I'm only 23, and I still remember when some of the first film footage was taken of a Giant Squid, and people we deriding it as fake, and "there's no such thing as giant squids". Makes you really think about what else is down there.
Yup, I remember that too & telling numerous people, "You know we've had washed up corpses for many years now right? It was only a matter of time before someone found a live one."
It should also demonstrate the arrogance to involved in declaring that one knows all there is to know… All science will continue to develop; and often results in surprising discoveries.
On cyclops. There’s also a birth defect called cyclopia (don’t recommend looking it up) where the brain and body fail to divide into left and right sides which causes the baby to have one eye on the center of the face. It’s rare but probably could be part of the myth too
OMFG!! I looked it up. 😭😭 Mice get it too BTW. Or some scientists are sick puppies is probably the explanation with mice being tested on so often for human conditions.
This is by far one of the best (if not the best) channels out there. Everything from content to delivery including Joe’s high likability sets it apart…
For the dragon, their is also the possibilities of the Australian's mega fauna where a gigantic version of the Komodo Dragon lived and was killed until extinction. It was so dangerous by day, the natives had to wait until night to put the forest in fire around it, hoping to burn it alive (and it didn't worked so much). Facing it by day was suicide.
I think most monster stories make sense if you've ever hung out around guys that like to fish. "You should have seen it! It was 13 feet long! Had to weigh 200 pounds or more!" Now apply that logic to the dude that saw an alligator or something and said it was a dragon...
I mean, they make sense if you acknowledge the knowledge gap between us and them (the people of then). If you've had even marginal contact with limited knowledge groups, people living in remote areas, these kinds of things become apparent. Lack of knowledge = a rampant mind, able to confabulate and throw a "logical" (by their standards) answer. It's not about a specific category of people, it's about the gap of knowledge between us and them. Us, knowing what we see because we've seen it before, them, not knowing what they see because there's no body of knowledge to fill the existing thing they saw. So an out of time swan turns to Nessie, an escaped circus chimp turns to Sasquatch, a large squid turns to the kraken, an albatross turns to a ... well, whatever they might come up with. Oh and the reason there's plenty of them today as well, is because education is not as common as you'd think. You're biased to your group, your experience. Most of the people who come up with these things ... suffice it to say they need to be reminded that in rain, they should close their mouth.
There are actually a disturbing number of freshwater fish that grow large enough to occasionally kill and/or eat humans that are still alive. They don't even need to be lying about the size, just a few details on how it looks. Just because they aren't magic doesn't mean that the word monster is inapplicable.
Deep Sea Oarfish has most of the characteristics of Eastern Dragons. They occasional come to the surface when dying. I really think they were some of the inspiration for those myths.
Dude, your profile pic makes me suspect you have African ancestry. African people knew about gorillas since forever. Quit your "first person" bull shit.
So glad you mentioned the elephant skull / cyclops thing. The first time I heard about that I was completely convinced that's where the cyclops myth comes from, and I've been excitedly telling people about it for years lol
@@chinabluewho there have been over a thousand sightings, prints, and recordings of screams, et c. over the past 200 years. And NO gorilla runs 30 mph, or even half that, through the forest. This "cryptid" is a real animal.
@@davidflitcroft7101 and all of those have been debunked. Prints were made with casts, fur is either goat or pallas cat. Screams are literally just people screaming their lungs out.
I recently read "The Immortality Key" by Brian Muraresku, which was fascinating and makes total sense to me. The idea that ancient people frequently ingested hallucinogens (intentionally or unintentionally) probably contributed to quite a few myths.
@@josemaldonado3385The Bible might have been sober delusions. There is truth in all religions, but not everything they offer is truth. - a random friendly polytheist
Soma/Haoma has epinephrine as an active ingredient. It's quite important to the steppe horselords. Communing with sky father might have just been tweaking.
There's some speculation that unicorns were based on this one type of ancient woolly rhino. It's tusk was quite gigantic. You should do a part 2. There a few more mythical creatures I feel could have been covered.
1:55 _"A few skeletons and an endless imagination can go a long way."_ If you ever find yourself saying these words in court, something has gone wrong.
@@Think_Inc because you are clearly a psychopath who thinks that having a few skeletons in the closet is a literal meaning of the phrase 😂🤣 Please don't murder me.
You should do an episode on Australian megafauna. Very few people know about it these days but amongst other things we had a 25 foot long goanna that’s would’ve regarded Komodo dragons as an appetiser, a marsupial lion, hippo sized wombats, giant killer emus, and a land crocodile that would’ve regarded a 25 foot long goanna as an appetiser! Many of these animals were alive only a few thousand years ago but most died off after the end of the last ice age. Which meant that Indigenous Australians lived with them for about 40 thousand years or so. The whole subject fascinates me and I’d love to see your take on it Joe…
Wrong on some of the sizes but pretty accurate, except for the crocodile you described, of which there is no record of any crocodile larger than the saltwater crocodile ever living in Australia. The largest crocodiles ever found are from Africa. Also, the Indigenous Australians only lived with some of the species, not all of them. You also forgot the gigantic eagle, which is arguably the scariest of them all.
@@It-b-Blair Nessy is real, I'm from Scotland trust me it's real, as for big foot, had you never seen an ape, you would be astonished yet if some other group of ape was suggested it's as if it's Aliens or Unicorns. If an animal exists, you will have exceptions when it comes to size, this is true from human to larvae.
@@Dylan_Sterling for Nessy? I've got selfies with Nessy and she has a whole family there, there is one named kilo and another named peach, we don't like people knowing as they would torment her and she just lost her husband.
Minor point, we've actually mapped about 20% of the ocean which is still small but hardly the insignificant number of 5% that it used to be. Great video.
both numbers are extremely false, we've mapped much closer to 95%, humans have only been in about 10-30% of the ocean because the ocean is overwhelmingly empty
The 'every culture has dragons' thing always gets to me, because the definition of 'dragon' is pretty arbitrary. We tend to apply it to anything large and reptilian - or even not reptilian; some Asian dragons are more based on fish and even have mammal features. They may or may not be winged; they may or may not have serpentine bodies; they may or not breathe fire or be venomous. In short, yeah, everyone has dragon stories if you're just going to lump all of these things into the 'dragon' category. Anyway, dinosaur bones almost certainly inspired dragons (especially in China, have you SEEN the sauropod skeletons coming out of China?), as did living crocodilians and monitor lizards. Though the Nile monitor probably had a wider reach in the western world than the Komodo dragon, which wasn't even known outside of Indonesia until relatively recently. The Nile monitor isn't AS large, but it's still big enough to scare the pants off of someone not used to reptiles of such size... and it has a forked tongue that flickers out of its mouth like flames. As for crocodiles, well, no need to explain THAT association. The Biblical Leviathan is almost certainly based on a crocodile, right down to its armored hide. Not buying the Protoceratops-gryphon explanation, though, cool as it is. Protoceratopsids are only known from China and Mongolia. Also, the Greeks especially had a whole thing for hybrid animals, or chimaeras (including the chimaera itself), so the gryphon was probably just another example of that, and doesn't need further explanation. Funny enough, some of these hybrids DID turn out to be based on real animals. The camelopard, for instance, was a camel-leopard that was almost certainly based on descriptions of the giraffe.
The leviathan probably was a crocodile, although not sure what, "spits fire from its mouth" which the Bible does say, is supposed to be a metaphor for?
When megafauna was roaming ancient Australia, the relative of the Komodo Dragon, Megalania, made the current version look like a lightweight and they were known to exist at an overlap with Aborigines for quite a time. This absolutely could be a source of real encounters at a truly ancient age at possibly 50+ thousand years ago.
