Myths & Legends That Might Actually Be True! - AskReddit

there's certainly evidence of a human species cousin existing in very recent history historians what legendary creature or person do you believe may have been real and probably existed in some way there are many diseases that the origin of the vampire myth can be traced back to however I think rabies fits at the most in the olden days people would tie those suspected of it to trees in about three days time the disease would drastically change them extreme light sensitivity paleness aggression excessive drooling they would try to attack you in a bounce of either extreme slow fatigue or even adrenaline also rabies can be passed from person to person through a bite not just an infected animal the Maori people of New Zealand have long told stories of the buckeye a monstrous bird that was big enough to hunt and eat humans many believe that these stories are referring to the hostile it was the largest species of eagle ever to have lived on earth with weights of around 30 pounds and wing spans almost reaching 10 feet it lived on New Zealand's South Island and primarily hunted the flightless mouid bird which weighed around 500 pounds given the large size of its main prey it's likely that the eagle may have also targeted lone humans as well interestingly enough the Hass seagull went extinct around the Year 1400 not long after the Maori arrived in New Zealand it's thought that its extinction can be attributed to habitat destruction combined with the extinction of the MOA due to hunting by the Maori the wendi-go probably existed just not as a creature people in the far north who survived a brutal winter by eating a family member had a psychological escape hatch for the guilt and horror by convincing themselves they were transforming into a ravenous murderous beast they'd continue killing and eating in a hysterical ushion that they had no control over it Wendy Eagle hunters would then have to come and kill them and perform a shamanic ritual to assure the rest of the tribe that the taint wouldn't spread it's actually an incredibly fascinating study into culturally specific mental illness the lengths the mind will go to in order to avoid dealing with a traumatic event are so extraordinary that in the culture they would actually continue to murder and cannibalize fellow tribe members under the delusion they had transformed into a monster the Luca giant octopus it supposedly lives in the blue holes of the coast of Florida and the amount of food and temperature of water both support the theory of an octopus living long enough to grow way larger than we expect based on our current records we know that giant squid exists we've also recently caught it on camera it's even possible it inspired the lusca but all an octopus really needs to get huge is a lot of food and super cold water the problem being as the water gets cold or food gets more scarce but in a deep cave surrounded by water that's warm enough to have a high food population while also providing water cold enough to help promote a longer life an octopus may get rather large the cyclops of greek mythology go google up an elephant skull there's this huge hole right in the middle of it looking to all the world like a single eye now add this to the knowledge that the cretan dwarf mammoths left sub fossil bones on crete easily discoverable was one meter at the shoulder and could be more or less assembled into a giant humanoid there's a small population of albino deer in my area and they are beautiful definitely ethereal looking and totally matched the European description of a unicorn the mythical unicorn likely derives from travelers from Africa or Asia to Europe trying to describe a rhinoceros there are Asian rhinos in India Nepal and Indonesia when you consider that ancient Greek depictions of lands sometimes looked more like dogs and that the word hippopotamus comes from Greek words meaning River horse it's easy to see how a Greek traveler would describe a rhino as a one horned horse archaeologist here there's a really interesting ancient Egyptian story called the shipwrecked sailor in which a man is washed ashore a beautiful island and is apprehended briefly by an enormous serpent in this story the serpent tells him that there used to be hundreds of others like him but a falling star wiped them all out I think it's unlikely that the Egyptians had knowledge of dinosaurs but there's a site called whadya town that has thousands of ancient whale skeletons from the eocene I think it's possible they could have seen these skeletons and mistaken them for giant snakes Herodotus actually tells similar tales of giant flying snakes in Egypt and I suppose if you saw these skeletons but no trails you might think they were capable of flight aboriginal tales from dream time which in many cases have been proven to be validated records predating the end of the last ice age they coexisted with mega fauna in Australia and they're crypto creatures have literally been linked back to now extinct fauna I mean you think about the rosetta stone and how that was a holy hell moment because it unlocked the Egyptian language and pushed back our knowledge about 5,000 years I regularly get to see pods of humpback whales at the beach where I surf most of the time all you see is their backs as they partially surface from the water occasionally one of them breaches mouth first so you see a giant mouth emerge from the water other times you see a giant tail emerge if you were watching them and had no idea what a whale was or that you were looking at multiple of them I could easily imagine mistaking multiple whale backs as the coils of a colossal snake I strongly suspect that this is the origin of legends of sea serpents changelings babies switched out by fairies were probably an early explanation for birth defects also may explain postpartum depression think about it in ye olden days after all isn't a mother meant to naturally love and bond with her baby like automatically so why am I not bonding with