Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (2 page)

Recent work in animal behavior has revealed something fascinating: There are personality types in animals. Among fish in a single species, there are adventurous individuals, ready and willing to take risks, and there are more cautious and timid individuals, fearful of doing anything that could put them in danger. Similar variations in
personality are starting to be found in birds and mammals too. A recent study led by Kathryn Arnold at the University of York revealed that when greenfinches were presented with brightly colored objects in their food, there was considerable variation in how long it took each bird to eat. When intriguing objects were attached to the birds’ perches, a similar variation was found. Some birds quickly flew to explore the new toy while others stayed away.

Being courageous or curious undoubtedly presents serious dangers. Ongoing studies indicate that fish with more daring personalities are more likely to nibble on bait on the end of a hook and risk-taking rodents more commonly end up in traps set by researchers.
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Yet having a personality that predisposes an animal to take risks can yield rewards. Courage can lead an animal to investigate previously unexplored locations where food is present, or it can lead to the discovery of well-hidden nesting areas that have yet to be found by any other members of the species. Such discoveries can lead to better health and better breeding opportunities for the courageous animal that allow for its courageous genes to be passed along more readily to the next generation.

Whether some humans are genetically predisposed to be more adventurous than others remains to be determined, but there clearly are some people who ultimately are more willing to take risks. Make no mistake, the instinct to flee from danger is still deeply rooted in every person’s brain, but some of us are more willing than others to go to places associated with danger. Just as with daring animals that find resources by taking risks, it is logical to assume that more adventurous humans have historically made the same sorts of gains. For this reason, monsters may be serving a valuable purpose in society. By representing key fears and allowing these to be discussed and explored in a safe
environment, monsters might be making it feasible for these fears to be more effectively prepared for and ultimately faced, so the benefits of being a courageous individual can be more readily reaped. Like lion cubs play-fighting in the safety of their den, monsters may be allowing threats to be toyed with in the safe sandbox of the imagination.

So if monsters are present in society for both pleasure and mental practice for future frightening interactions, what happens when our fears are overcome? What then?

To a certain extent, danger should function as the life essence of monsters. Once a perceived danger is dispelled, this essence is destroyed and the beast becomes extinct. It may continue to live on in fiction as a fossil of its former self or as a mere creature of interest, but not as a monster with all of the terror that comes with such status.

Fears have changed a lot since the dawn of humanity, and with these changes have come alterations in the pantheon of monsters that lurk in our world. The Minotaur is no longer with us, but aliens are. In a sense, monsters, while strictly the stuff of fantasy, experience evolution at a rate that is in stride with the pace of human understanding of the surrounding world. Science, the empirical testing and exploration of the world, which is about as seemingly unrelated to monsters as can be, is both responsible for their birth by discovering new environments where they might be living and the cause of their destruction through the ultimate revelation that they cannot possibly be real.

That many monsters have risen and fallen throughout the ages is clear. What is less clear is which specific fears these monsters stood for and how long these fears actually lasted. An exploration of fear’s mask, the mask of the monster, seems an excellent way to find out.
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As it happens, this has really screwed up lots of biological research. We have spent decades “thinking” we could get a reasonable sense of what animals are like by setting traps in the wild and then studying the animals that get caught. But if the animals that get caught are only the most daring individuals (or the most foolish) in a population, they are hardly giving us a reasonable sense of how a species behaves!

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A gentle disclaimer as we begin our little tour of all things monstrous: There is no way to know with certainty what was actually in our ancestors’ minds when they invented the various monsters that have come to haunt our world. We have to guess. Guesses come in many forms. There are those of the wild variety and there are the educated ones guided by shreds of evidence. You will find the latter in this book.

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Giant Animals—Nemean Lion, Calydonian Boar, Rukh, King Kong

“Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don’t think they exist.”

—Westley,
The Princess Bride

In the midst of the darkened jungle, it sniffs the wind and catches the scent of a lone human not more than a mile off. Saliva dripping from its sharp fangs, it eagerly sets off in search of its prey. There is but a sliver of a moon in the sky, but this doesn’t matter to the creature’s inhuman eyes. The scent grows stronger and the beast slows its movements to a crawl as it silently stalks its prey from the depths of the forest. Then, in a split second, it springs into action. Claws rend flesh in a single swipe. Blood gushes forth. Jaws sink deep into the shoulder, snapping bones as if they were twigs. In an instant, the human is dead.

A lion might not look particularly monstrous while sitting caged in a zoo, but make no mistake, a midnight encounter with one in the wild would change that perception in a hurry. For most people today,
there is not much reason to worry about being hunted.
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Every now and again the story of a lone backpacker being eaten by a large predator makes its way across the media, but the reality is that predators capable of eating people are mostly endangered and often terrified of even coming close to us.

