Before Bigfoot and Nessie: Earth's Forgotten Monsters

SPEAKER_00 0:03 In ancient times, as far back as ancient Greece, there lived a race of people like no other. Roaming the distant edges of the known world, there was a tribe known simply as the Headless.

SPEAKER_01 0:16 Ancient Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote about the Headless, describing a land filled with horned asses, elephants, and bears. And even throughout the late medieval times, these creatures were said to exist across the world. But then they vanished.

SPEAKER_00 0:36 From Bigfoot to the Loch Ness monster, we're used to creatures that sit on the edge of belief, debated, doubted, but never fully ruled out.

SPEAKER_01 0:47 But history is full of creatures that didn't survive into the modern world. Monsters once described by our ancestors in vivid detail. Not rumors, but things they claim to have actually seen.

SPEAKER_00 1:01 So what happened to them? Today we'll explore some of the legends that came before the modern mythical creatures that we know today. I'm Ollie. And I'm Matt, and this is What We Did Before, the podcast exploring the history of modern inventions. Okay, Matt. So as I mentioned, um, we have our own modern myths that are still hotly debated. You know, you've got Loch Ness Monster, you've got Bigfoot, you can add the Chupacabra and Mothman to that list as well if you know about Mothman. But in ancient times, it feels like the classification of like myth and legend was a little bit different because uh actually these legends were taken much more seriously. So these headless people then, let's explain who they are.

SPEAKER_01 1:50 So these headless people are um a tribe called the Blemies, and they were headless, but in fact they still had faces. Yeah, they did, but not quite in the right place. No, that's right. So their faces were actually embedded in their chests. Oh, that sounds painful. Yes, it does. Um I suppose you don't get neck pain, I don't know. Um with eyes where you'd expect a sternum to be and mouths just above the ribs.

SPEAKER_00 2:23 Oh, it's really creepy, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 2:25 Yeah. So many of interpretations around this have been drawn on what they look like, and they're all horrifying, um but for the most part they mirror the human form pretty exactly, except for the no-head thing, of course.

SPEAKER_00 2:43 Yeah, the no-head thing is a sort of a a major differentiator. But and the Blemi, they weren't a monster in the way that we might imagine one today, so they weren't like described as beasts or demons. Um they were actually described just as people, like a tribe of real people. The earliest mentions um appear in the writings of Herodotus, he which is as far back as the 5th century BCE, and he places um these strange races of people at the far edges of the known world. Uh, these would have been places that his readers would likely never visit. Um so you know they couldn't disprove the fact that these blemies existed either. And then later the Roman natural philosopher Pliny the Elder took it a bit further. So he doesn't sort of hedge his bets and imagine that they might exist somewhere out there. He actually states very confidently that the blemi do exist. And he says, as you alluded to earlier, they exist in a land populated by huge snakes, elephants, bears, horned asses, and dog headed men. Which we'll we'll get onto in a moment. But let's stick with blemies for now.

SPEAKER_01 3:55 So um just looking at this picture of blemies, I have to say it kind of looks a bit like how I used to draw people when I was a kid. So I'm wondering wondering if it looked like that, but I just had the like a head and then arms and legs coming out of it. So I don't know, maybe there's something in that.

SPEAKER_00 4:13 So blemies were just some wild child's drawings gone mad. Imagine if we trusted the drawings of our children all the time. There would be some very weird creatures that exist in the world if I trusted the drawings of my daughter.

SPEAKER_01 4:28 Well, yeah, I mean, uh, we could go into a whole thing about our consciousness episode on this one, but let's uh let's keep it on topic. So um this land that we were talking about before with the huge snakes, elephants, bears, etc. Um, this is a place obviously that feels very wild and dangerous and unfamiliar enough to sort of suspend disbelief. So it wasn't written as a myth, but as fact. Pliny wasn't telling campfire stories. His natural history was meant to catalogue the world as it truly was plants, animals, geography, and people, of course. So to him, the blemi belonged to the same category as animals like giraffes or crocodiles. Strange, yes, but they were real.

