomplished, but it was so provocative that the idea became widespread, and to this day is still widely repeated and taught. Every so often, I see or hear someone repeat this, over 100 years since it shown to be a fraud. |
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Hmm.. This was actually in my biology textbook in high school. And though I've since learned it wasn't completely true, it never occured to me it was completely not true.
Quote:| It is possible to be overly skeptical as well. When the English were first exploring Australia, people in England ridiculed the idea that such a thing as a duck-billed, web-footed, mammal that laid eggs could possible exist. Even when stuffed platypuses (platypi?) were sent back to England, some were sure that it was a hoax, with parts of different animals sewn together. |
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Well honestly, it is a ridiculous animal 
It's surprising though what some people will doubt and what those same people will believe. For instance some people doubt man ever landed on the moon despite all the evidence, and at the same time believe people on average swallow 8 spiders each night, despite the lack of any evidence (it was actually a made up 'fact').
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #13 on: Apr 22nd, 2004, 12:12am » |
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Well, people of course do not swallow spiders at night, but if you eat strawberry jam, or some other processed foods, then probably you are eating some insect parts. But, they are small, and do not affect the taste very much.
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towr
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #14 on: Apr 22nd, 2004, 1:18am » |
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That doesn't just hold for processed foods.. If people can eat it, bugs can eat it (or die trying). So some will inevitably be eating it when we are, upon which we eat them as well.. (granted we may have cooked them first)
Then there's some places where insect are a regular (intended) part of the diet.
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #15 on: Apr 22nd, 2004, 1:29am » |
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Here in Japan, people often eat grasshoppers. Well, they are mostly popular with folks over 40 or 50. I think their popularity is going down with the younger crowd. I was introduced to them by a jokester who expected me to turn up my nose. So of course I ate them. They look like grasshoppers, but they tasted mostly of the sauce they were cooked in. So, not too bad. Someplaces eat the bugs raw. Just break the carapace off and suck out the goo. 
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John_Gaughan
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #16 on: Apr 22nd, 2004, 7:44pm » |
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Eating grasshoppers? That is justice for what they did to the poor ants in "A Bug's Life."
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Icarus
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #17 on: Apr 23rd, 2004, 5:20pm » |
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Then I'll let you opt for justice in this one, while I'll be merciful!
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #18 on: Oct 7th, 2005, 6:53pm » |
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quite a gap from the last time anything got posted on this thread. how did it go from dragons to eating grasshoppers? 
well, the western model of a dragon is very similar to the chinese version - the western looking more like a large lizard or dinasaur with wings. The chinese dragons however were just serpents with claws. the huge fossil skulls might suggest such an animal but any part of the body found of a mammal or a dinasaur or most large vertabrates would not suggest such a shape.
There's also the very famous "si bu shang" or the creature that looks like no four animals. its made up of parts of 4 different creatures. where'd that come from?
and by the way, candied grasshoppers and fried spiders and termites are yummy. you guys should really try frying regular house spiders in the microwave. they taste like fried meat!
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Grimbal
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #19 on: Jun 13th, 2006, 5:51am » |
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Regarding the origin of dragons, maybe some sea travelers reported seeing an island with "giant lizards". Giant being 1 meter long. The concept of "giant" being relative, it could have been understood (after a number of intermediaries) to mean "bigger than a house". Here, a kind of natural selection results in the most strange and fascinating descriptions to shadow more realistic descriptions. Once there is no living animal matching this fantastic description, it is the artists renderings of what the beasts might look like, based on what they heard, that ends up as the base of popular knowledge of what dragons look like.
To me, the real origin of these fantastic animals is just that they fascinate people. There might be some truth seeding the process, but the rest is just the sum of all the little contributions of those who relay the myth.
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Icarus
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #20 on: Jun 13th, 2006, 6:25pm » |
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This is true. It may well be that even in origin dragons were not the result of any observation, but rather the imagination of a gifted storyteller. I can easily imagine some storyteller needing an antagonist for his or her story and using a giant lizard. If the tale was good, others would repeat it, and use the monster as well (just as Frankenstein's monster has become so popular today).
Assuredly, however dragons first came to be (and Grimbal's komodo theory makes as much sense as mine), their continued existance and modern character are strictly the result of imaginative story telling.
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flamingdragon
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #21 on: Nov 28th, 2006, 8:08pm » |
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To my understanding, I think that different civilizations that never had any contact with each other both had dragons in their religion. The seeing bones of a big lizard and eventually coming up w/ a dragon would work for one civilization, but not two. There's no way they could both have came up with the exact same name and somewhat same shape for it.
So,
How could two civilizations who never came in contact with each other both believe in dragons?
I believe that info is correct, but I could be wrong.
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| « Last Edit: Nov 28th, 2006, 8:08pm by flamingdragon » |
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towr
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #22 on: Nov 29th, 2006, 12:36am » |
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on Nov 28th, 2006, 8:08pm, flamingdragon wrote:| There's no way they could both have came up with the exact same name |
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The name isn't even somewhat the same among civilizations that never had contact. And ones in the same language group obviously must have had contact.
Quote:| and somewhat same shape for it. |
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The same shape could very well be explained by the bones, there's not that many ways you can imagine flesh around a skeleton.
But still, there's a wide variety of dragons among cultures.
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Icarus
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #23 on: Nov 29th, 2006, 5:15am » |
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Dragons are basically scaled-up lizards. Lizards exist in every part of the world. It would not be surprising to me that more than one culture invented large lizard monsters.
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flamingdragon
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Re: To the roots of DRAGON...
« Reply #24 on: Nov 30th, 2006, 9:34am » |
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UNBELIEVERS!!!!!!
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