Unfortunately it only works if you mispronounce 'Kraken' (it's an 'ah', not an 'a'). Reminds me of the great Beach Boys line "went to the dance, looking for romance" - in (southern) British English this sounds very wrong - went to the darnce, looking for romarnce...
@@SilverionX In Swedish everything sounds different! We have a similar problem, as my wife is Hungarian and they pronounce 'a' more like the 'au' sound in 'aught' - so, for instance, we call Aldi 'Auldi', whereas everyone else else in the UK rhymes it with 'pal' . Hungarian actually has no English 'a' sound (as in 'pal') at all (their other 'a' sound, 'á' is more like 'ah'. They use 'e' where they have to - so 'sandwich' for instance is pronounced 'sendvich' (spelt szendvisc!). Languages, eh??
Speaking for many marine biologists I've heard complain about this, I have to point out that we've explored 20 % of the oceans and the 80 % left is mostly very deep almost empty places
Well when you go into the dark black ocean at night high as fuck on psychedelics after eating mushrooms before setting sail yoir going to see some funky shit
I wanna see a segment in a video about how flies repair themselves and how the saw blades on grasshopper legs can kill spiders and other things like this, im sure you can elaborate
That quote originally was a painting caption from a art piece made in 1556 called "Big Fish Eat Little Fish", but the very first occurrence of "There is always a bigger fish" actually came from a book called "The Fishing Gazette" made in 1910.
Do a story about the abominable snowman or yeti. National Geographic did a study to see if the sasquatch is a real animal. They gathered DNA from samples people said were from a squatch. Most were bears or dogs, but the Yeti samples matched an extinct polar bear from the ice age. Polar bears still live in the Himalayas and are the yeti.
5:50 Also in Australia there was Megalania, a giant relative of modern Komodo dragons that went extinct about 40 000 years ago and it was HUGE (average length was probably around 7 meters (23 ft), with some exceptionally large individuals being 8 or 9 meters long (26-30 ft)).
Now what I want to know is whether the Partridge was the new species or was the Pear tree the new species or both. Please don't explain the joke again to me, I am just going along with it.
Joe in the song Sheb sings “Mr. Purple people eater what’s your line? He said “eating purple people and it sure is fine’” so don’t worry, you’re safe but I’m not so sure about the Fugates.
16:05 ngl, first thing that came to mind when I heard this description is the sloth bear. Although they're a mainland India thing (not found in the Andaman islands afaik), it could still explain how ancient greeks "knew" about them (as it would be more likely for them to be in contact with northern regions rather than the Indian Ocean).
Nah you'd be fine as a duck on the ISS. Noone wants poorly cooked soggy duck and seeing as the best they can do is the warm water the they use for freeze dried food thats the best they could do. More likely you'd just want to be a female duck so they'd keep you around for eggs they could make soft "boiled".
@@agustinvenegas5238 But they aren't fantasy dinosaurs, they are just fictional dinosaurs in a fantasy setting. Jurassic Park is dinosaur fiction, for example.
"and 1 partridge in a pear tree" - that unexpected bit so early into the video made me spit out my soda laughing. and I was not even drinking anything...
I think it's become fairly certain in recent years that many tales of sea serpents were inspired by oarfish, very large very long deep dwelling fish that very rarely come up to the surface. Aside from the fact that they're not actually snakes they basically are sea serpents just based on size alone.
I have always thought that dinosaur bones inspired the myths of dragons. Dinosaurs were world wide, but often different in different areas of the world. Dragons are in many cultures around the world, but also different depending on the area of the world where the myth developed. The first time I saw pterosaur bones hanging in a museum, I saw a European dragon.
When I was in Europe, I saw several Griffon vultures and thought that they were the inspiration for the griffin myth. They are HUGE, up to 9 foot wingspan, and almost 4 feet tall when standing. Huge beaks that are vaguely Eagle looking, huge claws, and a feathery ruff around their neck, and a golden brown color. Someone could have easily described a Griffon vulture as a “lion-eagle” and someone hearing that imagined something completely different.
Funnily enough, of nearly all mythological creatures, griffins tend to be the ones that act more like… animals. In older tales, they did not talk, did not approach humans. They were just… wild animals.
Very minor correction: When discussing the gorilla, you said that “ the first reported gorilla sighting from outside of Africa…” You go on to say it was by a Carthaginian. Carthage was in Africa.
@@maximusmidnight2591 Well, I guess every people come from somewhere else. And agreed, the Carthaginians weren't indigenous to Africa, having come from Phoenicia. But they had been been in Africa since the 900s BC. So when the gorilla sighting was made by one of them, they were there for about 400 years at that point. I think it might be fair to say they were living in Africa by then- just as we live in America. I think maybe he means sub-Saharan Africa. At any rate, it is such a minor point. Joe is one of my favorite You Tubers - smart, entertaining, and just a good guy.
@@terryhasan Also, by 500 BC, they were a thoroughly mixed people, the main ancestry being Phoenician, followed by Greek, but with some ancestry from virtually every nation living along a connected trade route. Hannibal's elephants were imported from India, along with riders and the riders' families. While the Sahara was a greater barrier than oceans, we know that there was trade across it, as well as trade through Egypt. The Carthaginians were genetically South of Sahara Africans. And South Europeans, and Indians, and a lot more. Culturally, though, they were Mediterranean, which became Roman culture, which became Medieval European culture, and ended up as modern European culture. Their "Known World" was about the same as that of Romans and Greeks, and very different from that of Africans south of Sahara.
The best description probalby would've been "sub-saharan africa", as even today the cultures are different, with the north more mediterranean or arabic, something that has been for quite some time back into ancient times.
@@erikjarandson5458 NO Hannibal's elephants did not come from India, nor did their riders or their families. His elephants belong to a now extinct species of elephant called the African Forest Elephant
this is weird. I just received my how it works magazine and one article is about the origin of mythical creatures and now 1 week later I see this. also fun fact: Marco polo saw Rhinoceros and had no idea what they were so he mistook them for unicorns so he wrote. "Tis a passing ugly beast to look upon, and is not in the least like that which our stories tell of as being caught in the lap of a virgin; in fact, 'tis altogether different from what we fancied. There are also monkeys here in great numbers and of sundry kinds; and goshawks as black as crows"
Actually, it is quite possible that the mistake was not made by Marco Polo, but rather by European artists who drew unicorns with horse bodies and a narwhal tusk for a horn because they didn't know the proper way to draw them.
@@faroncobb6040 In any case, he said they don't look "in the least" like mythological unicorns, according to the quote above, indicating that the horse with a horn depiction already existed at the time.
@@jeffbenton6183 Norse traders from Greenland spent a few centuries living high on passing off narwhal tusks as horns of unicorn. They were worth more than their weight in gold. Every king and nobleman with sneaky enemies (so, every king and nobleman, period) needed a drinking cup and a plate made of it, to neutralize any assassin's poison. In powdered form, it could cure absolutely everything. The Norse Greenlanders were quite adamant about all of that, especially the price. Anyway, they were probably responsible for the idea of unicorns having long, slender, twisted horns.
Wink wink, well of course Kraken exists and you know all about its apperance. Btw its me, your "friend" at the mental hospital. Will you come iwth me please, you forgot to take your pills during breakfast today. We can do this hush-hush so you can continue your day and nobody will know.
Let's say you are a fisherman on Europe before 700 AD, most ships are under 100 foot long and fishing boats are usually under 20 feet. You find a Giant Sea Squid washed up on the beach that's 12 or 13 meters long and you've never seen anything like it before. Having never seen it alive you can only imagine what it could do to a fishing dory and it's one or two man crew. You tell everyone, including the local priest who writes up a report to send to the local bishop, who sends a report to the Archbishop, who sends a report to the Papacy. By the time the story gets there the "Kraken" can stop a merchant ship in the middle of the ocean and pluck sailors from the deck before dragging it prize to the bottom. Helps explain all those missing merchant ships the Vikings were capturing ...