SPEAKER_00 5:20 Yeah, and what's fascinating is that this belief didn't fade quickly. So medieval map makers continued to draw the blemi centuries later. If you look at world maps from the Middle Ages, especially the Hereford Mappa Mundi, you'll often find them sketched into the margins. You'll see little blemies appearing like headless men kind of staring out from their chests, kind of inhabiting the the blank spaces of the world, the parts of the world that that people didn't quite understand yet and hadn't been able to visit. So could you maybe explain a little more about the Hereford Mappa Mundy? Uh yeah, so this is really cool actually. Um this is the largest medieval map still known to exist. Um it's not actually a literal interpretation of the world, it's more like a religious one. So, alongside the fact that it features heaven and hell, um, it also showcases various mythical creatures like the Blemies. Oh, nice, okay.

SPEAKER_01 6:19 Well, let's sort of stop there. Uh let's not give too much away about it. I think this could be a whole episode in itself.

SPEAKER_00 6:27 Yeah, I think that's a good idea. Um the map of Monday, the whole thing could take us well over an hour to explore. So let's revisit it. But for now, let's explore uh the Blemies in a bit more detail. So what what were they said to do?

SPEAKER_01 6:40 Well, they were said to live in um Nubia or Ethiopia in Roman geography, and um they were existing as sort of a stable population, not some anomaly. And they were treated as kind of like an ethnic group and not certainly not monsters. In many medieval illustrations, the Blemia shown carrying spears, swords or shields, standing in defensive or confrontational poses, so it's it's quite clear that medieval thinkers imagine them as dangerous or potentially hostile.

SPEAKER_00 7:16 Yeah, I I can't imagine that you would see headless creatures with faces in their chests as anything other than at least mildly hostile. Um and apparently apparently they could speak as well. I mean, they had mouths, I suppose it makes sense. Um so there are sources that imply that they they spoke languages, um, they could even negotiate, they could threaten people, um, or they could communicate and they were also capable of reason and intent. So um, you know, this is these are all very very human attributes, not just animalistic attributes. So this is why medieval theologians later debated whether they had souls, and if they did have souls, whether they could be converted uh or counted as fully human.

SPEAKER_01 8:02 Right, okay. Um, so a bit of an ethical debate there, and I'm just wondering what their voices would have sounded like um with such huge faces on their chest, would have made ice cream.

SPEAKER_00 8:14 Yeah, because all of our voices uh the origin of our voices are from our vocal cords, so they could have like very expansive vocal cords like uh reaching out across their entire ribcage.

SPEAKER_01 8:25 Yeah, they would have had terrifyingly deep vocals, I would I would imagine. That would be the most metal thing I think I would see is one of those fronting a deaf core band.

SPEAKER_00 8:37 No head holding the microphone to his chest and just like visceral guttural roar coming out of his body. Yeah, I like the sound of that.

SPEAKER_01 8:46 But the question is how do you head bank with no head? These are the deep topics that we have to explore on this podcast, Dolly.

SPEAKER_00 8:57 Um I love that um all of the illustrations of Blemies look quite different, though.

SPEAKER_01 9:04 Yes, they do. Um so some Bleme are very muscular and some are thin, basically like humans, and some look pretty human and some barely look human at all. So this inconsistency kind of tells us something important that no one was copying a a real thing. I guess they were probably doing a bit of Chinese whispers on this. Um they were kind of just copying each other's descriptions.

