Dragons!

[pitbulllady]

Originally Posted by koosie

Yes That's totally true. No human ever saw a dinosaur (except their bird descendents but that's a different matter). However something us and the rest of the mammals presumably descended from was around the same time and would have probably interacted with them on some level, either running away or snatching eggs.

Could reactions to certain forms be written into us? A chimp who's never seen a snake will react with great caution to an even inanimate snake-like object and probably most mammals feel something similar. Do they all dream of dragons too?

I don't know, but it would really be interesting to find out exactly what animals dream, and how their concepts of things work. Chimps, even those born and raised in captivity, to a mother born and raised in captivity, who's never seen a snake, are inherently afraid of them, while human children who've never seen a snake express no fear of them whatsoever. We are not "hardwired" to fear snakes, but we are hardwired to LEARN to be afraid of certain kinds of animals. Oddly enough, no one has ever done a study to see if there is a mutated gene in certain humans, that makes them fascinated by reptilian creatures naturally, despite every effort to teach them otherwise! I'm certainly one of those humans, and coincidentally enough, my obsession with reptiles began as an obsession with dragons, at the age of TWO, before I could even say the word "dragon"! It endured in spite of my herpaphobic mother doing everything she could short of actually killing me to make me hate and fear these animals as much as she did, and I am seeing the exact same pattern in my three-year-old neice, Sydney, who was angry for her father for three days for him shooting a Copperhead in the yard, and insisted on giving the deceased pit viper a decent funeral!

Still, on the whole dragon thing, along with a belief in sentient reptile-like beings that lived among humans, you have to really wonder why it's so common. Even today, people are utterly fascinated with the whole concept of dragons. It cannot simply be explained by misidentification of common reptiles; how would an Inuit living in the high Arctic of Canada have encountered a crocodile or lizard, for example? Those beliefs pre-date contact with Europeans, also.

pitbulllady