@@johndanzer8181 Vikings were more like late 700s - 1000s, not "before 700". Also, the priests were well aware of their existence as Vikings frequently raided monasteries.
The Nile crocodile is not the world's largest crocodile species. The saltwater crocodile of Australia (known as "Salties") and the East Indies (known there as the Indo-Pacific or Estuarine crocodile) is not only the largest crocodile species, but it is also the world's largest reptile as well.
@@Faisaldegrt I learned about the Arctic ocean and was told the Antarctic Ocean wasn't an official name. At least that's what I learned in European school so maybe Americans learned Southern Ocean? As most Americans are more comfortable with cardinal directions than Europeans
@@sirius_b_13 I'm an American and I can say that we didn't from my experience. I vividly remember nearly 20 years ago coming home from elementary school and telling my father that the Antarctic ocean was now called the southern ocean and his maps were wrong. He jokingly called it a plot by the liberals.
Seabiscuit? That race horse has been around since the 1940's. He was a champion thoroughbred who was the top money-winning racehorse - didn't these scientists know that?
@@TAROTAI scientists didn't give it the name sea biscuit. Both the animal and the horse are named after the food. Sea biscuits are sailors' rations also called hardtack. The animal was probably named first since nowadays everyone thinks of seabiscuit as a horse and not a food that a sea creature may resemble.
I always love your style of humor, but I literally cracked up and applauded at the Blue Fugates of Kentucky reference (before remembering that my partner's asleep in the next room and feeling mildly embarrassed). I may be a geek. I may also have spent too much time working with colloidal silver electrophoresis stains, which can cause similar discoloration.
So funny story about a Komodo dragon. I attend a university in America where our mascot is a dragon (uab) and one day our athletic director thought a Komodo dragon petting zoo at the next football tailgate would be a great idea. He called the Birmingham zoo, just to find out they’re actually venomous and aggressive. So he began to wonder what to do, because he really like the idea. Turns out there was some bronze statue or someone made a statue of a Komodo dragon and gave it to the university. so at the tailgates there was a tent set up with velvet ropes around guarding a bronze statue of a Komodo dragon that you could pet. After the season ended, UAB donated the statue to the zoo and now it’s outside the Komodo dragon exhibit where the live dragon has stare downs with the statue.
I've always found the claim that every culture has stories of dragons to be a weak one. "Dragon" is, of course, and English word so when we look at "dragons" from other cultures we are applying the word to something which has its own name in that culture and when you start to look at a lot of these creatures you come to realize that our definition of what counts as a "dragon" is so broad you could drive a truck through it. It includes creatures as diverse as the European dragons which were snake/lizard/bird hybrids to the Chinese Long which is sort of a lizard/snake/fish thing with a lion's face and deer antlers. If your definition of "dragon" is "mythical creature with scales" then it's not impressive that just about every culture has one.
"mythical creature with scales" isn't quite there either seeing as how Quetzalquoatl is often called a dragon and he has feathers, i like to think of it as "these things are vaguely scimilar and i myself think that's pretty neat"
“Dragon” is an English word but you can check if it has the same root in other languages through etymology ect - the English word for dragon derives from both the ancient Greek word drakon and the ancient Latin word “draco”. I’m not sure if people have been able to trace the origin of all of the written words for “dragon” in Eurasia right back to the same root though. Certainly Europe. You can also tell that Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese and Japanese “dragons” all originate from the same word looking at the characters for dragon in these languages. Whether the Chinese dragon / European dragon also have the same origin word/character further back in time idk. But it wouldn’t surprise me if there was an initial origin for this.. the fact that large flying reptilian beasts have a such a high significance in both East Asian and European mythologies is definitely notable - if anything it says something about human psychology but it could be based on the misidentification of fossils ect.
The kraken was most likely a gigantic octopus type. Back in those old days there was probably still some ancient living animals that were absolutely massive. Like, beyond what you could imagine.
Excellent video! Just one thing that’s bothering me, aren’t saltwater crocodiles the largest crocodile species? Or did he just mean at the time in that part of the world the biggest they’d seen were Niles? I know this is pedantic asf but I’m just curious.
Imagine being a little drunk and getting caught out in the rain in ancient Crete, staggering into a cave and finding a bunch of dwarf elephant skulls and then trying to sleep. 😯
Have you seen early depictions of Saint George fighting the dragon? It totally looks like a Komodo Dragon, with a forked tongue and all. As time went on artists kept adding forks to the tongue, which started looking a lot like fire.
Maybe he just had a long face. My be was just "misformed" and devoted his life to religion after being shunned for his looks. Thinking of modern freak shows it iisn't even uncommon today
Hey, if you're going to evoke Sturgeon's Law, you should attribute it! :) So, the word, "manticore" is based on the ancient Persian word, "merthykhuwar," which directly translates into, "man-eater." It describes a beast with the face of a man, the body of a great cat with scales, wings, and a long tail with a barbed spike on the end. it has three rows of teeth, and it eats people. The Persians reported that it lived in the jungles of India, and that's the key to unlocking the myth. The fur around the face of a tiger makes it appear round, instead of triangular, like most cats. An ancient Hindu word for "scales" is very similar to a Hindu word for "stripes." Tigers supposedly have a long bone at the end of their tails, although it's usually covered by skin and fur, but anybody who hunted one (successfully) might know that. Many of a tiger's teeth have three points -- a central one, and two lesser spikes on either side. This helps them tear the flesh, which they gobble down in chunks, without grinding it down much. Finally, of course, tigers are ambush hunters. They kill with a long pounce -- up to 25 feet. And, yes, they eat people -- especially older tigers that have started to lose their teeth. So, yeah. The word, "manticore" comes from a Persian word for the garbled description of a tiger they learned from travelers to ancient India. That mythical creature earns a heavily soiled pair of tighty-whiteys. :)
This was such a good video!! Would love to see a part 2 with more cryptid/monsters? Like mothman being an (enormous) barn owl, unicorns being rhinos because of poor translation, and my personal favorite, people misidentifying whale penises as sea monsters. (seriously, look it up)
You know, ancient people in Australia actually have to deal with actual Dragon-Like animal such as Megalania, a giant monitor lizard, and Quinkana, a terrestrial Crocodyliform. They all went extinct at the end of Pleistocene, but for a brief Windows of time, native Australian actually co-exist with them.
I'd seem to recall hearing/reading that Unicorns were thought to have originated because of descriptions sent to Greece of Rhino's. As always thank you so very much for the video.
@@okaydetar821 Eh, that's why I said "almost" for the middle syllable. Some of it comes down to accent (some people pronounce the words Mary, marry, & merry identically). Most English speakers would also pronounce the "ch" in chimera as a hard k whereas some would pronounce it as a guttural as in "Loch". The point is, its not anything like what was said in the video.
I an 44 years old and I grew up in a town on the south coast of Western Australia called Esperance, we were taught in primary school the ocean on our beaches was the Southern Ocean, so this being a recent official name is news to me.
You should possibly cover the story about the stories about the creature in Lake Baikal of Russia, also the isolated body of water in Antarctica that supposedly had a creature that freaked out the Russian marine biologists. Either way those bodies of water are amazing, even without a unknown creature.
Not a spectacular example, but in ancient and medieval times the Black Swan was used as an example of something that didn't exist. Right up to 1697 when they were found to actually exist in Australia.
I'd like to know more about the "Submarine" sighted in the oceans near Cape Town. It's described as a shark but during a freak accident with a tour boat accident, a horrific shark eating frenzy occurred but the 10s of sharks scattered. I think the species might be associated to the Mexican "demon shark". It's larger than a great white and can breath while stationery, which is impossible for a regular species of shark.
The biggest type of fish, the whale shark, lives in the waters of South Africa (among other places). They dwarf great whites (estimates ranging from 14 to 21.9 meters (46 to 72 ft) in length). But they generally feed on plankton and small fish and are a docile species
I mean, it's still right up there near the top. Out of all the species that have ever walked the earth, far less than one percent were bigger than Deinotherium.
5:37 as good as an explanation that would be, there just simply aren't any traces of dragon folklore from indigenous Australian cultures (as far as we know) aside from large snake creatures- i think we can guess where that inspo came from.
Just received my Answers with Joe t-shirt, one with your logo, and I have been proudly wearing it all around Uptown here in Dallas! Love your channel Joe!
I typically enjoy your videos but you have won a full blown fan with that “passions” reference 😂 oh I used to get in so much trouble when my mom would catch teenage me watching passions in the summer or when school was out 💀
Thx for these videos…you make me ponder new information, your humor makes me smile and you are a breath of fresh air on TH-cam. Keep doing what you’re doing!
I'm only 23, and I still remember when some of the first film footage was taken of a Giant Squid, and people we deriding it as fake, and "there's no such thing as giant squids". Makes you really think about what else is down there.
You are right
There are huge creatures down there 100%
Yup, I remember that too & telling numerous people, "You know we've had washed up corpses for many years now right? It was only a matter of time before someone found a live one."
It should also demonstrate the arrogance to involved in declaring that one knows all there is to know…
All science will continue to develop; and often results in surprising discoveries.
@@mannycorona3669 I won’t be satisfied until I see Godzilla
On cyclops. There’s also a birth defect called cyclopia (don’t recommend looking it up) where the brain and body fail to divide into left and right sides which causes the baby to have one eye on the center of the face. It’s rare but probably could be part of the myth too
You don't recommend looking it up? You now know what I must do don't you!! 🤣🤣
OMFG!! I looked it up. 😭😭
Mice get it too BTW. Or some scientists are sick puppies is probably the explanation with mice being tested on so often for human conditions.
Goddamn, this shit is real! I dont think its such a stretch(get it?) for someone to survive with less severe forms of it.
@@greenanubis I didn't look that far into it, I take it all those poor kids died then?
I've seen pickled cyclops babies in med school. Our anatomy lab had formaldehyde - filled jars with all sorts of oddities. "Gross" anatomy indeed.
I'm furious the underpants scale wasn't about how scary the monsters were
Yeah, scary like the underpants at the bottom of the scale. I tried to avoid looking at it...
I was really hoping the sponsor of the episode was the underpants company. It would have been a perfect fit... :]
@@jommeissner Same! Those were some pretty gnarly undies.
I'm just surprised he didn't have Mack Weldon as the sponsor for this episode.
I wouldn't expect him to waistband width talking about it.
This is by far one of the best (if not the best) channels out there. Everything from content to delivery including Joe’s high likability sets it apart…
For the dragon, their is also the possibilities of the Australian's mega fauna where a gigantic version of the Komodo Dragon lived and was killed until extinction. It was so dangerous by day, the natives had to wait until night to put the forest in fire around it, hoping to burn it alive (and it didn't worked so much). Facing it by day was suicide.
I think most monster stories make sense if you've ever hung out around guys that like to fish. "You should have seen it! It was 13 feet long! Had to weigh 200 pounds or more!"
Now apply that logic to the dude that saw an alligator or something and said it was a dragon...
I mean, they make sense if you acknowledge the knowledge gap between us and them (the people of then). If you've had even marginal contact with limited knowledge groups, people living in remote areas, these kinds of things become apparent. Lack of knowledge = a rampant mind, able to confabulate and throw a "logical" (by their standards) answer.
It's not about a specific category of people, it's about the gap of knowledge between us and them. Us, knowing what we see because we've seen it before, them, not knowing what they see because there's no body of knowledge to fill the existing thing they saw.
So an out of time swan turns to Nessie, an escaped circus chimp turns to Sasquatch, a large squid turns to the kraken, an albatross turns to a ... well, whatever they might come up with.
Oh and the reason there's plenty of them today as well, is because education is not as common as you'd think. You're biased to your group, your experience. Most of the people who come up with these things ... suffice it to say they need to be reminded that in rain, they should close their mouth.
There are actually a disturbing number of freshwater fish that grow large enough to occasionally kill and/or eat humans that are still alive. They don't even need to be lying about the size, just a few details on how it looks. Just because they aren't magic doesn't mean that the word monster is inapplicable.
Some whales are big as whales.
Deep Sea Oarfish has most of the characteristics of Eastern Dragons. They occasional come to the surface when dying. I really think they were some of the inspiration for those myths.
Why are we right that dinosaurs weren't dragons?
Birds have hollow bones and dont fossilize.
Imagine being the first person to see a gorilla, must’ve been scary as shit😂
Imagine what the gorilla must think!
Considering human pubic lice are more closely related to gorilla lice than human head lice, I’d doubt it.
@@joshuahadams no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no fuck whyyyyy
This explorer was first to write about them. He named them they name they have.
Dude, your profile pic makes me suspect you have African ancestry. African people knew about gorillas since forever. Quit your "first person" bull shit.
So glad you mentioned the elephant skull / cyclops thing. The first time I heard about that I was completely convinced that's where the cyclops myth comes from, and I've been excitedly telling people about it for years lol
I have often wondered about the Yeti/bigfoot legend just being an escaped Gorilla that some circus had and lost on a journey in the late 1890's
@@chinabluewho there have been over a thousand sightings, prints, and recordings of screams, et c. over the past 200 years. And NO gorilla runs 30 mph, or even half that, through the forest. This "cryptid" is a real animal.
@@davidflitcroft7101 Wow, just wow, you are living the dream man.
@@davidflitcroft7101 and all of those have been debunked. Prints were made with casts, fur is either goat or pallas cat. Screams are literally just people screaming their lungs out.
@@chinabluewho I doubt there were circuses with gorillas in the most mountainous regions of the himalayas where the Yeti myth came from.
I recently read "The Immortality Key" by Brian Muraresku, which was fascinating and makes total sense to me. The idea that ancient people frequently ingested hallucinogens (intentionally or unintentionally) probably contributed to quite a few myths.
The bible 🙌🙃
@@josemaldonado3385 no comments
The Eleusinian Mysteries come to mind.
@@josemaldonado3385The Bible might have been sober delusions. There is truth in all religions, but not everything they offer is truth.
- a random friendly polytheist
Soma/Haoma has epinephrine as an active ingredient. It's quite important to the steppe horselords. Communing with sky father might have just been tweaking.
There's some speculation that unicorns were based on this one type of ancient woolly rhino. It's tusk was quite gigantic. You should do a part 2. There a few more mythical creatures I feel could have been covered.
1:55 _"A few skeletons and an endless imagination can go a long way."_ If you ever find yourself saying these words in court, something has gone wrong.
🤣🤣
I don’t get it.
@@Think_Inc because you are clearly a psychopath who thinks that having a few skeletons in the closet is a literal meaning of the phrase 😂🤣
Please don't murder me.
Either I will be having a BONEr or she will get the BONEzone
Can't a necromancer just raise his family in peace?
You should do an episode on Australian megafauna. Very few people know about it these days but amongst other things we had a 25 foot long goanna that’s would’ve regarded Komodo dragons as an appetiser, a marsupial lion, hippo sized wombats, giant killer emus, and a land crocodile that would’ve regarded a 25 foot long goanna as an appetiser! Many of these animals were alive only a few thousand years ago but most died off after the end of the last ice age. Which meant that Indigenous Australians lived with them for about 40 thousand years or so. The whole subject fascinates me and I’d love to see your take on it Joe…
Good thing there aren't Giant Emus anymore. Oh wait... you still lost the war.