SPEAKER_00 9:32 Yeah, and so if they just come from descriptions, uh you know, where did all of these stories of the blemies come from? Um some historians think that the blemis might be rooted in just exaggerated accounts of real Nubian tribes, or people seen ki carrying large shields with faces on, um, or perhaps that they had their, you know, these these people may have had their heads tucked close to their chests when they marched, for instance. Maybe that was part of their marching formation, and it gave the illusion of a face embedded in the chest for somebody watching from afar who was maybe for a foreign traveller who'd never seen that before. And actually some people think they could have been um travellers who wore their hair or their clothes in unfamiliar ways. And then you mentioned Chinese whispers, you know, over time, those sorts of different factors could certainly cause features to shift, uh details to blur, and then all of these different interpretations coming about. And, you know, as with Chinese whispers, it tends to happen that these interpretations become more extreme than the last.

SPEAKER_01 10:38 Yeah, so you can also take some influence, I think, from or you can take some explanation from other things in nature, like you probably can for things like Bigfoot, let's say. So if you look at uh some of the great apes like bonobos, when they're sitting down, they sort of tuck their head down and hunch their shoulders. It sort of looks like they don't really have a head, or that they don't have a neck, and the head is just part of their body. So maybe they were describing some sort of ape.

SPEAKER_00 11:08 Yeah, that's quite possible, but then how do you explain the next creature that we've got to talk about? Because you might be able to say a head embedded in a chest or a face embedded in a chest is an ape, or uh people stooping down, but what about dog-headed people? So this is the second of the four beasts that we're examining today. So, Matt, tell us more.

SPEAKER_01 11:34 So, as promised earlier, we're talking about the dog-headed people, and now these were otherwise known as the Cynocephalae. As Pliny the Elder mentioned, these were said to live in similar regions to the Blemys. It's kind of hard to describe them otherwise. They're basically just a man with a dog's head. Great. Thanks for that. The dog headed people amend the dog's heads, thanks for that. We can wrap up the episode there. You you know everything you need to know about the dog-headed people. So um just wanted to make sure everyone's on the same page. So, what are we thinking, like a labrador head? Not really a labrador, more like a hunting dog. So if you imagine like a long snout, teeth, and uh pointed ears. Not a chihuahua or like something cuter. No, I mean if you want to see that, you can try your favourite AI, and I'm sure it would generate it for you. But um, you know, pre-AI and we had the cynocephalae, and the consistent detail in the illustrations is this. They're they're not really described as animals that sort of happen to uh walk upright, they're described as people as well as like the the blemies. So they have human bodies, they have human hands, they stand in groups and they carry and use tools. They sometimes even wear clothing. I know dogs these days sometimes wear clothing, but it's a bit different. Um The only difference between sort of humans and uh these dog people are i i is the dog head.

SPEAKER_00 13:11 Okay, so heads seems to be a really important part of creating a mythical beast, doesn't it? Um headlessness or a change of heads. Um and before anyone listening sort of um rolls their eyes, I want to make something clear. These weren't originally presented as fairy tales. So in a lot of ancient and medieval writing, they're presented in the same tone that you would use to describe a distant country, like, you know, here's what lives over there, and the cynocephali just happened to be one of those creatures. And as with the Blemies, the Cynoshali almost always live over there, you know, somewhere at the far edge of your mental map. Um, in some accounts it might have been India, in others it's Ethiopia or North Africa or the mysterious east, which is, you know, already a bit of a clue, isn't it? Because when different writers place the same creature in completely different places, it usually means no one's working from first-hand knowledge. They're working from a tradition or a rumour that can't be uh pasted on, you know, can't can't be copy and pasted.

SPEAKER_01 14:15 So we can't really I guess we have to speculate a little bit here, but there's the factors that obviously nob n not many people would actually be able to go there to check. Um, maybe it's also a factor that you kind of don't want people to stray into the unknown. Uh yeah, like a story you tell people to say there's some scary stuff over there, don't go there. So they're kind of like a placeholder for the unknown.

SPEAKER_00 14:41 Yeah, exactly, like this idea that the world contains people or peoples unlike us somewhere out there.

SPEAKER_01 14:48 Yeah, so kind of like uh building this distrust of the unknown to so that people sort of stick together in in their own communities and things. That's how I look into this. But so these specifically these Cynocephalae, but what they did and what they were like, uh this is where it kind of kind of gets interesting because the Cinocephali, they're not described as mindless monsters. In many versions they also live in communities and they hunt and defend territory and they have leaders. Some sort of describe them as fierce, aggressive, intimidating, not to be approached, um, but others go the other way. So they're sometimes described as quite orderly or civilized in their own way.

SPEAKER_00 15:40 Yeah, that's odd, isn't it? Because you think if someone invents dogheaded men that they just go full down, like full bore down the horror route.

SPEAKER_01 15:47 That's right, but they don't, not consistently, and that's kind of why they make such a good creature for what we did before. They kind of sit on this fault line between two ways of thinking, like one side being, you know, they're beasts, and on the other, it's just they're humans, just different. And I I guess again you can kind of look at it that you know, people straying a bit further and seeing other people would be like, yeah, they are just people but different. Maybe they're trying to build this kind of feeling that yeah, they can look like us, but they're not us, they're you know, they're actually dog headed people. Um so some accounts sort of say that they communicate by just barking, um, but it's not presented as just you know what we think of as dogs barking, where it's kind of just noise. It's actually presented as a language. They can convey commands and negotiate and warn each other.

SPEAKER_00 16:44 Yeah, and as a result, um they were subjected to the same questions as the Blemies, like, are they human enough to have souls? And because of this lingering question, they start to creep into Christian storytelling. There's even a tradition, it's not a universal tradition, but it does it does crop up in some medieval art where Saint Christopher is depicted as um Sinuscephalous, uh so a dog-headed saint.

SPEAKER_01 17:10 It's crazy, isn't it? So in some versions, a dog-headed person becomes a saint?

SPEAKER_00 17:17 Yeah, it's not the mainstream depiction, but it does exist. And it's kind of revealing because it shows that for some medieval Christians, dog headed didn't automatically mean demonic. Um, and as far as you know, other descriptions go in a lot of texts, the detail is weird weirdly practical. So they're said to be hunters sometimes carrying uh spears or bows, maybe wearing animal skins. Um I wonder if it's okay for them to wear dog hides uh as their animal or to domesticate dogs.

SPEAKER_01 17:49 Oh yeah, yeah, that's strange, isn't it? Like yeah, if you're the pet if a dog-based animal has a pet that's a dog, um is that like slavery?

SPEAKER_00 18:02 I don't know. Oh yeah, it would be. I I wonder if it would be like us wearing the hide of a Neanderthal. Oh god, yeah, you don't it's actually quite gruesome to think about then I wouldn't wear a dog hide either, so no. I'm not sure how many instances of in archaeology of like dog hides are to be honest. I think we domesticated long enough them long enough ago that we didn't start skinning them to wear them as clothes.

SPEAKER_01 18:28 Yeah, yeah, it's a really actually you can go really far with this debate. Like it the dog headed people, would it be unethical to like domesticate dogs? Like, would you ever say you'd domesticate humans? It sounds a bit strange. Well, we are, we're self-domesticated, aren't we? That's true. I suppose you domesticate your children in a way, don't you? You turn them from wild to like people who can function in society. Mine's still in the wild phase at the moment. I don't know if we ever left that phase, Ollie. We didn't. So um let's go back to uh the dog-headed people rather than the human-headed people. So um so some accounts say that they live in mountainous regions, kind of like you know, tough mountain people shaped by a harsh environment. But some writers describe them as just sort of trading with neighbouring groups, exchanging goods and giving tribute and dealing with outsiders cautiously, much like a lot of humans of this time. So when we look at medieval manuscripts and when you see them illustrated, they they often appear with the same sort of visual language as any human group on on the margins. That they're armed, they're standing upright, sometimes they're shown kind of like confronting travellers, or sometimes they're simply shown existing alongside these other monstrous races as if they're just like another nation.

