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Nov. 25, 2014 - Skeptoid
14:43
Skeptoid #442: Griffins

Griffins, considered absurd mythological beasts today, were actually our first attempt to explain fossils. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Ancient Griffins and Gold 00:09:02
If we found some kind of alien technology, or something that was otherwise unexplainable, according to anything we know, what would we conclude about it?
We can also go back in time, centuries or even millennia, and imagine what our predecessors would have thought when they found fossilized bones of prehistoric creatures.
One explanation they may have come up with was griffons.
That's coming right up on Skeptoid.
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Today we explore the natural history and evolution of the Griffin, the famous creature said to have the head of an eagle and the body of a lion found guarding gold in the mountains along Central Asian trade routes during the times of the Greek and Roman empires.
Nowadays we like to think of the griffon as a mere fantasy in the same league as centaurs and myrrh people.
However, the way ancient writers depicted the griffon was much more as a natural animal, just part of the landscape in a far-off exotic land.
So how did the nomads and traders come to believe that there were griffins all around them?
Was it always a story to scare intruders away from their gold deposits?
Or is the griffon actually the first recorded attempt to interpret a fossil fact?
The original griffon stories come from the folklore of Central Asian nomads called the Scythians.
The Scythians never had a written language, so our earliest evidence of griffins in their culture comes from their art, which relied heavily on zoological themes, which included griffins.
In the 1940s, Russian archaeologist Sergei Rugdenka explored several 5th century BC tombs in the Scythian region and found nomads that had been mummified by permafrost for 2,500 years.
One of the mummies was a male warrior covered in tattoos of animals, including griffins, establishing a concrete data point for griffins in Scythian culture, even in the absence of writing.
Griffins were first described in writing by the Greek poet and traveler Aristeas around 675 BC.
Aristeas was traveling trade routes in Central Asia and encountered a tribe of Scythian nomads, the Isidonians, near the base of the Altai Mountains, named after the local language's word for gold.
They described to him a lion-sized, four-legged bird that nested in the mountains and guarded gold.
Aristeus incorporated this new knowledge into an epic poem that became incredibly popular in Greece after his return, ushering in an age of griffins that would last nearly a thousand years.
Sadly, his original poem no longer exists, outside a few quotations in the works of other ancient authors, but the timing does coincide with an explosion of griffin art in Greece.
What's interesting about griffin art in Greece is that it doesn't follow standard mythological narratives.
Griffins tend to be depicted in more naturalistic ways, as though they were a real animal from a far-off land, and not something consciously made up for narrative reasons like the Sphinx.
This is an important distinction we'll come back to again and again.
Griffins were typically just seen as animals, not mystical beings with any sort of special power or importance.
A great example of this can be seen in the Temple of Zeus, where a decorative plaque depicts a Griffin mother defending her pup, or chick.
The whole bird-mammal hybrid thing makes it tough to say which.
Even when inserted into myth, their role reads more like set-dressing than principal player.
In 460 BC, Athenian playwright Aeschylus pens the masterpiece tragedy Prometheus Bound.
I imagine most people are already familiar with this tale, but just in case, here are the highlights.
Prometheus is a titan who steals fire from the gods and gives it to humanity.
This infuriates Zeus, king of the gods, who punishes Prometheus by exiling him to Scythia, where he is chained to a rock and has an eagle come each day to eat his liver.
Because he's immortal, the liver grows back, allowing the torture to last indefinitely.
Aeschylus was fascinated by exotic lands, and he describes griffins guarding the rock where the titular Prometheus was bound.
But that's about it.
Herodotus wrote about griffins in his famous and according to some infamous histories from around 430 BC, where he describes the dangers of mining gold in Isidonia.
I cannot say for sure how the gold is obtained there, but some say that one-eyed men called Arimaspians steal it from griffins.
Herodotus later points out that he doesn't actually believe in a race of one-eyed men off in Asia, but he expressed no such skepticism when it came to the griffins in the same story.
Other writers from around that time show a similar pattern, fantastical and easily dismissed claims about life out east, but with much more down-to-earth descriptions of griffins.
An appropriate idiom because even with their wings, ancient authors agree that griffins were flightless.
When Greek physician Theseus wrote about why Asian gold was so hard to get, he said it came from high mountains in an area inhabited by griffins, a race of four-footed birds almost as large as wolves and with legs and claws like lions.
Even Pliny the Elder in his book, Natural History, agreed with the many other authorities that griffins were a part of life for anyone near a Scythian gold mine.
Pliny was also the first to write much on the ears and wings often seen in paintings and sculptures, as well as the first to mention griffins burrowing into gold deposits in order to build their nests.
The last ancient author to add any new information about gold guarding griffins, Alien, around 150 AD, had this to say.
I hear that the griffon is a quadruped, like a lion, with talons of enormous strength that resemble the claws of a lion.
It is reputed to have black plumage on its back with a red chest and white wings.
These says the neck is variegated with dark blue feathers and it has an eagle-like head and beak, just as artists portray.
Griffins make nests near mountains, and although it is impossible to take a full-grown griffin, people sometimes capture the chicks.
The Bactrians say that griffins guard the gold of those parts, which they dig up and weave into their nests.
However, others sensibly deny that the creatures would intentionally guard the gold.
The truth is that when the prospectors approach, the griffins fear for their young and so give battle to the intruders.
In the face of all this evidence, to continue thinking of griffins as magical hybrids would be akin to a straw man fallacy, misrepresenting, though not intentionally, the argument ancient peoples were making for the existence of griffins, then mocking our own misrepresentation as outlandish or ridiculous.
So if we accept that people back then thought they were talking about a real animal and not some mythical beast, what aspect of the real world inspired them in the first place?
Ironically, to find that out, we have to go even further back into the past using the new field of geomythology, or combining our knowledge of geologic reality with the mythical worlds of people's past.
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Early Paleontologists' Successes 00:03:27
Roy Chapman Andrews was an American paleontologist for the American Museum of Natural History in the 1920s.
He is most famous for two things.
First, he is one of the real-world inspirations for globetrotting action archaeologist Indiana Jones.
And second, he led an expedition into the Gobi Desert beginning in 1922 that revolutionized our then understanding of dinosaurs.
In addition to discovering the now famous Velociraptor, Andrews and his team also found the first examples of preserved dinosaur eggs and many other new species of dinosaur, including the Ceratopsians, Protoceratops, and Cetacosaurus.
At a site called Flaming Cliffs, only 48 kilometers from the Altai Mountains, Andrews and his team gathered over a ton of fossils, including more than 100 protoceratops and Cetacosaurus skeletons.
Andrews even remarked that the ground seemed paved with bones.
In many instances, the dinosaurs were found still intact and articulated, a very rare occurrence in paleontology.
Future expeditions had similar levels of success finding abundant remains of ceratopsians throughout the region.
While this area is incredibly harsh for modern life, it makes things incredibly easy for a paleontologist.
There is very little vegetation, it's extremely dry, and the rock is crumbly in red while the bones preserve white.
Frequent sandstorms in the late Cretaceous some 66 million years ago buried entire animals whole, sometimes in life position, preventing disarticulation from scavengers or future storms.
Even amateurs in the area would be able to see bones peeking out from the rock all around them.
Protoceratops and Cetakosaurus are both quadrupedal hornless ceratopsians, the group that contains triceratops with pronounced beaks.
Ceratopsians are members of the larger group Ornithiscia, or bird-hipped dinosaurs.
Even though this is not the group that evolves into birds, they were given the name before we understood all the evolutionary relationships in context.
The nomadic Asian falconers traveling with Andrews' expedition and familiar with large raptors would have been able to notice the similarity in hip structure in addition to the large beak.
Could these dinosaurs be responsible for the inception of the Griffin story?
Let's look at the evidence.
A protoceratops could reach up to two meters in length, a Cetacosaurus slightly less so.
This would have put them in the range of wolves or lions to which griffins were compared.
They have four limbs and a large beak, looking a bit like a mammalian body plan with the head of a bird.
The fossils are incredibly abundant in the region where griffon myths come from, often found in lifelike positions around nests near gold deposits.
In context, it seems obvious that nomadic traders would have seen the bones of an unknown animal around where they were looking for gold and done their best to describe it.
Not being held to Linnaean notions of zoological classifications, i.e., a mammal is a mammal and a bird is a bird, why wouldn't the most logical depiction be a creature that combines aspects of both?
Since the concept of extinction wasn't well formulated at the time, and since the fossils were found in such good condition in areas incredibly remote and tough to get to, why not assume that the living breathing version could be just over the next ridge?
Thus, a natural part of a fossiliferous landscape becomes a fantastical part of local lore and legend, spreading around the world into an instantly recognizable symbol.
Finally, in the early days of paleontology, dinosaurs were thought of as slow, plodding, dim-witted, and inactive reptiles.
Why Griffin Myth Emerged 00:02:10
As our understanding of these animals has progressed, including their kinship with birds as well as reptiles, we now often depict dinosaurs as more active and gracious creatures.
In this way, the Scythians' ancient ideas about griffins had an accuracy about them that our scientific notions didn't pick up on for centuries.
It turns out that some of humanity's earliest paleontologists did a pretty good job, all things considered, and gave us a really wonderful cultural image from people's first recorded attempt to describe an extinct animal known only from fossils.
For that, I think we should acknowledge their contribution.
So thanks, Scythians.
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