Wrong on some of the sizes but pretty accurate, except for the crocodile you described, of which there is no record of any crocodile larger than the saltwater crocodile ever living in Australia. The largest crocodiles ever found are from Africa. Also, the Indigenous Australians only lived with some of the species, not all of them. You also forgot the gigantic eagle, which is arguably the scariest of them all.
"We used to think giant squids were a myth, until we found whales with sucker marks on their sides."
-Some science dude I can't recall.
Collosal squids were never really disputed, they just hadn't actually caught one.
@@darrenhenderson6921 I remember when if you said you thought they existed people would ask if you believed in Bigfoot and Nessy too 🤷♂️
@@It-b-Blair Nessy is real, I'm from Scotland trust me it's real, as for big foot, had you never seen an ape, you would be astonished yet if some other group of ape was suggested it's as if it's Aliens or Unicorns. If an animal exists, you will have exceptions when it comes to size, this is true from human to larvae.
@@darrenhenderson6921 Yeah but where’s the hard evidence though?
@@Dylan_Sterling for Nessy? I've got selfies with Nessy and she has a whole family there, there is one named kilo and another named peach, we don't like people knowing as they would torment her and she just lost her husband.
Minor point, we've actually mapped about 20% of the ocean which is still small but hardly the insignificant number of 5% that it used to be. Great video.
Try 100
No it's 20, but 5 is the amount where humans have been
both numbers are extremely false, we've mapped much closer to 95%, humans have only been in about 10-30% of the ocean because the ocean is overwhelmingly empty
The 'every culture has dragons' thing always gets to me, because the definition of 'dragon' is pretty arbitrary. We tend to apply it to anything large and reptilian - or even not reptilian; some Asian dragons are more based on fish and even have mammal features. They may or may not be winged; they may or may not have serpentine bodies; they may or not breathe fire or be venomous. In short, yeah, everyone has dragon stories if you're just going to lump all of these things into the 'dragon' category.
Anyway, dinosaur bones almost certainly inspired dragons (especially in China, have you SEEN the sauropod skeletons coming out of China?), as did living crocodilians and monitor lizards. Though the Nile monitor probably had a wider reach in the western world than the Komodo dragon, which wasn't even known outside of Indonesia until relatively recently. The Nile monitor isn't AS large, but it's still big enough to scare the pants off of someone not used to reptiles of such size... and it has a forked tongue that flickers out of its mouth like flames. As for crocodiles, well, no need to explain THAT association. The Biblical Leviathan is almost certainly based on a crocodile, right down to its armored hide.
Not buying the Protoceratops-gryphon explanation, though, cool as it is. Protoceratopsids are only known from China and Mongolia. Also, the Greeks especially had a whole thing for hybrid animals, or chimaeras (including the chimaera itself), so the gryphon was probably just another example of that, and doesn't need further explanation. Funny enough, some of these hybrids DID turn out to be based on real animals. The camelopard, for instance, was a camel-leopard that was almost certainly based on descriptions of the giraffe.
The leviathan probably was a crocodile, although not sure what, "spits fire from its mouth" which the Bible does say, is supposed to be a metaphor for?
Your use of the archaic spellings is delightful! Do you know ancient Greek?
Joe's great
You’re great :)
Comment of the year
Agreed...Joe IS great!
Greatest man, I even had a dream about him once
@@noahmead4652 now if we can get a woo woo alarm clock he can wake you up too!
When megafauna was roaming ancient Australia, the relative of the Komodo Dragon, Megalania, made the current version look like a lightweight and they were known to exist at an overlap with Aborigines for quite a time. This absolutely could be a source of real encounters at a truly ancient age at possibly 50+ thousand years ago.
Crazy as shit, imagine fighting off a literal dragon with some sticks and a rock 😂
@@imyourmaster77 then it's cut in half by a speeding semi truck..... don't question it.
@@pottyputter05 These things were that big, that the semi driver will be as dead as the Lizard.
"Kraken the case" had me choke in my coffee. Fantastic.
Unfortunately it only works if you mispronounce 'Kraken' (it's an 'ah', not an 'a'). Reminds me of the great Beach Boys line "went to the dance, looking for romance" - in (southern) British English this sounds very wrong - went to the darnce, looking for romarnce...
@@paulhaynes8045 Well, it all depends on what language you pronounce it in. For example in Swedish the a sounds really different.
@@SilverionX In Swedish everything sounds different! We have a similar problem, as my wife is Hungarian and they pronounce 'a' more like the 'au' sound in 'aught' - so, for instance, we call Aldi 'Auldi', whereas everyone else else in the UK rhymes it with 'pal' . Hungarian actually has no English 'a' sound (as in 'pal') at all (their other 'a' sound, 'á' is more like 'ah'. They use 'e' where they have to - so 'sandwich' for instance is pronounced 'sendvich' (spelt szendvisc!). Languages, eh??
@@paulhaynes8045 stop deeping it tf
@@paulhaynes8045 crackin the case
The taniwha of Māori myth might have been based on the giant frickin' eels they have down here.
Speaking for many marine biologists I've heard complain about this, I have to point out that we've explored 20 % of the oceans and the 80 % left is mostly very deep almost empty places
If we haven't explored it, how do we know it's almost empty?
@@EEsmalls because we dont have to physically be some where to know its empty, we've mapped most of the ocean with sonar and other methods
"... and their feathers can cure blindness."
And now we know why they're extinct.
Whatever you do, don’t look into Roman birth control methods. >__
@@pandakicker1 😰
I'm starting to think most ancient myths were people trolling each other.
Including troll myths? 🤔
And the smart ones used them to control the masses.
@@qwertyferix
Does trolling each other is a myth?
Well when you go into the dark black ocean at night high as fuck on psychedelics after eating mushrooms before setting sail yoir going to see some funky shit
Exactly
0:21 A list of all the animals that crawled into my house when I opened the window to let a fly outside
He's was a purple-people eater. He he. This is in the song "And he said, "Eatin' purple people and it sure is fine"
I loved that song
I wanna see a segment in a video about how flies repair themselves and how the saw blades on grasshopper legs can kill spiders and other things like this, im sure you can elaborate
And that, my grandchildren, is how the underwear scale became a standard of measurement.
Underwear for scale?
“There’s always a bigger fish”
Qui-Gon Jin
Unless you're a whale shark :)
and then they hear, "Release the Kraken!"
That quote originally was a painting caption from a art piece made in 1556 called "Big Fish Eat Little Fish", but the very first occurrence of "There is always a bigger fish" actually came from a book called "The Fishing Gazette" made in 1910.
Cthullhu 2024 🐙
# Nolivesmatter
@@XenXenOfficial no star wars was a long time ago
more than 500 years ago
5:02 He said," shimera" (Chimera)
Let's Get Him!!!!
🔱🔥🔱🔥
angry atlantean villagers
How dare he! It's /kīˈmirə/, Joe!
(ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻
Looking for this comment.
Yep! String him up! (I had to do this twice because I'm an idiot.)
Kai'Mer'Ah
Do a story about the abominable snowman or yeti. National Geographic did a study to see if the sasquatch is a real animal. They gathered DNA from samples people said were from a squatch. Most were bears or dogs, but the Yeti samples matched an extinct polar bear from the ice age. Polar bears still live in the Himalayas and are the yeti.
Hey hi this is a very old comment right but I really would love to have a source for this please it seems really interesting
So sorry to disturb you !
5:50 Also in Australia there was Megalania, a giant relative of modern Komodo dragons that went extinct about 40 000 years ago and it was HUGE (average length was probably around 7 meters (23 ft), with some exceptionally large individuals being 8 or 9 meters long (26-30 ft)).
"... and a partridge in a pair tree."