SPEAKER_00 19:58 Okay, but where does the idea come from in the first place? Because it's one thing to exaggerate a report or see a child's wild drawing and think that that's a real creature, but it is another thing to sort of land on this idea of dog headed and for it to stick and for it to become a real creature in the eyes of ancient people.

SPEAKER_01 20:21 That's true. I mean, it's a bit harder to explain uh unless there were some creatures that might look like this. I mean, obviously there's wolves and things, but they very clearly have a wolf's body. So if you've ever seen a baboon up close, especially something like a hammer-dryas baboon, now these baboons have like a long dog-like muzzle, they have sharp teeth, they have a mane, and it's quite a human posture when it sits or stands. So imagine you're hearing about that animal secondhand from someone who's travelled, and they don't have the concept of a primate as a category, and they're not thinking evolutionary, there weren't really zoos for reference for other people. So they might describe it as like a man but with the head of a dog, and then you can imagine how that tumbles into like, oh yeah, my mate saw a man with the head of a dog.

SPEAKER_00 21:21 Yeah, it just gets blown out of proportion, doesn't it? Because I think actually that's such a good point. We often forget, like, we can see pictures as easily as typing it into Google and finding them. We can go to zoos and see these animals. We think it's just um a given that we can we know what an animal looks like. You know, as as young as two and three, or even younger, we're showing pictures of animals from Africa like lions, and they just become a a part of our visual understanding, and and it wasn't the case for our ancestors.

SPEAKER_01 21:53 So the next possible explanation could be basically just cultural misunderstanding. So if Travellers encounter a distant group whose language sounds kind of harsh or unfamiliar, it's not that uncommon historically for outsiders to describe it as sort of barking or yelping or even growling. That's a pattern you kind of see across history, sadly. So they bark can kind of start as an insult or a misunderstanding and ends up as literal biology in the retelling.

SPEAKER_00 23:30 Yeah, kind of a grim view of how we view outsiders, but it makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 23:37 Yeah, um, and I guess we're just a bit more educated now, but you can kind of understand with unfamiliarity the best way to categorize things is just based on kind of the things that you know, and also there was a lot of distrust of other people because it was it was dangerous to trust other people. So the third possibility would be masks and ritual. So many cultures use animal masks in ceremonies, and these can include dog masks and wolf masks and jackal masks. So if a traveller saw a ritual that was using this and didn't understand what was going on, and then reported back, that story can turn into like they have dog heads. And once uh a classical author writes that down, it gains authority, it becomes real.

SPEAKER_00 24:28 Yeah, so then you get what like a later writer copying it, you get a medieval map maker illustrating it, uh, maybe an artist adds some teeth for a bit of drama, and then another adds armour, and you know, suddenly you don't just have a rumour, you have like well, something which has been drawn up and imagined in the minds of people. You have a group with an identity. Yeah, absolutely. But Matt, so far we've been talking about creatures that lived at the edges of the land, but the next one exists somewhere even more uncertain, the open sea, which for most of human history might as well have been another planet.

SPEAKER_01 25:10 So this creature doesn't stalk forests or deserts, it doesn't chase or hunt. In fact, most of the time it doesn't move at all because the aspidocalone isn't mistaken for an animal, it's mistaken for land.

SPEAKER_00 25:28 Right. This is the mythical beast that looks like an island.

SPEAKER_01 25:34 Yes, so for anyone listening that didn't catch that word, it was aspidocalone, and in medieval texts and bestiaries, the aspidocalone is described as an enormous sea creature, often said to resemble a turtle or a whale, and it was so vast that sailors confused its back for solid ground. So ships would anchor beside it, crews would disembark, and fires and camps would be maze, and only then would the creature reveal itself by sinking. Yes, by sinking, dragging ships, supplies and people down with it. Yeah, that's genuinely horrifying. Yeah, it is, especially because we both come from an island, you can imagine that that could if that happened, that's terrifying.

