Dragons - An Interesting Point

[Yavin4]

I heard someone make the point that dragons appear in both ancient European and Asian mythology even though the two cultures didn't know each other.

[ironflange]

1. Dinosaur fossils?

They find these weird skeletons in the ground, and think "WTF kind of creature left these?"

[BreweryYardRat]

2. Could be...

That's actually been theorized to have started the myth of the gryphon-some guy back in ancient days turned up part of a Protoceratops skeleton and thought it was something else entirely.

I like a theory put forward on an Animal Planet special, myself:

Dragons have a similar "basic" appearance (big teeth, serpentine body with scales, and claws) all around the world because humanity's distant and not-so-distant evolutionary ancestors were hunted by things with one or more of the basic traits. Dragons are a sort of subconsciously created combination of the main three:

Big cats/bears: Teeth, claws (for most cultures).
Snakes: Body, scales.
Large birds, in the really distant past (or not-so-distant, for Native Americans and Maoris): Claws, flight for those cultures with winged-dragon myths.

[miss_kitty]

3. "...the two cultures didn't know each other."

That we know of.

:)

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

4. Perhaps the only thing they had in common was the dragons that used to fly

around.

[ForrestGump]

5. Symbols of very different things, though

And there were several different codified types of Chinese dragons.

By the way, people born in the Year of the Dragon are generally the coolest to ever walk the planet, and it's often written that they almost uniformly possess disproportionately massive and powerful (unmassive and yet equally powerful, for the female variety) reproductive bits and pieces. Women approaching the Dragon-born male are generally advised to lift their shirts or otherwise display their mammalian protuberances to the aforementioned dragon male. Not sure what the equivalent appropriate greeting would be for a dragon female, but I'm sure that someone can fill us in. It's a very interesting phenomenon.