The Totally Reasonable Ancient Grecian Response to Prehistoric Bears, or: Come on Lads, Let's Give This Giant Corpse I Found in my Back Garden a Makeover
Hey pals, you know what we haven’t talked about for a while?
Women, frankly. People of colour. I'm so sorry. History’s such a mess of white dudes; I’m doing my best.
But anyway, the thing we haven’t talked about recently is bears.
Remember Corporal Wojtek? Little bear who joined the army? Adorable. Love that guy.
For this week's bears, we’re going to have to travel back a few tens of thousands of years to the Ice Age, when prehistoric megafauna roamed the Earth and people weren’t around to ruin everything with racism and whatnot. Back then, animals were generally massive, I guess because there was more space. For example, did you know that there was an entire order of giant marine sloths that crawled along the seafloor, ripping up plants with their abnormally muscular lips? Fucking horrifying. I know full-species extinction is generally a bad thing, but I’m thrilled those monsters died out. Disgusting.
Thalassocnus: a genuine fucking crime against nature, what the fuck.
I can’t remember what I was talking about.
Megafauna. So these massive creatures lived on Earth, fucking and fighting and being frankly terrifying, and then they died. And, as they hadn’t developed things like burial rituals (because they were literally just massive sloths), their corpses lay around until they were buried by nature. Over the years, they got buried further and further until they became fossils, along with the dinosaurs and whatnot.
Today, in a post Mary Anning society (have we ever talked about Mary Anning? We should talk about Mary Anning some time, she was wild), we dig up fossils on the reg and put them in museums and make fossil-based documentaries like Jurassic Park and that one where Raquel Welch wears a fur bikini, and we fully understand what they are and it’s all dandy. But these bastards have been under our feet for the ENTIRETY OF HUMAN HISTORY which is something I just hadn’t considered, because I’m an idiot. And humans have been digging them up for millennia.
Can you imagine being an ancient Greek, in a time when they hadn’t even developed proper shoes or basic democracy yet, and digging up a FUCKING DINOSAUR? How do you deal with that?
BY SPAWNING A THOUSAND LEGENDS, THAT’S HOW.
You’ve heard of dragons, yeah? Most famously featured in the cinematic epic How to Train Your Dragon 2? Well that legend most likely comes from someone way back when digging up a goddamn dinosaur and making a fairly logical guess at what the fuck this monster might be. Griffins? Probably some kind of beak-nosed dinosaur. Cyclops? Pygmy elephant skulls. Unicorns? Prehistoric rhinos. Vampires? One hundred percent real, ward your homes, do not take risks.
This lad here, Guericke’s Unicorn, is a partial woolly rhino skeleton dug up in 1672 and presented as a unicorn. It’s still on display at the Natural History Museum in Madgeburg, Germany, and is the single funniest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
But I promised you we would talk about bears. So I'm gonna talk about some goddamn bears.
Let’s hop forward a little, to ancient Greece. At this time, according to legend, Zeus and his god buddies had defeated his dad Kronos and the Titans and were reigning supreme on Mount Olympus. Meanwhile, people down on Earth were busy invading Troy and making relatively impressive steps in architecture and art and having just a whole bunch of orgies.
The Greeks really loved an orgy.
(And you know what, let’s give a bunch of credit to the Greeks here. This was as far back as the 12th century BC. This was the Bronze Age. We were still living in fucking caves up in Britain. You know what we invented in the 12th century BC? Fucking cups. The Greeks had a whole system of religion and organised group sex. One thousand points to the Greeks).
At this time, as with most points in history, people kept unearthing fossils. Specifically, in this case, they were digging up the skeletons of prehistoric bears. Now I need you to bear in mind (heh. BEAR in mind. I’m hilarious) that these were not fully-articulated, entire skeletons. This was a vague assortment of bones that, when put together by your average orgy-having ancient Greek, looked A LOT like a human skeleton. Except they were EIGHT FEET TALL.
For reference: this diagram I pulled off the internet.
So the ancient Greeks, using some let’s-be-honest pretty reasonable common sense, were like “oh hey, these giant skeletons must be the bodies of the heroes of legend”. Obviously, based on the contextual clues they'd been given, they had discovered the final resting place of Hercules and his demigod buds.
Again. We’d just invented cups. This is a MASSIVELY REASONABLE train of thought the Greeks were having here.
In a totally logical response to the discovery of demigod corpses, they decided to give these heroes a proper burial befitting to their monster-slaying achievements in life. And so they dug them up and got some fancy clothes and armour custom-made for their new eight-foot-tall skeleton pals. Once they were dressed up nice and stylish, they re-buried them in lavish religious rituals, with some jazzy weapons and shit.
Northern Europeans had also developed burial rituals by this time. We buried our dead with cups.
(For real, we were super into cups in the Bronze Age. It was called Beaker Culture. I’d say to look it up but it’s super boring, so maybe just take my word for it).
And that was it. Demigod makeover complete. Weird bear reburial achieved. Let’s move on with our lives and have another orgy.
Quite obviously, this was not the last we're going to hear of Hercules-bear.
Hello pals, just me, an awful nightmare beast, passing through.
FAST FORWARD FIVE HUNDRED YEARS.
And it’s the Age of Reason, with Socrates and Plato and Aristotle swanning around, giving birth to concepts like democracy and philosophy and logic and being super smug about it. You know the deal – Plato’s cave, that business with the plucked chicken, I think therefore I am (Was that Aristotle? I could Google it but I shan't). Standard white boy arsehole stuff now, but at the time it was groundbreaking.
In Britain, we’d just learned how to build small walls.
Our boys the Grecian philosophers were particularly big on preaching atheism, or at least encouraging a re-examination of how we look at the concept of religion. The gods? Humanity’s way of dealing with the fear of unanswered questions. Zeus? A fabricated father figure to help us deal with isolation in an infinite universe. Demigods? Probably just tall men.
The problem was, people kept unearthing these mad burial sites. Burial sites containing ancient skeletons, dressed in lavish armour, bearing (pun) weapons too huge for any mortal man to carry. These skeletons – you’ve guessed it – were eight feet tall.
(If you hadn’t worked out where that was going, I’m not sure I can help you).
Even though Plato was undoubtedly a pretty smart dude (and you can quote me on that. Plato: Pretty Smart Dude), he had no way of knowing what evolution and extinction were.
And so our boys, after dedicating their lives to the development and teaching of reason and atheism, had to hold their hands up and be like “well shit, I guess demigods are real. Sorry about that one lads, I definitely thought we had something there. Back to square one, I guess”.
Thank Christ nobody told them about dragons.