SPEAKER_00 26:29 So imagine if Guernsey just suddenly dragged all of its inhabitants down after however many hundreds of thousands of years of its existence.

SPEAKER_01 26:37 Yeah, that the turtle has woken up. So uh but it's not just something that we can theorize or joke about now, because what's striking about this is that it's very consistent across different sources. The Aspidocalone appears in early Christian texts like the Physiologus from the second century AD, which later fed into medieval bestiaries. You just remind me what uh what a besturi would have been. So bestiary is like a compendium of real and imaginary animals, um plants and rocks. Kind of like uh what Pliny the Elder was compiling.

SPEAKER_00 27:18 Right, okay, yeah. I I I'm sort of imagining it as the um the fantastic beasts and where to find them from Harry Potter.

SPEAKER_01 27:25 Yeah, basically basically the the real world version of this, yeah. Yeah, cool. Um so the asperdo also appears in uh seafaring law, which you can imagine why, based on you know the fact that it mostly seemed to affect sailors or they were worried about it. Uh and also in sermons and moral writing, sometimes it's called the aspidocalone, but sometimes it's just called the great fish. But the behaviour is always the same. It waits, it deceives, and then it kills through full stability.

SPEAKER_00 28:00 Yeah, which immediately to me brings me back to a point you made earlier. It kind of feels less like a monster and more like a warning. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 28:10 It's not like a creature that attacks you, it's a creature that punishes assumption or kind of like comfort in you know, you can imagine for seafarers it's actually quite a a useful kind of fable to say, you know, don't necessarily just make the assumption that when you're on dry land you're going to be safe. Um and this kind of tells us a lot generally about the people who told this story, because the the medieval sailors did live with a constant uncertainty. They didn't have accurate charts, they didn't have weather forecasts. There was no way of really knowing whether beyond the horizon was safety or or death. The sea was a really treacherous place to be.

SPEAKER_00 28:59 Yeah, and what people may have actually have been seeing was, you know, there are some plausible explanations. It could have just been whales, for instance. So some species of whale, they rest at the surface completely still for long periods of time. And if a sailor has never seen a whale before, especially in calm water, this massive, unmoving shape could easily look like maybe like a low-lying island. And then you throw seaweed on top, maybe some birds landing on it, maybe even some barnacles, and suddenly like it does, it feels quite solid. Until it isn't. Exactly. Um, and the second possibility is giant sea turtles, uh, which also makes a lot of sense. So leatherback turtles, for example, can reach enormous sizes. And early travelers describe turtle backs that look like land, especially um if you know visibility was poor.

SPEAKER_01 29:49 So again, the you can see how these might be based on real phenomena, but they're filtered through kind of fear and limited knowledge.

SPEAKER_00 29:59 Yeah, exactly. So, you know, what's fascinating here is that medieval writers didn't treat the asperdocalone as like random, they gave it meaning. So in Christian moral text, the asperdocalone becomes a metaphor for the devil. Um, you know, look safe, offers rest, but if you trust it, it destroys you. And in that sense, it's doing double duty. It's, as you mentioned, a very practical sailor's warning, but also a theological lesson, like not just beware of the sea, but also beware of false security.

SPEAKER_01 30:30 Yeah, yeah, definitely. And and that's kind of why it appears so often in bestiaries alongside real animals. Medieval readers didn't sharply separate biology from symbolism. A creature could be physically real and morally instructive at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 30:49 And it's also interesting, um, isn't it, that this idea extended not only as an island, but it's seen as a myth in multiple cultures, that the entire world is supported on the back of a giant turtle. Um, so unlike the Blemi or the Cinocephalae, this isn't about other people, it's about the environment itself. It's about a world that doesn't care whether you understand it or not.

SPEAKER_01 31:16 So far, our creatures have lived far away, but the catablipus is different because this creature doesn't live somewhere exotic, it lives somewhere nearby.

SPEAKER_00 31:28 Yeah, which already makes it a lot worse.

