Summary
This is the animal who inspired King Kong, and maybe some dragon stories. Find out about their magical healing abilities, their insane sense of smell, and their truly disturbing method of killing their prey. Discover the answer to the following questions: Why do almost all cultures have dragons? Do Komodo dragons kill by sepsis or venom? Are baby Komodo dragons just reptilian squirrels?
Bibliography: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10Z5Gnu_HJURoW5VYyTTcfcgmeXfNfXGq39BDgUoXl6s/edit?usp=sharing
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Why do dragons exist in so many cultures? How did we all independently come up with the same |
| 0:08.0 | idea? I mean, look around. We've got dragon stories in Egypt, dragon stories in ancient Mesopotamia, |
| 0:16.3 | dragons in the Bible, dragons in medieval Europe, dragons in ancient Rome, dragons in ancient China, |
| 0:22.2 | South Asia, East Asia, everywhere. And yet, you look around in the real world, and he got to ask, |
| 0:29.2 | where is this idea coming from? Where are all the dragons? This isn't an obvious one, folks. |
| 0:36.6 | Great minds think alike, but that alike? |
| 0:40.8 | If dragons are attested to in so many cultures, |
| 0:44.6 | is that evidence that they might have been real? |
| 0:49.2 | No, but is it weird? |
| 0:52.0 | Yes, and there have been a few hypotheses to account for this weirdness that we're seeing. |
| 0:58.7 | One argument is that people found dinosaur bones. This makes a lot of sense. And lacking a concept of extinction, which is actually not an obvious concept. People only began believing in extinction at the world level quite recently. |
| 1:13.5 | But anyway, they basically found dinosaur bones and said, okay, oh dear, this animal exists. |
| 1:20.9 | What are we going to do? |
| 1:22.5 | And then knowing some basic anatomy from hunting, they were able to reconstruct the animal in their drawings |
| 1:28.5 | and in their stories. My favorite theory, at least from an intrigue perspective, if not from a |
| 1:35.2 | convincingness perspective, is that of the anthropologist David E. Jones, who basically argues |
| 1:43.1 | that we are hardwired to be scared of snakes, going back |
| 1:47.6 | all the way to our roots, where our small primate ancestors were regularly consumed by snakes, |
| 1:53.3 | they were our predators, and that we were born with this instinct. We have this instinct that snakes |
| 1:59.1 | are terrifying and evil, and so dragons are basically us recreating that archetypal fear. |
| 2:06.5 | And this makes some sense. It is certainly strong to say that humans are instinctively scared of snakes. |
| 2:14.4 | It is also strong from the perspective that almost all original dragons in cultures |
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