It's subtle comedy like this that makes me laugh.
Now what I want to know is whether the Partridge was the new species or was the Pear tree the new species or both.
Please don't explain the joke again to me, I am just going along with it.
I am not gonna ruin 69 likes cuz
funni
Joe in the song Sheb sings “Mr. Purple people eater what’s your line? He said “eating purple people and it sure is fine’” so don’t worry, you’re safe but I’m not so sure about the Fugates.
They're explicitly blue though... though, do they turn purple with a bad enough sunburn...?
Who does this song everyone is talking about lol. Sounds funny af
That song is ancient 😂
@@jbirdmax it does sound like lyrics to an older song. Imagine Adele belting out those words in a new album lol. People at the concert be like 😳
Beat me to it. . .
You showed the head of Medusa, I turned to stone, this is really hard to type
"Impossible! Why don't you turn to stone?"
"I'm already rock hard, baby."
16:05 ngl, first thing that came to mind when I heard this description is the sloth bear. Although they're a mainland India thing (not found in the Andaman islands afaik), it could still explain how ancient greeks "knew" about them (as it would be more likely for them to be in contact with northern regions rather than the Indian Ocean).
0:30 the whole list i couldn't concentrate because I was anticipating and hoping you'd make that joke and I got too excited when you did lol
"A few skelletons and an endless imagination can go a long way" ... do you happen to play a necromancer in D&D?
The fact that we’ve only explored 5% of the ocean is why I refuse to swim in it.
If it helps, public beaches are usually in the explored part ;-)
@@OnkelShlimpo-vr6bf If you're a duck in a space station, then there are probably humans around. Humans like to eat ducks.
@@OnkelShlimpo-vr6bf Yeah, sorry to be a wet blanket. My advice is to not be a duck, or at least one trapped with people who might get hungry.
You don't know what you're missing.
Nah you'd be fine as a duck on the ISS. Noone wants poorly cooked soggy duck and seeing as the best they can do is the warm water the they use for freeze dried food thats the best they could do. More likely you'd just want to be a female duck so they'd keep you around for eggs they could make soft "boiled".
"Dragon" is just a word for a fantasy dinosaur, fight me.
except in DnD, where there are actual dinosaurs too
@@agustinvenegas5238 But they aren't fantasy dinosaurs, they are just fictional dinosaurs in a fantasy setting. Jurassic Park is dinosaur fiction, for example.
nah cats are purrific
It's also a word for what I be doing with the bodies.
Dinosaurs used to be called dragons
"and 1 partridge in a pear tree" - that unexpected bit so early into the video made me spit out my soda laughing. and I was not even drinking anything...
I think it's become fairly certain in recent years that many tales of sea serpents were inspired by oarfish, very large very long deep dwelling fish that very rarely come up to the surface. Aside from the fact that they're not actually snakes they basically are sea serpents just based on size alone.
I have always thought that dinosaur bones inspired the myths of dragons. Dinosaurs were world wide, but often different in different areas of the world. Dragons are in many cultures around the world, but also different depending on the area of the world where the myth developed. The first time I saw pterosaur bones hanging in a museum, I saw a European dragon.
Me: *eagerly waiting for Joe to say Mermaids*
Joe: ...
Me: :(
I was expecting Narwals
I was surprised that Joe didn't mention the creatures that inspired mermaid mythology. 🙄
Be honest, you were waiting for Joe to say, "Mermaids were probably just shapely blonde women swimming topless," and of course include illustrations.
beluga whales?
@@worthyisback5652 Manities I believe
There's going to be an underwear ad from Joe later, isn't there?
...Wait, there isn't? I don't want to say it's a missed opportunity, but...
I "subverted your expectations." I'm the Rian Johnson of TH-cam.
@@joescott you're reaching M. Night Shyamalan levels even
When I was in Europe, I saw several Griffon vultures and thought that they were the inspiration for the griffin myth. They are HUGE, up to 9 foot wingspan, and almost 4 feet tall when standing. Huge beaks that are vaguely Eagle looking, huge claws, and a feathery ruff around their neck, and a golden brown color. Someone could have easily described a Griffon vulture as a “lion-eagle” and someone hearing that imagined something completely different.
Funnily enough, of nearly all mythological creatures, griffins tend to be the ones that act more like… animals. In older tales, they did not talk, did not approach humans. They were just… wild animals.
I'm so happy I found this channel, there's so much great content to go back and watch. Big fan Joe!
Very minor correction: When discussing the gorilla, you said that “ the first reported gorilla sighting from outside of Africa…” You go on to say it was by a Carthaginian. Carthage was in Africa.
I think he means the first recorded sighting by someone who didn't already live in Africa?
@@maximusmidnight2591 Well, I guess every people come from somewhere else. And agreed, the Carthaginians weren't indigenous to Africa, having come from Phoenicia. But they had been been in Africa since the 900s BC. So when the gorilla sighting was made by one of them, they were there for about 400 years at that point. I think it might be fair to say they were living in Africa by then- just as we live in America. I think maybe he means sub-Saharan Africa. At any rate, it is such a minor point. Joe is one of my favorite You Tubers - smart, entertaining, and just a good guy.
@@terryhasan Also, by 500 BC, they were a thoroughly mixed people, the main ancestry being Phoenician, followed by Greek, but with some ancestry from virtually every nation living along a connected trade route. Hannibal's elephants were imported from India, along with riders and the riders' families. While the Sahara was a greater barrier than oceans, we know that there was trade across it, as well as trade through Egypt. The Carthaginians were genetically South of Sahara Africans. And South Europeans, and Indians, and a lot more. Culturally, though, they were Mediterranean, which became Roman culture, which became Medieval European culture, and ended up as modern European culture. Their "Known World" was about the same as that of Romans and Greeks, and very different from that of Africans south of Sahara.
The best description probalby would've been "sub-saharan africa", as even today the cultures are different, with the north more mediterranean or arabic, something that has been for quite some time back into ancient times.
@@erikjarandson5458 NO Hannibal's elephants did not come from India, nor did their riders or their families. His elephants belong to a now extinct species of elephant called the African Forest Elephant
this is weird. I just received my how it works magazine and one article is about the origin of mythical creatures and now 1 week later I see this. also fun fact: Marco polo saw Rhinoceros and had no idea what they were so he mistook them for unicorns so he wrote.
"Tis a passing ugly beast to look upon, and is not in the least like that which our stories tell of as being caught in the lap of a virgin; in fact, 'tis altogether different from what we fancied. There are also monkeys here in great numbers and of sundry kinds; and goshawks as black as crows"
Actually, it is quite possible that the mistake was not made by Marco Polo, but rather by European artists who drew unicorns with horse bodies and a narwhal tusk for a horn because they didn't know the proper way to draw them.
@@faroncobb6040 In any case, he said they don't look "in the least" like mythological unicorns, according to the quote above, indicating that the horse with a horn depiction already existed at the time.
@@jeffbenton6183 Norse traders from Greenland spent a few centuries living high on passing off narwhal tusks as horns of unicorn. They were worth more than their weight in gold. Every king and nobleman with sneaky enemies (so, every king and nobleman, period) needed a drinking cup and a plate made of it, to neutralize any assassin's poison. In powdered form, it could cure absolutely everything. The Norse Greenlanders were quite adamant about all of that, especially the price. Anyway, they were probably responsible for the idea of unicorns having long, slender, twisted horns.
The kraken indeed does exist, however they are definitely a little different then the kraken shown in old pictures consuming a large wooden ship lol.
Kraken may not exist, but Karens do.
Wink wink, well of course Kraken exists and you know all about its apperance. Btw its me, your "friend" at the mental hospital. Will you come iwth me please, you forgot to take your pills during breakfast today. We can do this hush-hush so you can continue your day and nobody will know.