SPEAKER_01 31:31 Yeah, much worse. Uh so the catablipus is described by ancient writers, most famously Pliny the Elder. He has a lot to answer for with these. He does. Um It's described as a large, heavy animal, something like a buffalo or a wildebeest. It has a thick body, short legs, and a head so massive that it constantly droops downward. So heavy that the creature can barely even lift it.

SPEAKER_00 32:01 Yeah, I mean that sounds almost it sounds a bit frightening, but also a bit pitiful, that it can't even lift its own head up.

SPEAKER_01 32:08 Yeah, it does, it does on the face of it until you hear what happens if it does lift its head.

SPEAKER_00 32:14 Because anyone who meets the Catablipus' gaze dies instantly. Yes, exactly. So there's no attack, there's no bite, they're just dead.

SPEAKER_01 32:25 Yes, exactly. No wounds, no struggle. The catablepus doesn't chase people, it just exists in a place that you shouldn't be, and if you wander too close, then you die.

SPEAKER_00 32:37 So another good way of keeping people out of unwanted places, then, right? So where is this catabolipus meant to live?

SPEAKER_01 32:44 Well, it was almost always in swamps, marshes, low-lying wetlands, places associated with decay, rotting vegetation, dead animals, stagnant water, all of that sort of stuff. So Pliny places it in parts of Africa, but most importantly, he associates it with kind of like a landscape, not geography. Right. So the catablipus belongs to environments that just feel wrong. Places where the air is heavy and where animals might die suddenly and humans might fall ill without warning.

SPEAKER_00 33:23 Yeah, so another environmental monster, but this one um a bit subtler than the asperdocalone, you know, the sea kind of kills you dramatically, but the catablipus kind of kills you quietly. And I think that makes it way more unsettling. Um actually, in many ancient accounts, people don't even realise like what's happened to them. Um someone enters the marsh, hours later they're just found dead, no injury, uh, as we said, there's no sign of violence. So the explanation becomes that there's a creature out there whose presence, who just the fact of them existing is lethal. So you've described its looks, but is there any reference to like um a living, you know, a real animal that we can make a comparison between so we can explain how these really looked?

SPEAKER_01 34:07 Well, it it's quite tricky because each depiction looks vastly different. So one image might be of a giant upright elephant, three times the size of a normal human, with like a big flabby belly and human fists, but another might be more like muscular and lean and walking on all fours with curved horns and sharp teeth and tusks, and there's others that might be more kind of cute, basically a vicious puppy.

SPEAKER_00 34:42 And then there's some as though it's kind of like a cow-like creature. Yeah, there's some really great pictures if you ever want to search the catablipus, you will not find two of the same image, which I find really fascinating. But why is it thought that this particular creature was a sign of instant death then? Like what's actually going on?

SPEAKER_01 35:02 Well, I think the most there's a few candidates for this, but probably one of the clearest is that it's a sign, uh, like you mentioned before, of kind of there being some cause of death in that area. So let's start with toxic gases. Uh in swamps and marshes, they can release gases like methane, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon dioxide, and in certain conditions, these gases can kind of just displace oxygen and kill you very quickly. So to someone without the chemistry or atmospheric science, it can feel like death came from nowhere.

SPEAKER_00 35:41 Yeah, and then if someone went looking for you, they might die too as a consequence of those toxic gases, which sort of reinforces the idea that something in that specific place is deadly, right?

SPEAKER_01 35:52 Yeah, and there's another explanation that sort of comes off of this, which could just be disease. You know, marshes have long been associated with illnesses like malaria, long before anyone knew what caused them.

SPEAKER_00 36:07 What about the um whole thought that they kill just by looking at you? Yeah, this is a bit like is it Medusa, maybe?

