Once thought to be legendary, now known to be real?

March 25, 2005 1:09 AM

What are some things once thought of as mythic, legendary, or folk tales, but know thought or known to be real?

Examples I can think of: Troy, until Schliemann unearthed it, possibly Atlantis if Rainer Kühne is right, gorillas or pygmy humans as described by Hanno of Carthage, and hippopotami and Pygmies as described by Herodotus.

But coelacanths would not be an example of what I'm looking for, as while they were mistakenly believed extinct, they never featured (so far as I know) in myths or legends or folk tales or travelers' tales.

Examples from archeology or cryptozoology of especial interest; things first alluded to in myth, legend, or folk tales are of greater interest than things only mentioned in travelers' tales.

(Speaking of Herodotus and pygmies, anyone know what "Near Schaffhausen, Dr Kollman found skeletal remains of small human beings" refers to in the 1911 Britannica entry on pygmies?)

posted by orthogonality to Science & Nature (44 answers total)

I heard of a place called Wall Drug once...by the time i found it Wall Drug had become a beast of my personal mythology. RIP Dobby.

Perhaps skeletal remains of small human beings refers to the hobbit?
posted by schyler523 at 1:51 AM on March 25, 2005

Wales and other sea creatures perhaps? Huge squids and those jellyfish that are hundreds of metres across, things like that.
posted by fvw at 1:58 AM on March 25, 2005

Wales and other sea creatures perhaps?

Wales is hardly the stuff of legend. /crickets

Have you read Frazer's The Golden Bough, ortho?
posted by AlexReynolds at 2:03 AM on March 25, 2005

Response by poster: AlexReynolds writes " Have you read Frazer's The Golden Bough, ortho?"

Yeah, actually, part of what inspired this AskMefi were some of Frazer on Corn Mother. Not to mention the Rye Mother.
posted by orthogonality at 2:14 AM on March 25, 2005

Takahe birds in New Zealand (actually, tons of stuff in New Zealand), the Aardvark (look it up under Earth Pig for the folk tales), the poisonous Upas tree (on Java, I think) which was made famous by Erasmus Darwin in Loves of the Plants, and the Coco-de-mer (sea coconut) of the Seychelles are all examples of such plants/animals. Willy Ley's various books are great compendiums of "cryptozoology" (not a word I'm very fond of, I'd go with forensic zoology).
posted by j.edwards at 2:32 AM on March 25, 2005

I think I read somwhere that there is/might be evidence of the Great Flood (Noah's flood) actually having taken place. Something about the Mediterranean crashing through and connecting to the Black sea or something. The Ryan-Pittman Theory from Wikipedia.
posted by ruwan at 2:44 AM on March 25, 2005

Viking settlements in North America are an example - they were thought to be figments of the 12th century Icelandic imagination, with the only "evidence" in the sagas, until one was found and excavated.
posted by booklemur at 2:46 AM on March 25, 2005

The Duckbill Platypus?
posted by the cuban at 3:10 AM on March 25, 2005

I remember hearing that 'mermaid' sightings were actually manatees.
posted by cmyk at 4:25 AM on March 25, 2005

Jesus? Or am I mis-remembering? I thought there was now some kind of consensus that a person existed who was the basis for the central character in the new testament (obviously without all the miracles and stuff, but some kind of religious guru).
posted by andrew cooke at 5:19 AM on March 25, 2005

Andrew_cooke, the problem would be that the narratives and legends came after Jesus, not beforehand, no?
posted by AlexReynolds at 5:38 AM on March 25, 2005

Response by poster: AlexReynolds writes "Andrew_cooke, the problem would be that the narratives and legends came after Jesus, not beforehand, no?"

No, it's cool. If something really existed (and that's my criterion), then naturally the stories about it will come after it. The "problem" with andrew cooke's suggestion is that Jesus wasn't popularly considered "merely" mythological, at least by most people who talked about him.
posted by orthogonality at 5:55 AM on March 25, 2005

i thought about your (orthogonality's) objection before posting. what you say might be true in the usa, and in europe historically, but it's certainly not always the case. the majority of my generation in the uk would, i think, assume jesus was a myth. or maybe i'm just assuming everyone is like me - i have no data. do you think mohammed or the buddah or confuscious really existed? what about vishnu and shiva?

didn't mean to (and don't want to) drag this into a christian flame war, just trying to show that it's reasonable for at least me to claim so (i honestly assumed it was a myth).
posted by andrew cooke at 6:09 AM on March 25, 2005

What about King Midas? Myths were wrapped around him but it looks like his tomb's been found.
posted by substrate at 6:32 AM on March 25, 2005

Vishnu and Shiva didn't exist. The region where most of the Mahabharata & Ramayan occured exists (meaning, there are places with the same names today). A few years ago, there was some international ceremony or prize where the Mahabharata was honored (and treated as fiction). At the time, of all people, the Hindu nationalists (BJP) were in charge of the Indian central govt. Inevitably, some group complained about the 'fiction' classification. I was surprised when the govt. didn't take that up. Not even a protest.
posted by Gyan at 6:44 AM on March 25, 2005

King Arthur, possibly.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 6:49 AM on March 25, 2005

While Vishnu and Shiva are definitely myths, I read something recently that claimed that Krishna might have been real.

