Where did dragons come from?
That question has been an enduring source of puzzlement and wonder for humankind for centuries. Other mythical beings are relatively easy to explain. Fairies in all their forms, (elves, troll, goblins, et al), are personifications of the natural world. Hybrid monsters, like griffins and chimeras, are perfect villains because they combine at least two animals that are feared by humanity collectively. And like fairies/nature spirits and hybrid monsters, dragons are found in virtually every society’s myths and legends. So, where did they come from?
The short answer is that we don’t know.
The long answer is that many professionals have proposed explanations regarding the presence of dragons in global cultures, but none of the evidence they’ve gathered leads to anything conclusive. Anthropologist David Jones once hypothesized that dragons appear in multiple cultures because they’re an amalgamation of attributes of three primeval animal groups know to prey on the ape ancestors of humanity that humans, (consequentially), have evolved to have an innate fear of: snakes, big cats, and raptors (birds of prey) (Jones 2000). Adrienne Mayor contends that the inadvertent unearthing of large fossils could account for many of these legends, and others could be explained by early encounters with large reptiles, such as monitor lizards and crocodilians (Mayor 2000). The ultimate problem with all of these theories is that they’re unverifiable. For every common denominator we find between cultures that could explain the presence of dragons worldwide, additional information disproves our assumptions eventually. We don’t know why they appear worldwide. But one thing is for sure: dragons are a common occurrence in multiple mythologies.
A common denominator.
The draconic denominator.
Bibliography
Jones, David E. (2000). An Instinct for Dragons. New York, NY and London, UK: Routledge
Mayor, Adrienne. (2000). The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press