Bones of the Gigantomachy

How does one make the skeleton of Hercules ? Take a bunch of mastodon bone and mix well .

In her excellent bookThe First Fossil Hunters , author Adrienne Mayor explicate , in fascinating detail , how Classical myths of giants , dragons , titan , hero , and other badly - form atrocious beingness often stem from a misunderstanding of the fossil record .

After all , it was not at all infrequent for people of the time to have “ striking personal experience with giant skeletons that weathered out of the earth in Asia Minor , ” Mayor pen , a place “ where strange and Brobdingnagian frame emerge from the gumption . ” And , with no particular reason to tack together all those gigantic bones into animal signifier with which humans had no direct experience , the bones were , instead , plainly fashioned together to form titanic wedge . Gods on earth . atrocious ancestry .

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A mastodon skeleton like this , for instance , seen here in its right assembly-

-was pieced together , instead , with Herculean proportions , loom over the human figure beside it .

Heroes , Titan , behemoth : eventually , in a time before human history , Mayor explains , a mythologic war between the oversized dweller of the Earth and the Gods themselves need place , called theGigantomachy . Explosive battles left incomprehensible torso portion scattered all over the land masses , where they were gradually buried by Baroness Dudevant or stratigraphically entombed inside rocky cliffs .

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Then mankind came along , unversed in today ’s anatomical principle , and assemble these giant finger cymbals into a baffled and mutant history for themselves . And there you have Hercules , for instance , a mutant being accidentally assembled from the remnant skeletons of other beast .

The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor . ” / >

This post earlier come along onBLDGBLOG .

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