Weren't dinosaur fossils (in China, at least) believed to be dragon bones?
posted by Eamon at 7:03 AM on March 25, 2005

Mohammed almost definitely existed. I think evidence for Buddha's existence is, if I remember correctly, still a bit anecdotal, but much stronger than Jesus's. I can't remember about Confucius, but I think the scholarly consensus is no.

The big difference for me is that the geneologies (before and after) of Mohammed and the Buddha are documented much more extensively than that of Jesus. The whole "celibate only child" thing kind of screwed the pooch that way.
posted by mkultra at 7:13 AM on March 25, 2005

Oh, and to answer the question- technically, "life on other planets" falls in this realm now.
posted by mkultra at 7:14 AM on March 25, 2005

Not exactly what you're looking for, but black swans were once used as a textbook example of "something that is a contradiction in terms."

Then white people reached Australia, and said "whoops!"

Hypertrichosis may have sparked (or helped sustain) lycanthropy legends.
posted by adamrice at 7:16 AM on March 25, 2005

it does? what planet?
on second thought - oh, what, like apollo? (hmm - is the moon a planet?)
posted by andrew cooke at 7:16 AM on March 25, 2005

apologies for my awful spelling of a couple of famous figures from other people's religions up there. no offence intended.
posted by andrew cooke at 7:19 AM on March 25, 2005

andrew cooke writes, "it does? what planet?"


Mars. We found some frozen bacteria there, or am I misremembering that? And honestly, if there's not definitive proof yet, I think we're safely in the "it's only a matter of time" zone there- signs increasingly point to some form of life having been there.
posted by mkultra at 7:37 AM on March 25, 2005

Folk tales on the island of Flores (in Indonesia) told of a race of little people. And recently, they've found fossil evidence of a race of 3-foot high people.
posted by profwhat at 7:43 AM on March 25, 2005

The Roman historian Tacitus and the Jewish historian Josephus both wrote contemporary accounts` of "Christus".

As for Atlantis, some people think the legend really refers to the island of Santorini.
posted by fingers_of_fire at 7:45 AM on March 25, 2005

Cyclops in mythology have been found, though it turns out the cyclopses were the skulls of elephants. The snout hole was mistaken for a single eye.
posted by substrate at 7:51 AM on March 25, 2005

ah. i think the mars result is still not certain (that page is the main nasa mars/life link, updated recently, and would be a lot more enthusiastic if there were confidence in that result - sorry!).
thanks for all the info on various religious figures.
posted by andrew cooke at 8:06 AM on March 25, 2005

I've read that Columbus wrote about sighting some mermaids, noting that "they are not as attractive as they're made out to be." Using his physical description and notes on his current location, it was postulated that he was seeing manatees, creatures roughly human-sized (as opposed to a minnow or a whale) with one big flipping tail in back.
posted by scarabic at 8:36 AM on March 25, 2005

The existence of a monarchy in Israel with King David as its ancestral head was widely considered to be legendary until the discovery in 1993 of the Tel Dan Inscription.
posted by felix betachat at 9:48 AM on March 25, 2005

Angkor Wat.
How about animals that Marco Polo described (i.e. snow tigers, aardvarks, etc.) that were at first met with skepticism.
Or Asian descriptions of animals that Western science believed were myth (i.e. Panda bears).
Other than Troy, I recall seeing a Discovery Channel show on another Greek (or possibly Roman) -era city, described in classical text, that was razed and the earth salted and was (fairly) recently discovered in the Casablanca/Tunisia area; though the city name escapes me, I seem to remember the name was long ago co-opted into English as a synonym for destruction.
posted by Dante5Inferno at 9:56 AM on March 25, 2005

Argh. I think maybe the latter city of which I was remembering was Carthage. Sorry.
posted by Dante5Inferno at 10:14 AM on March 25, 2005

didn't mean to (and don't want to) drag this into a christian flame war, just trying to show that it's reasonable for at least me to claim so (i honestly assumed it was a myth).

There are mentions of Jesus in plenty of historical records. Knowledge of his historical existence has been continuous (though certainly some actions ascribed to him are not confirmed!) so it doesn't seem to qualify for the category of "once thought [by the cognoscenti] to be legendary, now known to be real". It's interesting as a kind of reverse case, though: "Known to be real, but increasingly (?) assumed by the rank and file to be a myth."
posted by redfoxtail at 10:52 AM on March 25, 2005

Though I can't find any information on it, I swear I heard somewhere that the orangutan was thought to be a local myth by the Dutch and whatever other Europeans were in Indonesia.