mine why do I feel like a failure of a mother oh maybe the fairies came and took my actual baby away and I am protecting myself from the fairy magic I believe that big flea probably does exist or at least did until very recently but I doubt that it was a unique species my theory is that what people see is a mundane animal probably a large brown bear with serious genetic deformities encountering a 7-foot bear with mange maybe a deformed cranium possible scars from fights with other bears and other such traits would certainly trigger a fight-or-flight response you see something like that you haul in the other direction when you stop you're not 100% certain of what you saw so your brain fills in the details so you take a deformed animal and mix it with an imaginative mind that knows what the popular version of Bigfoot looks like and you get a bonafide Bigfoot sighting very simple mythological creatures like black dogs were probably exaggerated stories of encountering wild dogs in the dead of night they're often described as having glowing eyes which isn't an unusual effect when torch light is reflected in dogs or cats eyes the black dog spirits and myths of the British Isles are also likely the grim professor Trelawney was talking about in the Prisoner of Azkaban the Banshee was never real but lots of Irish parents came up with a story about a screaming woman that kept their kids terrified and in their beds the banshees woeful wail meant kids had to stay in bed or get stolen away this story was told so that the parents in question could have sex loud sex because the kids would have heard their moms amorous moans and interpreted them as a ghostly call from beyond the grave there's evidence for King Arthur existing but similarly to Moses it seems to have been a dude that did some stuff but later other big fish stories got attributed to him and it just grew over time back then it was common to change the names of the folk hero so that the story itself would be remembered also dragons nearly every culture has a mythological giant lizard in a way they're correct almost all of the evidence they gave turned out to be dinosaur bones and fossils Arthur from the legendary people side of things King Arthur was certainly someone who actually existed albeit in a much different form than modern audiences would be familiar with the earliest mentions of him are is a historical British king who lived during the fifth century he's in a king list he's mentioned as winning a series of decisive battles against the Saxons and his excellent swordsmanship is referenced once and that's about it during the Middle Ages Arthur's tail was romanticized and then conflated with other myths and folklore several of his knights such as Lancelot were originally heroes of their own legends before being added to his until we finally ended up with our present version that has all the medieval knights and magic and the round table and the Holy Grail business it's entirely possible that the name of Arthur itself was part of this later conflation as his victories against the Saxons were also credited in some sources to a general named M Brosius orally honest those sources may be wrong or they may have been two different leaders who were mistaken the combined by later writers a king in his general perhaps among historians who support Arthur's historicity the thinking goes that he was a romano-british he Welsh leader who fought against Saxon incursions and held them off during his lifetime becoming ruler a part of Britain in the wake of Rome's withdrawal his name would have originally been Roman artorias which became Arthur's in the vulgar latin and was later shifted to Arthur by Celtic influence in the 6th century Troy the Trojan War is another legendary event that was certainly based on something real we know Troy was a real city that was actually raised around 1190 BC and we have a lot of evidence that says the Mycenaean Greeks and the Hittite Empire fought several conflicts over the city which was a powerful city-state and vassal of the Hittites at the time the Trojan War from the Iliad is either a legendary account of the most glorious Mycenaean victory in these wars or perhaps a dramatization of the entire series of wars distilled into one mythical conflict as for the people mentioned in the stories though no telling many were likely based on actual nobles from the conflicts but Greek mythos has a habit of adding in later heroes to famous stories combined with the massive time gap before we inherit our earliest surviving copy of the story at least some of the characters were probably added later serious scholarship tries to identify which parts of the Iliad are most guilty of this and which parts most resemble its Bronze Age Origins my favorite thinking from the historicity debate on Troy's that the whole Helens situation was originally understood to be a metaphor for the actual transgression that the Trojans committed Hittite letters suggest that they were the aggressors but don't specify how so we're left guessing about what sort of treaty violations or trade disputes that Helen might have been meant to represent one of my anthropology professors primate evolution is convinced Bigfoot exists and is the result of a line of Gigantopithecus that survived and has avoided human detection and capture for 100,000 years there are actually several anthropologists who believe this theory edit my professor didn't actively research Bigfoot but he had a colleague named Grover Krantz who dedicated most of his career to researching and finding Bigfoot Sasquatch crabs had two degrees from UC Berkeley and was a professor at Washington State it's true Gigantopithecus was an Asian ape but Krantz believed they could have migrated to North America via the Bering Strait when it was still a land bridge Google Grover Krantz if you're interested he had some pretty cool theories as people have mentioned stranger things have happened I personally think it's neat that while it's improbable that Bigfoot exists it's not impossible