The Chinese didn’t fear dragons – they were signs of good luck.
As for the origin, it’s generally believed that the Chinese dragon was created accidentally. Various small tribes would have an animal symbol. Often the tribes would unite, and add features from both their symbols. Thus, a tribe who has a snake as a symbol might unite with a tribe that had a bird or bat. The result would be a winged snake. And, as time went on, other tribes joined in, adding parts of their symbolic creature to the mix. The result changed due to this and due to artistic license until it became a dragon.
I think it’s possible that some large, possibly even flying reptiles/Saurians survived into human times.
In the Big Bend area of Texas, for instance, the Indians carved depictions of flying, dragon-like creatures on walls and had legends of the beasts swooping down and taking humans and animals as prey.
Now, maybe pure fantasy or maybe they found some of the remains of the flying saurians which DID inhabit this area based on the fossil evidence, or maybe, just maybe, the extinction of these creatures wasn’t as complete as currently thought, and some small, isolated populations survived much longer, long enough to enter into the human collective memory.
The popular image of a dragon today is based on a 20th Century reinterpretation of lots of monsters feared and mythologised in the past. Dragon is a generic term for monster, and they came in many forms, though there were undoubtedly common factors. I don’t think you can say they were particularly lizard-based, though.
I would agree with, but actually go further than, CalMeachem and GuanoLad.
As I have suggested in earlierthreads addressing this topic, I supect that we, (i.e., Europeans), have imposed the word “dragon” on a wide variety of critters in other cultures that share only the single characteristic of being vaguely serpentine. Rather than some creature inspiring legends in multiple cultures, (or even a few creatures inspiring different related beasts in several cultures), I think that it is more likely that a lot of different cultures imagined a lot of different beasts and exploring Europeans happened to tie together anything that was serpent shaped under the name of “dragon.” Something similar has happened with the names “phoenix” and “unicorn.” Europeans have translated the names of several Chinese mythical beasts as “unicorn,” based on the single fact that they are frequently described as having one horn, even though none of them much resemble the unicorn of Ctesias. Similarly, the original phoenix of Egypt was described resembling a heron, but the Greeks changed the description to resemble an eagle and Europeans then translated the name of a somewhat eagle shaped bird in Chinese mythology as “phoenix,” even though the Chinese critter was much more of a chimaera, looking nothing like a heron.
I think we make too much of the “dragon” connection among various cultures because it appears to be nothing more than the cultural imposition of a name on a wide variety of beasts that shared only one similar characteristic.
Not a chance. An isolated population surviving a thousand years past a major extinction event – I’ll grant that. A hundred thousand years? Maybe, but in that time the population would be very unlikely to remain small and isolated – they’d have either died out or re-expanded into former niches.
Sixty five million years of edge-of-extinction equilibrium? No. Simply no.
I think that’s something most people find hard to quantify. It’s only recently that I really took the time (only a few seconds, really) to consider just how long it’s been since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and it’s an unbelievably long time. I can’t even imagine it.
Come to that, the period the dinosaurs existed is hundreds of times longer than humans have even existed in a recognisable form.
Does anyone want to comment on this, then? Is there not even the slightest possibility that there are real finds indicating humans have been around much longer than anyone ever thought? And what difference would it make to our way of thinking, if it was true?
I went through that “cryptopaleontology” phase as a teenager. It would be just so cool if it were true. Problem is, the proof just isn’t there. A lot of these claims get repeated indefinitely but if you go back to the original source, you discover that there’s less there than meets the eye. For example, the widely quoted “sandal print”. If you actually track down a photo of the supposed print, you see a roughly bean-shaped oval that almost certainly is the impression of a clam shell. The human hand print might be in 110 million year old limestone- that’s how old the stone is, not necessarily how old the print is, in fairly soft easily carvable limestone. One time I saw a photo allegedly proving that the Earth was hollow by showing the “light” from the inner sun- it was an overexposed satellite photo showing the polar ice cap. Moral of the story, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
It is all speculation of course. But I assume that dragons and dinosaurs are the same. That is, dinosaur bones were surely discovered on occasion. Without an understanding of geological time, people would assume that such large and unknown creatures existed somewhere. Combine that with stories about Komodo dragons
and viola-fire breathing flying (a leap certainly but it makes for a good story). The Komodo certainly has aspects of a flying, fire-breathing, terrible lizard. It hides in the tall grass and strikes suddenly, so someone might guess the strike came from above, the bite causes such severe infection that within a day or two the wound probably looks like a burn. And they are so remote that the story would be wildly distorted by the time it was recorded by the chinese/arabs.
That’s five thousand years. From the present back to the eariest Egyptian and Sumerian civilizations. Pretty much all of recorded history. Here’s ten thousand years-
:
Here’s how long since the Cretaceous extinction event: