As they happily filled their bellies, the maneating Cyclops Polyphemus came home to his cave and began filling his belly-with the trespassers! In Homer’s tale of Odysseus, the explorer and his crew found food in a cave while returning from the Trojan War.They were also said to have also forged Poseidon's trident and Hades' invisibility helmet. As a reward for their release, the Cyclopes gave Zeus his weapons of lighting and thunder. They were imprisoned and later released by Zeus and fought for him against the Titans. Three Cyclopes storm gods-Arges (thunderbolt), Steropes (lightning), and Brontes (thunder)-were said to be the first blacksmiths.Volcanic eruptions of fire, ash, and rocks were thought to be the result of blacksmiths working for the Greek god of fire, Hephaestus (Vulcan, in Roman mythology).The Cyclopes of Greek myths were repulsive, single-eyed, humanlike giants who served as the blacksmiths to the gods from their caves in the bowels of Mt.How did the elephants get there, and what happened to them? These fossils are particularly abundant in Sicily, and most of the Cyclopes tales start there. Synopsis: Fossil dwarf elephant skeletons from Italy and Greece with skulls twice the size of a human head were interpreted by Greeks-who had never seen an elephant-as single-eyed Cyclopes because the nasal cavity was a large hole in the center of the elephant’s skull. Having never seen an elephant, the Greeks imagined these were the skulls of giants with one large eye: the dreaded cave-dwelling Cyclopes-which then appeared in Greek mythology and rose to fame in Homer’s Odyssey. The elephants’ skulls were about twice the size of a human’s-with a single hole in the middle where the trunk would have been. And thousands of years later, the Greeks discovered them. Some of their bones ended up in caves, where tribes lived or cooked. Overstressing their own food reserves, early tribes hunted the small elephants to extinction. That is, until man arrived, 11,000 years ago.
Once adapted, they did quite well, with no natural predators…
These elephants shrunk to survive on less food, and on Sicily got as small as 3 ft tall and 250 pounds. When a population gets stuck on an island, it will often overstress its food reserves and be forced to adapt-something called island rule. Once seas rose again, some were trapped on islands like Sicily. Well, here’s a famous beast that started as a tiny elephant.ĭuring the Pleistocene ice ages, polar ice and continental glaciers held more of Earth’s water, causing sea level to fall.ĭuring low sea-level periods, elephants from Africa walked and swam across a nearly dry Mediterranean to Europe. Credit: Matteo De Stefano/MUSE (CC BY-SA 3.0 ), via Wikimedia Commonsįrom a previous EarthDate, you may remember that some mythological creatures were born when ancient cultures discovered fossils and created stories to explain them. Cyclopes myths were thought to have developed from observation of these skulls. Credit: Cornelis Cort (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.īelow: Skull of Palaeoloxodon falconeri, a now-extinct Pleistocene dwarf elephant from the Mediterranean region. Above: Detail of the Forge of the Cyclopes by Hoorn Holland (1533–1578) from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
0 kommentar(er)