We're all still waiting for Sidney Powell's kraken.
Let's say you are a fisherman on Europe before 700 AD, most ships are under 100 foot long and fishing boats are usually under 20 feet. You find a Giant Sea Squid washed up on the beach that's 12 or 13 meters long and you've never seen anything like it before. Having never seen it alive you can only imagine what it could do to a fishing dory and it's one or two man crew.
You tell everyone, including the local priest who writes up a report to send to the local bishop, who sends a report to the Archbishop, who sends a report to the Papacy. By the time the story gets there the "Kraken" can stop a merchant ship in the middle of the ocean and pluck sailors from the deck before dragging it prize to the bottom. Helps explain all those missing merchant ships the Vikings were capturing ...
@@johndanzer8181 Vikings were more like late 700s - 1000s, not "before 700". Also, the priests were well aware of their existence as Vikings frequently raided monasteries.
I love that you can’t go more than 2 videos without bringing up how smart the writing for your cephalopod video is. It’s wholesome
Thanks Jason
The Nile crocodile is not the world's largest crocodile species. The saltwater crocodile of Australia (known as "Salties") and the East Indies (known there as the Indo-Pacific or Estuarine crocodile) is not only the largest crocodile species, but it is also the world's largest reptile as well.
“A few skeletons and a bit of imagination can go a long way” sounds like something off tumblr
Reminds me of the literal grave robbing someone posted about
Or pintrest
Lol
The Southern Ocean has been known as the "Southern Ocean" for years.
Yea...but it’s now official instead of just colloquial
Wasn't it the Antarctic Ocean?
@@Faisaldegrt I learned about the Arctic ocean and was told the Antarctic Ocean wasn't an official name. At least that's what I learned in European school so maybe Americans learned Southern Ocean? As most Americans are more comfortable with cardinal directions than Europeans
@@sirius_b_13 looks like it
@@sirius_b_13 I'm an American and I can say that we didn't from my experience. I vividly remember nearly 20 years ago coming home from elementary school and telling my father that the Antarctic ocean was now called the southern ocean and his maps were wrong. He jokingly called it a plot by the liberals.
Wait, they just discovered a new Seabiscuit? That is one sneaky horse.
🤣 I enjoyed this more than I should have. 😂
Maybe that was the new seahorse he was talking about.
I just looked it up. Sea biscuits are chonky sand dollars. 😁
Seabiscuit? That race horse has been around since the 1940's. He was a champion thoroughbred who was the top money-winning racehorse - didn't these scientists know that?
@@TAROTAI scientists didn't give it the name sea biscuit. Both the animal and the horse are named after the food. Sea biscuits are sailors' rations also called hardtack. The animal was probably named first since nowadays everyone thinks of seabiscuit as a horse and not a food that a sea creature may resemble.
I always love your style of humor, but I literally cracked up and applauded at the Blue Fugates of Kentucky reference (before remembering that my partner's asleep in the next room and feeling mildly embarrassed). I may be a geek. I may also have spent too much time working with colloidal silver electrophoresis stains, which can cause similar discoloration.
So funny story about a Komodo dragon. I attend a university in America where our mascot is a dragon (uab) and one day our athletic director thought a Komodo dragon petting zoo at the next football tailgate would be a great idea. He called the Birmingham zoo, just to find out they’re actually venomous and aggressive. So he began to wonder what to do, because he really like the idea. Turns out there was some bronze statue or someone made a statue of a Komodo dragon and gave it to the university. so at the tailgates there was a tent set up with velvet ropes around guarding a bronze statue of a Komodo dragon that you could pet. After the season ended, UAB donated the statue to the zoo and now it’s outside the Komodo dragon exhibit where the live dragon has stare downs with the statue.
I'm perdy sure "chimera" is pronounced with a hard K sound....
Thats wat i thot....i have always read it as Kai-mera ...
My brain makes it very easy to take that pronunciation too far and I end up with shimmery.
I guess it depends. In German the word "Chimäre" is definitely pronounced with a soft ch-sound, rather than a k-sound.
@@scifino1 Swedish too.. But this is English last time I checked :)
Yes
It's Greek.
I've always found the claim that every culture has stories of dragons to be a weak one. "Dragon" is, of course, and English word so when we look at "dragons" from other cultures we are applying the word to something which has its own name in that culture and when you start to look at a lot of these creatures you come to realize that our definition of what counts as a "dragon" is so broad you could drive a truck through it. It includes creatures as diverse as the European dragons which were snake/lizard/bird hybrids to the Chinese Long which is sort of a lizard/snake/fish thing with a lion's face and deer antlers. If your definition of "dragon" is "mythical creature with scales" then it's not impressive that just about every culture has one.
I was about to point this out, but you did it for me.
Very good point indeed. I guess it's just our brains again desperately trying to see patterns where there are none.
Overly Sarcastic Productions did a good video on this very topic.
"mythical creature with scales" isn't quite there either seeing as how Quetzalquoatl is often called a dragon and he has feathers, i like to think of it as "these things are vaguely scimilar and i myself think that's pretty neat"
“Dragon” is an English word but you can check if it has the same root in other languages through etymology ect - the English word for dragon derives from both the ancient Greek word drakon and the ancient Latin word “draco”. I’m not sure if people have been able to trace the origin of all of the written words for “dragon” in Eurasia right back to the same root though. Certainly Europe. You can also tell that Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese and Japanese “dragons” all originate from the same word looking at the characters for dragon in these languages. Whether the Chinese dragon / European dragon also have the same origin word/character further back in time idk. But it wouldn’t surprise me if there was an initial origin for this.. the fact that large flying reptilian beasts have a such a high significance in both East Asian and European mythologies is definitely notable - if anything it says something about human psychology but it could be based on the misidentification of fossils ect.
I finally figured it out.
Sing this along with Joe's guitar intro:
"Answerswith"...
"Answerswith"...
"Answerswith"...
"Answerswith...
"JOE!"
Nice
Cringe
*snap* ho ho this one is going in my cringe compilation
The kraken was most likely a gigantic octopus type. Back in those old days there was probably still some ancient living animals that were absolutely massive. Like, beyond what you could imagine.
Excellent video! Just one thing that’s bothering me, aren’t saltwater crocodiles the largest crocodile species? Or did he just mean at the time in that part of the world the biggest they’d seen were Niles? I know this is pedantic asf but I’m just curious.
Imagine being a little drunk and getting caught out in the rain in ancient Crete, staggering into a cave and finding a bunch of dwarf elephant skulls and then trying to sleep. 😯
Why would you drink around a cave?
@@fajaradi1223 You haven't had a drink at your friends place and decided to walk home at the end of the evening?
@@Nikenik2001
I did, but I stayed there.
You just forgot about the biggest source for all those stories, Joe: alcohol! 😬
People tend to drink a lot! 😂
Also bad water, moldy bread, spoiled foods, disease, and insanity.
@@davidbeppler3032 Very true!
Mushrooms and weeds, along with alcohol, can lead to a lot of story telling.
Yes, the Incline Wolf is practically invisible to sober people. I'm pretty sure the Slope Badger is more abundant around drunks, too.
Fun fact: Hafgufa means Ocean Steam. That's it. That's the whole fact.
🇮🇸 haha
Omg isn't Joanna the goanna from The Rescuers Down Under?? I loved the Rescuers movies when I was young 💙
I can't believe that Rhett and Link didn't make this list!
Have you seen early depictions of Saint George fighting the dragon? It totally looks like a Komodo Dragon, with a forked tongue and all. As time went on artists kept adding forks to the tongue, which started looking a lot like fire.
ummm wait I feel like we glossed over the fact that a dude with an apparent dog head became a saint waaaay too quickly?!