SPEAKER_01 36:15 Uh so um that's where symbolism and misunderstanding kind of uh collide. So if people believe that merely seeing the catablepus caused death, what they're really saying is being there at all is enough to kill you. This is pre-scientific thinking grappling with kind of invisible threats. But the catablepus is what you invent when danger has no obvious source. And like the Aspidocalone, it isn't just biology, but it's also moral. Many medieval writers treat the Catablipus as um like a warning against forbidden places against wandering into lands that is stagnant, corrupt, or cursed.

SPEAKER_00 37:04 So from dragons to vampires to unicorns, there are many mythical creatures that still inspire the stories that we tell, but there are few that remain as true possibilities, you know, creatures with question marks over their existence, living somewhere out there in the world, you know, like Bigfoot, the Chupacabra or Nessie. These cryptids, as they're known, they're exciting fantasies that most of us don't actually believe in. Uh they're they're myths, they're legends that we sort of keep as part of our culture out of choice. Some people do believe in them, but most most of us don't, and it's we don't keep them uh in our minds because we fear them. We we want them there. But before these came about, ancient legends, it seems, were very different. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 37:53 For for much of human history, humans didn't invent mythical creatures for fun. They were often describing something real that they couldn't quite explain any other way. In an unexplored world, one where it would be rare or even impossible to see far beyond your own birthplace, stories would travel home from faraway lands and they would sound fantastical.

SPEAKER_00 38:19 Right. And I mean, have you ever seen the way that medieval artists painted or depicted animals? Um so more often than not, when they heard about an animal, they were relying purely on the description of someone who saw it, because obviously they didn't have cameras back then. So they end up looking kind of wonky. Um so if you take an elephant, for example, so an artist's interpretation back then may have been based purely on the description of a traveller. You know, they might say something like, Oh, it's it's like a horse, but bigger, uh, with a long nose, and then they get this monstrosity that we're looking at right now.

SPEAKER_01 38:54 Yes. So to describe it for listeners, um, we have basically almost like a dog-like creature with a a trunk that looks like a trumpet. Yeah. Um and the feet look like paws like a dog. So it it does look like a cryptid, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:12 Yeah, it very, very much looks cryptid-like, doesn't it? And it just goes to show how much of the world was yet unknown, only just a few hundred years ago, really. But as exploration expanded and documentation improved, these just sort of disappeared. So you can see why these legends spread as though they were fact and people just believed them. But you know, now it's a bit harder to get away with in the modern age. We have cameras, we've explored much of the world, and with that, these sorts of legends died. I mean, I know people still take pictures of Bigfoot, but they're always um suspiciously blurry considering we have such amazing cameras on our phones these days. But anyway, I am for one excited to see what happens when we finally explore the deep ocean properly. Because we mentioned uh the asperdocalone and the fact that sea is treacherous and we don't know much about it. Actually, we we still don't know much about the ocean. Uh you know, the deep ocean is what, 99% unexplored? And there's an engineering company called Deep that's doing something really fascinating, creating these undersea habitats, which look a little bit like the Gungan world in Star Wars, and and their goal um is to make humans aquatic. So it might not be that distant into the future that we can find new species of creatures that we could have never imagined. Right now with the deep sea, we're kind of in the same position as medieval people, right? In terms of being able to explain what was there. Um maybe one day we will dig up a mermaid.

SPEAKER_01 40:45 Well, you know, um if you look at the sea, um, especially the deep sea, a lot of the creatures and a lot of the plants look like alien worlds. Yeah, like how we describe or create alien worlds in media. So it will be amazing to see more of, and it'll be amazing if we ever do find those mermaids. Um but to that end, there are still creatures that people believed in, even after mapping the world, to explain things like death, fear, and misfortune. And we'll be exploring those in our next episode.

SPEAKER_00 41:21 And this is what we did before. I'm Matt. And I'm Ollie. And if you've got an idea for another episode, we'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment below, and we'll be sure to credit you in the outro of that episode if we choose your idea.

SPEAKER_01 41:34 And please do subscribe if you enjoyed the episode, it really does help us out massively. Thank you very much, and see you next time. See you next time.