Discover Magazine Reports 110-Year-Old News about Fossil Origins of Greek Myths

​Something that fascinates me is how ideas percolate through culture and either do or do not become common knowledge. This week, Discover magazine ran a piece exploring the question of whether mastodon, mammoth, or other extinct elephant fossils influenced the Greek myth of the cyclops. An extinct elephant skull’s nasal cavity resembles a gigantic eye socket in the middle of the skull, suggesting the shape of a cyclops skull. The article by Sean Mowbray presents the claim as news, but it’s really, really not. 

​Our first clue that the story isn’t exactly breaking news is that Mowbray frames it around an interview with folklorist Adrienne Mayor, who wrote a book about the potential connection between fossil bones and Greco-Roman mythology back in 2000, building on academic work she had published a decade earlier. The First Fossil Hunters is an important book, but it’s also almost a quarter-century old, and the underlying research ten years older. For all the many citations the book has racked up in the twenty-first century, it amazes me that is central claims are repeatedly presented as shocking and new.
 
Indeed, the idea is not unique to Mayor, even if she and her coauthor referred to matching fossils to myths as a “new science” of her creation in her 2014 autobiographical volume The Griffin and the Dinosaur for National Geographic. As she writes in The First Fossil Hunters, the identification of Sicilian fossil dwarf elephant skulls with the inspiration for the cyclops myth originated with Othenio Abel, an Austrian paleontologist who published the conclusion in 1914. Yes, Discover magazine is on the cutting edge of reporting 110-year-old breaking news.
 
And Abel, in turn, was writing at the tail end of a long tradition of scholarship. Beginning with the work of Hans Sloane in the early eighteenth century and Georges Cuvier in the early nineteenth century, and continuing until he end of the Edwardian Era, it was simply accepted fact that misinterpretations of fossils inspired myths and legends of giants, monsters, and other mythological creatures. Ample studies sought to connect various bones to one myth or another, and scientists reported witnessing the creation of such stories around newly unearthed fossil bones. Such accounts appeared in popular magazines and academic texts. And then, sometime during the interwar years, scholarship seemingly forgot all about it until 2000.
 
So, what happened?
 
It’s a difficult question to answer. It’s not that the idea entirely vanishes. It was a lesson for students in a 1920s college paleontology syllabus, albeit more as an “amusing” speculation by the founders of paleontology than a serious topic of study. Astounding Science Fiction reported it as a surprising secret its readers were unlikely to know in 1945, as did Willy Ley’s Exotic Zoology in 1941, though the latter was explicitly a popular book about monsters and cryptids. Astounding printed its ideas direct from Ley, and Ley cited Abel. But such references become very thin and mostly on the fringes of literature after the war years.
 
This was the time of specialization, when the arts and humanities broke decisively from the hard sciences, and the kind of interdisciplinary study of mythology that would draw on both had become difficult. It was also a period when Classics began their decline, when the idea of seeking historical truth behind mythology had again gone out of fashion—witness, for example, the difficultly Martin Nilsson had convincing colleagues that Greek mythology did indeed preserve traces of Mycenaean history and culture. And it was also a time when “serious” people thinking “serious” thoughts did not concern themselves with giants and dragons and other frivolity, especially scientists looking to enhance their institutional authority. And it was also a period when Victorians were held in deep contempt, their ideas seen as polluted and corrupt, the antithesis of modernity.
 
For whatever reason or combination of reasons, a very long tradition of scholarship became largely unknown, so much so that repeating these Victorian notions has been a shocking new revelation at regular intervals for the past quarter century.