Saint Lemur. 🤣
Sounds like a Monthy Python skit.
He might not be a literal saint, or it could be a legend told about his otherwise unknown past
Everyone loves doggy
Maybe he just had a long face.
My be was just "misformed" and devoted his life to religion after being shunned for his looks. Thinking of modern freak shows it iisn't even uncommon today
Hey, if you're going to evoke Sturgeon's Law, you should attribute it! :)
So, the word, "manticore" is based on the ancient Persian word, "merthykhuwar," which directly translates into, "man-eater."
It describes a beast with the face of a man, the body of a great cat with scales, wings, and a long tail with a barbed spike on the end. it has three rows of teeth, and it eats people.
The Persians reported that it lived in the jungles of India, and that's the key to unlocking the myth.
The fur around the face of a tiger makes it appear round, instead of triangular, like most cats.
An ancient Hindu word for "scales" is very similar to a Hindu word for "stripes."
Tigers supposedly have a long bone at the end of their tails, although it's usually covered by skin and fur, but anybody who hunted one (successfully) might know that.
Many of a tiger's teeth have three points -- a central one, and two lesser spikes on either side. This helps them tear the flesh, which they gobble down in chunks, without grinding it down much.
Finally, of course, tigers are ambush hunters. They kill with a long pounce -- up to 25 feet.
And, yes, they eat people -- especially older tigers that have started to lose their teeth.
So, yeah. The word, "manticore" comes from a Persian word for the garbled description of a tiger they learned from travelers to ancient India.
That mythical creature earns a heavily soiled pair of tighty-whiteys. :)
This was such a good video!! Would love to see a part 2 with more cryptid/monsters?
Like mothman being an (enormous) barn owl, unicorns being rhinos because of poor translation, and my personal favorite, people misidentifying whale penises as sea monsters. (seriously, look it up)
You know, ancient people in Australia actually have to deal with actual Dragon-Like animal such as Megalania, a giant monitor lizard, and Quinkana, a terrestrial Crocodyliform. They all went extinct at the end of Pleistocene, but for a brief Windows of time, native Australian actually co-exist with them.
How about the mythical creature that is a new GPU at a reasonable price? 😅
Gottem
Dude. Stop talking about fables.
Nonsense... More likely to find bigfoot
There's been stories that they released new consoles, but most chalk them up to a myth
Hahaha!
I'd seem to recall hearing/reading that Unicorns were thought to have originated because of descriptions sent to Greece of Rhino's.
As always thank you so very much for the video.
He pronounced it as -'shimeras'....🧐 Chimera is pronounced 'kaimera' ...right?
Yes. He shall pay! 😡
In molecular biology the term is used for antibodies that are half human half mouse
That's correct. Chi... (to rhyme with "try") ...me... (almost like "may") ...ra (to rhyme with "duh")
@@architeuthis3476 kai-may-ruh? Nah bruh, it's kai-mere-uh if you wanna brake it down phonetically.
@@okaydetar821 Eh, that's why I said "almost" for the middle syllable. Some of it comes down to accent (some people pronounce the words Mary, marry, & merry identically). Most English speakers would also pronounce the "ch" in chimera as a hard k whereas some would pronounce it as a guttural as in "Loch". The point is, its not anything like what was said in the video.
This is my new favorite channel to fall asleep to and I mean that in the best way possible
I an 44 years old and I grew up in a town on the south coast of Western Australia called Esperance, we were taught in primary school the ocean on our beaches was the Southern Ocean, so this being a recent official name is news to me.
You should possibly cover the story about the stories about the creature in Lake Baikal of Russia, also the isolated body of water in Antarctica that supposedly had a creature that freaked out the Russian marine biologists. Either way those bodies of water are amazing, even without a unknown creature.
It was a purple-people eater, it says so in the song.
"I wouldn't eat you cos you're too tough"
"Eating purple people and it sure is fine"
"Kraken, the scariest of sea monsters"
[Laughs in SCP 1128]
“kraken the case” made me laugh out loud 😂
Joe Scott. Always in my top 3, but somehow never in recommended, or even notifications. I'll never understand it. But I'm here for you Joe!
Not a spectacular example, but in ancient and medieval times the Black Swan was used as an example of something that didn't exist. Right up to 1697 when they were found to actually exist in Australia.
By the Dutch in Western Australia?
@@m.lhenderson5885 That's right!
@@jimg9820 I had an inkling but wasn’t sure. I’m Australian.
@@m.lhenderson5885 I have seen them in the UK in stately homes' grounds - beautiful but look "wrong" to my European eyes!
@@jimg9820 it’s kind of the opposite for us lol
I'd like to know more about the "Submarine" sighted in the oceans near Cape Town. It's described as a shark but during a freak accident with a tour boat accident, a horrific shark eating frenzy occurred but the 10s of sharks scattered. I think the species might be associated to the Mexican "demon shark". It's larger than a great white and can breath while stationery, which is impossible for a regular species of shark.
Dude, that mockumentary was fake...
The biggest type of fish, the whale shark, lives in the waters of South Africa (among other places). They dwarf great whites (estimates ranging from 14 to 21.9 meters (46 to 72 ft) in length).
But they generally feed on plankton and small fish and are a docile species
@@MattJDylan you serious!? Dammit... well my inquisition came to a non-dramatic ending. Thanks
@@mogomotsitlhone5990 yeah, shark week has been doing that for years... I was a bit bummed too when I found out
if it could breathe while standing still it would also most likely disqualify as a shark.
VAMPIRES WITCHES AND WEREWOLVES do a supernatural one
"It had the head and neck of a snake, the body of a leopard, the haunches of a lion and the hooves of a deer"
Acient description of African giraffe
Oh God Idk why but the little noise and the chair spin combination always makes me happy. Its literally the perfect intro :D
I find myhtical creatures more intersting than mythical gods, i don't know something about them is alluring
Deinotherium Gigante: one of the world's largest animals that ever walked the earth.
Sauropods: Are we a joke to you?
One of largest mammals that ever walked on Earth, not animals.
@@ExtremeMadnessX well Joe said "animals"
I mean, it's still right up there near the top. Out of all the species that have ever walked the earth, far less than one percent were bigger than Deinotherium.
"When a Komodo Dragon is afraid-"
Hold up. WTF scares a Komodo Dragon!?
A bigger Komodo Dragon ...
A bullet
Idk maybe literally anything bigger than it
a video on the development of film going from stills to movies with sound etc … now all medium digital. great work Joe!
5:37 as good as an explanation that would be, there just simply aren't any traces of dragon folklore from indigenous Australian cultures (as far as we know) aside from large snake creatures- i think we can guess where that inspo came from.
OR maybe humans have an affinity to not recognize or even neglect new species and instead label them as already known ones.
15 hours ago...
@@Death_by_NOLA Patreon man. early access to vids
@12:00…and everybody clapped?
"Did you know that there's now a fifth ocean?"
Me: "Wait, was there not?"
Just received my Answers with Joe t-shirt, one with your logo, and I have been proudly wearing it all around Uptown here in Dallas! Love your channel Joe!
4:51 Can we just take a moment to appreciate this mans fabulous hair.
I wonder what sort of myths kangaroos would have caused if more people had seen them in the olden days.
“Chimera” Lol. Forgive Joe
Carl Sagan said dragons could be a genetic memory of the dinosaurs.
He did not
God i hope he has 3 alts regarding the 4 likes on that comment.
How can we have a genetic memory of something that died out millions of years before we existed?!
I typically enjoy your videos but you have won a full blown fan with that “passions” reference 😂 oh I used to get in so much trouble when my mom would catch teenage me watching passions in the summer or when school was out 💀
Thx for these videos…you make me ponder new information, your humor makes me smile and you are a breath of fresh air on TH-cam. Keep doing what you’re doing!