I came up with a theory or thought today, like I often do, concerning dragons. My pondering is simple - if the concept of dragons was so prevalent in many isolated cultures, can we really say they didn’t exist. Where in the imagination would something like dragons come from? What can they be compared to? Dinosaurs? NO - dinosaurs and the first humans were 56 million years apart. I’m saying what I think is true, I’m just posing a theory of mine. Any thoughts?
Welcome to SDMB. I’ll jump on board this thread and we can all head over to IMHO. (General questions is usually reserved for questions that have a specific answer;IMHO is the place for throwing around thoughts and opinions)
I recall giving this issue some though a number of years ago, and I came up with the following observations:
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Although different cultures have things that we translate as “dragons,” they are quite different from each other.
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I’m unsure of just how widespread dragon mythology is. I don’t, for example recall dragons in native American mythologies. I think cultural diffusion is generally more powerful than most people’s intuition suggests.
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Hi Opal.
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The feeling that there are frightening creatures larger and stronger than humans would seem to be naturally universal among people who live close enough to nature to encounter lion, tigers, and bears on a regular basis. The feeling of powerlessness these encounters would inspire would naturally be extrapolated into grander myths. (It wasn’t just a regular lion that attacked me - it was some kind of kooky, whacko super lion.)
I don’t believe there were as many mythologies about dragons in ancient cultures as you might believe. Egyptians, and Mezzo Americans for example.
Well, it’s in human nature to use hyperbole to color oral history, myth, legend, etc. And lizards are quite common worldwide. Put these two facts together and you get a good probability of finding a reference to giant reptilian monsters in the body of any culture’s literature.
And then, when western literate types first encounter these legends, they say “oh, that’s a dragon,” and the official translation for whatever word was used in the original language becomes “dragon.”
Sorry - coincidence is not an exciting answer, but it’s the most likely one.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=50342
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=11914
Well, my wildly unsubstantiated guess is that the idea of dragons may have sprung from and been supported by people unearthing dinosaur bones. I mean, heck, it wasn’t until relatively recent history that we gained any real understanding of what dinosaurs were. Not only that, but we had nothing resembling fancy techniques like carbon dating, etc. So imagine, if you will, a bunch of peasants digging up the earth to lay the foundations of a castle or cathedral. They find an absolutely enormous bone, or better yet, toothy skull. I’m sure my imagination would be up to the task of fleshing the creature out, and dragons as we imagine them today aren’t a far cry from T-Rexes and other predators.
I’ve also read (great cite, eh?) that one theory about how cyclopses were created was from people coming across the skulls of mammoths or elephants. The nasal passage in a pachyderm skull looks like a giant, single eye socket. Hence, huge hairy humanoid with one eye.
Daniel Cohen, in his book “The Encyclopedia of Monsters,” suggests that the European “dragon” originally referred to snakes, and it was later writers who added such features as legs and/or wings to fictional “dragons.”
Oriental dragons, he says, were probably inspired by the Yangtze river alligator.
The Egyptians (I think) had the phoenix, and the Meso-Americans had the coatl, both of which are rather dragon-like in some of their features (winged snake? Flaming bird?). I think that this was mentioned in one of the threads Sue linked, but I’m still waiting for them to load, so I’m not sure.
I suggest reading Peter Dickinson’s “A Flight of Dragons”. It’s quite interesting, if not entirely convincing.
Well, to our distant ancestors (the ones that were 1/2 inch long proto-mammals), a pterodactyl would look very much like what we picture as dragons, and would be very fearsome. So, yes, dragons did exist, and we recall them from our ancestral memories.
Reliance on the ancestral memory of proto-mammals as an explanation for dragons seems more than a little far fetched. What is clear is that in Europe the idea of a dragon as a big lizard with optional bat-like wings and breath so bad that it was visible was pretty well fixed in medieval and early renaissance iconography as well as in the stories of saints. Look at the manuscripts illuminations of St. George and his wife, the dragon. Chinese dragons may well be derived from crocodiles the same way that King Kong is derived from gorillas. European dragons may likewise derive from Nile crocodiles. I seem to recall that such big bones as were uncovered before the 18th Century were identified as the remains of giants. There was scriptural authority for giants, see Goliath.
You just cannot chalk up pre-modern people as unimaginative oafs with no capacity to conjure up fantastic and dangerous beasts. Modern Hollywood has come up with Sigorney Weaver’s alien base on cockroaches and nightmares induced by a bad anchovy. Why can’t we think that ancient story tellers came up with the classic dragon based on Nile crocodiles, snakes and geckos.
Well Phil Bronstein certainly believes in dragons 
. Of a sort, anyway 
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- Tamerlane