A thought about Dragons (or dinosaurs) and man co-existing

[friedemann]

It was a You Tube thing. Yes, these narrators were people that believe the earth is only 6000 years old.

But they made a very interesting arguement.
How is it that almost every culture from East to West describe the same creature? How is it possible to draw such a creature such as a dinosaur(a 19th century word) so they called them dragons which is an older terminology for probably the same thing and when archeology did not exist? But images are drawn that are very similar from China to India to England to the Aztecs in South America. Not fire breathing, but acid spitting(which burns like fire)

They also point out that it takes special conditions to make a fossil...like a volcanic eruption.

Also pointed out that Mt St Helens made it deep with mud in a very short time(not millions of years)

While this is good for the 6000 year estimation it does not address the fact that the entire continent was not covered with volcano's (something they leave out of course) But science kind of leaves out what they don't like either as it does not fit the story.

I just found the discussion about dragons being everywhere rather interesting. It is on YouTube and could be "Dragons and evolution" Take a peek at it.

It makes you think about what we know and don't know.

[Paralith]

Hi friedemann,

There are many things that we can say are common to human cultures across the the world and over time. They all developed a belief in a god or gods of some kind. They all have a form of marriage of some kind. They all have a set of mythical creatures of some kind. Yes, lots of cultures have ideas of dragon-like creatures, but lots of cultures also have mythical creatures that are basically moshed-together creatures that they saw around them, mythical creatures that are undead humans of some kind, mythical creatures that are ghosts of some kind, etc etc. There are a lot of things that are broadly similar across many different human cultures. We also know that human cultures across the world and across time have stumbled across dinosaur fossils. If any of these people also had a passable understanding of what reptile bones looked like, it's not too surprising that they imagined big reptile-esque things that produced those fossils. It's certainly not, by itself, positive evidence that humans must have lived alongside dinosaurs at some point.

Yes, it is rare that any one animal that dies will have some or any of its bones becomes fossils. There do need to be certain special conditions at play, but volcanic eruptions are certainly not the only way to accomplish those conditions. There's also mudslides, rockfalls, flash floods, earthquakes, dying in a place like a tar pit or a sludgy marsh, dying in a deep dark ocean that many millions of years later become dry land, etc. We don't need that many volcanos to explain the existence of fossils.

It's definitely true that scientists are human; humans have their opinions and their biases and their faults, and yes, scientists have been guilty of looking the other way. Scientists are human, and so are the people who made that video. We're all guilty of discounting evidence that goes against something we strongly believe. The world would be a better place if we reminded ourselves of this fact, and tried to evaluate the evidence objectively. Science, at the very least, is a method whose goal is to evaluate the evidence objectively. An individual scientist doesn't always succeed in doing this, but you can bet that most of them are trying to do this. And between a whole bunch of them, working hard at this over many generations, they don't do too bad.

[zetreque]

This is an interesting topic. I'd like to speculate and say that the fire breathing part of "dragon" myths shows how significant fire used to be to human culture. Fire used to be much more significant in life prior to the modern kitchen and central home heating system.

Fire was threatening (forest fires), and it was also life saving (camp fires to keep warm and cook food).

[Ilikeponies]

I read that the aboriginals of australia co-existed with a lizard called a Megalania,which was a larger relative of the komodo dragon.

here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalania

[TheVat]

The aborigines wrought many changes on the ecosystem...possibly hunting animals that were central in the lizard's diet, causing a slow extinction. One could speculate that those people may have even hunted Megalania - given its size, it could have gone after children and been seen as a creature with whom they could not coexist. Or maybe it happened to taste delicious....