This is an interesting question.
posted by borkingchikapa at 11:00 AM on March 25, 2005

The Oracle at Delphi and her vapors. Told of by Plutarch, dismissed by 20th century archaeologists, proven by de Boer.
posted by jbrjake at 11:03 AM on March 25, 2005

The lost (and now found) Arabian city of Ubar, aka "the Atlantis of the sands."
posted by jbrjake at 11:11 AM on March 25, 2005

The pre-Incan Peruvian society of the Moche:

Vessels in the form of stirrup-spouted bottles with molded figures and intricate fine-line painting show warrior-priests bedecked in imposing ornate garb orchestrating ritual warfare; slitting captives' throats, drinking their blood, and hanging their defleshed bones from ropes; and participating in acts of sodomy and fellatio, all in a context of structured ceremony. In the absence of archaeological evidence, most scholars found many of the scenes too horrific to take literally, often suggesting they were simply artistic hyperbole, imagery the priestly class used to underscore its coercive power.

Then came Steven Bourget:

Under the direction of Santiago Uceda of the University of Trujillo, Steve Bourget of the University of Texas at Austin and his colleague John Verano of Tulane University have discovered at the Pyramids at Moche new evidence proving that the shocking scenes depicted in Moche art are faithful representations of actual behavior, if not records of specific events.

For example, earlier investigators assumed bizarre masks/earrings/costumes they'd seen in illustrations were fanciful portrayals of deities; Bourget actually found the accoutrements buried with mummies.
posted by jbrjake at 11:28 AM on March 25, 2005

Also, the giant squid and/or colossal octopus as Kraken. Love them octopi.
And protoceratops fossils as grffins.
The Hero Ajax as mammoth.
posted by Dante5Inferno at 11:30 AM on March 25, 2005

List of myths about the Aurora Borealis
posted by sharksandwich at 3:32 PM on March 25, 2005

Herodotus wrote about giant Persian ants who dug up gold with their burrows. Everyone assumed he was full of shit, as Herodotus so often was. He had a nasty habit of reporting foreign folk tales as if they were true.

But apparently there really are gold-digging marmots in Persia — and the ancient Persian word for marmot meant "mountain ant." Not quite a perfect vindication of the old story, but pretty close.
posted by nebulawindphone at 4:11 PM on March 25, 2005

It is a great question, but I think we need to leave Judeo-Christian myth out of it, otherwise the noise level will be deafening (sorry I am just too petty to leave it at that... the Pagan Christ.)
posted by Chuckles at 10:49 PM on March 25, 2005

The Northwest Passage was eventually deemed a futile pursuit, but global warming may make it a reality.

El Dorado was similarly sought by many explorers, then dismissed as a myth, but there appears to have been a pretty concrete origin of the myth.

There's a lot of science that once fell under the rubric of "myth" (or perhaps "nonsense") to a lot of people (some may still), and that is now considered essentially proven -- such as continental drift.
posted by dhartung at 12:10 AM on March 26, 2005

Hokioi, or Haast's Eagle. As memorialised in stories of bloody great big birds. In this neck of the woods, anyway.

Some people think taniwha, river-dwelling monsters, are folk-memories of crocodiles from the early stages of the great Polynesian migration out through South East Asia.

Does Ancient Greek atomic theory count? Not perhaps mythic but definitely metaphysical.

From the viewpoint of Maori and many other non-European peoples, "white" or pale-skinned people were supernatural (patupaiarehe), or spirits from the underworld, or what have you. And bad news, come to the that. Whether that proved to be true is left as an exercise for the reader.

Masada was known only from the writings of Josephus up until 1838. Again, not exactly legend, but Josephus isn't exactly a reliable historian either.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:48 AM on March 26, 2005

Porphyria has been invoked to explain legends of vampirism. There are different forms of porphyria, accounted for by different defects in an enzymatic pathway that's used to build "heme" - the non-protein part of hemoglobin which carries oxygen inside your red blood cells.

Among the interesting things that occur in some porphyrias:

- Extreme photosensitivity, making it likely that afflicteds will learn to avoid the sun.

- Teeth that glow red with ultraviolet light due to a buildup of an intermediate substrate in the pathway. This is noticeable by moonlight.

- Painful, acute crises with abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting - relieved (in certain of the porphyrias) by ingestion of fresh blood.

- Episodic hallucinations and psychosis.

You can see how that'd add up to a sort of proto-vampire, can't you?

I've often thought that Alzheimer disease, Parkinson disease, and the adult onset dementias like Huntington and so on could go a long way towards explaining stories of zombies, demonic possession, and so on.

I don't know if this is what the original poster intended but I like to think about it.
posted by ikkyu2 at 7:05 AM on March 26, 2005 [1 favorite]

Well, the one I'm working on right now for school is this: philosophers, at least the more interesting and important ones (in my book), contended for centuries that heavenly bodies did not admit of generation or corruption, which is to say that they were eternal. This was part of their doctrine thatt the world existed eternally rather than being created. But a lot of recent scientific evidence pretty strongly points to the fact that certain religious authorities were correct, and that heavenly bodies-- the sun, the stars, the moon, et cetera-- come together and fall apart. This points to the notion that the world had a beginning in time, and that it was therefore created.

A second one that's very interesting to me could be found in this: for centuries, people have thought that the world was fundamentally comprehensible to the human mind, and that simple observation could lead to a knowledge of all causes and effects. But quantum physics seems to show that observational data sometimes simply will not make sense. I think that proves that the scientific project is fundamentally limited.

I don't know if I'm right on that, though.
posted by koeselitz at 1:47 PM on April 3, 2005