Yet it was not a long time ago when wild animals were a regular cause of death. In the 1800s, rain forests weren’t ecoholiday destinations where tourists could be found snapping photographs of toucans and orangutans. They were jungles where bloodthirsty beasts waited to eat the unwary. Explorers who entered such places often did not come back. And that was in the 1800s. Ancient humans had it much worse.

The Aché people of Paraguay hunt with bows and arrows to this very day and, unlike humans in most other parts of the world who sit alone at the top of the food chain, they are hunted. Jaguars share much territory with the Aché and eat many of the same small mammals that the Aché depend upon to survive. However, jaguars also readily kill the Aché themselves, inflicting an 8 percent mortality rate on males in the population. For comparison, consider the fact that in 2002 the World Health Organization calculated a 2.1 percent mortality rate from road traffic accidents, a 2.2 percent mortality rate from malaria, and a 9.6 percent mortality rate from strokes. It is mind-boggling to think that jaguars could bring a somewhat similar loss of life to males in a population as strokes do in the developed world today, but given that the Aché have the same sorts of rudimentary tools that most of our ancient ancestors had, we have to assume that this was the way life once was.

Yet far beyond the issue of not having advanced equipment for a journey into the wilderness, early humans first exploring the wild had precious little information on what to expect there. One of the
first encyclopedic works on the natural world was written by the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, and he wasn’t even born until AD 23. Ancient adventurers would have had only tales passed by word of mouth to inform them of what to expect when they stepped beyond the safety of their town or village.

Let’s face it, word of mouth distorts, but that was not the only problem. In jungles, dense vegetation blocks most lines of sight and forces visitors to make sense of fleeting glimpses of movement, strange animal calls, and mysterious prints in the mud. There was also the thrill and fear. Adrenaline dramatically alters perceptions. Imagine the first reports: “The beast was as large as a house!” “Its teeth were as long as daggers!” “I once caught a fish
this
big!” You get the idea. It is not hard to see how otherwise ordinary animals transformed into monsters of legend.

With human exploration of the natural world in its infancy, the first environments of mystery encountered were the wild spaces just beyond town. Thus, it is unsurprising that some of the earliest monsters in human history are merely fierce animals with extraordinary characteristics.

Among these was the Nemean lion, a great cat born to Typhon, the godlike creator of monsters, which was later nurtured by the goddess Hera. A description of this beast as a fierce man-eater with skin that could not be harmed by mortal weapons has been attributed to the Greek scholar Apollodorus (180–120 BC). In his account, the monster is hunted by the hero Hercules, who must slay the beast as the first of his great labors. His tale reads: “And having come to Nemea and tracked the lion, he first shot an arrow at him, but when he perceived that the beast was invulnerable, he heaved up his club and made after him. And when the lion took refuge in a cave with two mouths, Hercules built up the one entrance and came in upon the beast through the other, and putting his arm round its neck held it tight till he had choked it.”

Exactly how big the lion actually was is not mentioned, but the mythic scene is well depicted on ancient pottery. In these works, the Nemean lion is shown to be as large as Hercules or slightly larger.
Hercules was part god and known for being big and strong. So a lion matching him in size would, presumably, have been large too, but only slightly larger than lions that are alive today. To say that the lion was a giant would be wrong. It is never depicted as dwarfing either Hercules or any humans, so we can assume it was merely meant to be a mean and mostly invulnerable beast.

But some monsters actually were giants. Homer, who lived around 850 BC, recounted a tale in the
Iliad
of a fierce boar that was unleashed upon humanity. According to the story, there was a king of a Greek city known as Calydon. He was a good king who looked after his people by making frequent sacrifices to the gods, but at one point he failed to properly honor the goddess of the hunt, Artemis. She became angry
at this lack of respect and, in a temper tantrum, let her personal boar run wild in the king’s lands.
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Homer describes this boar: “The Lady of Arrows sent upon them the fierce wild boar with the shining teeth, who after the way of his kind did much evil to the orchards of Oineus. For he ripped up whole tall trees from the ground and scattered them headlong roots and all, even to the very flowers of the orchard.”

“Shining teeth” indicates that its tusks were large and sticking well out of its mouth, and to be able to uproot tall trees, it must have been enormous. Artwork supports this last claim with Greek pottery revealing a boar as long as more than two men were tall, suggesting that it would have been about a length of 11 feet (3.4 meters).

As monsters go, the Calydonian boar and the Nemean lion did not require much creativity. One was just a somewhat large lion with seemingly weapon-deflective skin, the other just a boar that differed from normal animals in its size, strength, and ferocity. All storytellers needed to do was point to the real lions and boars that most Greeks were familiar with and say, “The boar that Artemis released was like that, only bigger and meaner,” or “See that lion? The one that haunted Nemea looked the same, but its skin was invulnerable.”