not so mythical but there's certainly evidence of a human species cousin existing in very recent history it's fascinating because many animals have similar but not exact species but the closest relative to Homo erectus is presently the chimpanzee or ape there was the Neanderthal but that hasn't existed in hundreds of thousands of years Homo floresiensis may have existed as recently as a couple thousand years ago and its offspring still inhabits parts of New Guinea the Indian mythology that mentioned going to war against the monkey kingdom and I can't help but wonder if they just waged war and wiped out a human adjacent Squatch like creature alright is the historian giants they exist in some form over many cultures in history my favorite story is about a Native American tribe that told the story of the Giants that killed them to near-extinction generations upon generations ago and how they were a horrible beast and quite large all the characteristics of giant truth be told and this is probably true of most legends of giants that it's just a height relative thing a majority of the population was quite small back in the day besides being easier to hide and run less body mass meant less food needed and more chances of survival but I digress people were quite small like average five footers and less anyone who was dollar was probably a considered a giant and all whole tribe a giant people 5.10 and above must have been especially terrifying when they were a warning tribe or just in conflict with you so the generational story was just about a smaller height-wise tribe that encountered a taller height-wise tribe and they fought the story of the Giants the natives have a lot of stories of supernatural creatures that were just odd to them humans the pale faced beasts were probably Vikings Vikings caused a whole migration of a tribe as well it's really interesting in my field of work to just put things in perspective you gain so much trolls and unicorns but in the form of Neanderthals and woolly rhinos I believe our mass genetic and social memory has kept the memory of the last surviving Neanderthals alive in the imagery of trolls solitaire short dark hairy creatures living in caves the woods by rivers etc the woolly Rhino likewise was passed along as a big four-legged creature with a horn from its snout and eventually four-legged turned into horse-like through broken telephone Beowulf who is featured in one of the most important texts written in Old English may very well have been real the epic details what people Beowulf belonged to the guides who resided in modern year to lond and battles which have taken place according to historians particularly between the gates and the swedes most intriguing to me are the facts that the location of beowulf's burial mound is included in the epic and that there is what looks like a hill at that location in modern sweden that has never been excavated environmental scientists here to mention stellar sea ape stellar is a highly respected name in botany and zoology to this day responsible for naming and/or discovering a lot of charismatic Russian and Alaskan creatures such as Steller's sea cow Steller's sea lion sea otters and many more everything he described was fully legitimate and confirmed despite concerns that he was making things up people did not believe in a sea cow so large and docile as he described or in otters at sea with thicker fur there is only one exception that being the sea ape this was a creature that he reported to be smaller than the men on the ship furred and ape-like which swam around his ship in an almost mocking fashion supposedly juggling and playing with kelp before dodging every bullet the crew shot at it and swimming off many different ideas exist as to what this actually was something stellar was mocking the captain of the ship who he had a contentious relationship with referring to him as an ape of the sea while others think that this may actually have been an edit put into Stellar's original works by a rival scientist however others still think that this may have been a real observed incident with the malformed sea lion personally from what I have read I think there is a decent chance that the sea ape was a unique animal not an ape but either a specific species or subspecies of otter or marine or semi aquatic mammal sea mink were likely still alive on the opposite coast of the states at the time of this reported sighting who's to say that a larger similar animal couldn't have also frolicked through the waters of Alaska as for the juggling I am no expert in German but I know his original manuscripts were translated and then back translated before their initial publication when the potential rivals could have inserted this story to harm his credibility but my guess is the term for tossing around playfully and juggling are similar and that the kelp may not have been actually tossed like a circus performance but rather spun around in the water playfully regardless it doesn't really make sense to me that one of the most respected names and science known specifically for not telling the tall tales that his colleagues often did would invent such a creature just to mock a co-worker or gain fame I don't think this was really an ape but I totally buy its existence quick mini one with way less evidenced by its nature but it's hard to discuss stellar sea ape without also mentioning the Aquatic ape hypothesis the idea that humans were the failed evolutionary experiment of a marine mammal ape this purports to explain why our noses are more telescope than other species of APE why we lost much of our body hair why we have more webbing between digits and various other commonalities seen in the evolutionary history of marine mammals there is no way to test this hypothesis but it's a fun thought to entertain thanks for 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Channel: Radio TTS

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Id: 48nV4v98CG8

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 14 2020