Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (3 page)

And while it might not be easy for modern audiences to appreciate why such creatures would have been frightening, consider this: Male wild boars frequently grow to 5 feet (1.5 meters) in length, weigh over 440 pounds (200 kilograms), and their tusks are more than 4 inches (10 centimeters) long. Today, fatalities from boar attacks in Europe are extremely rare, but traumatic wounds are not. The wounds can be easily treated in hospitals, but a few thousand years ago blood loss and infection would cause many encounters with these animals to be lethal. Boars are exceedingly territorial, and before their habitats were significantly reduced, they were a serious menace. With fear of wild boars already present among ancient populations, it would not have taken much for a mysterious call heard in the woods and unexplained fallen trees to be tethered to the presence of a boar of mythic proportions.

As for lions, they were not just the inhabitants of the African savannas. European lions lived in and around ancient Greece.
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To the best of modern scientific knowledge, these were as fierce and as large as the African lions of today. They probably stayed well away from human settlements, but even so, if any lions hunted humans,
the stories of such events would have spread like wildfire along trade routes and could have quickly led to the imagining of a terrible beast of legendary size. And the tendency for lions to hunt at night would have strengthened the myth. People living near lion dens would vanish in the night, leaving behind just a smearing of bloody remains. Many lion attacks would have had no eyewitnesses to describe what exactly did the killing. And even if there were witnesses, their eyes would have been mostly useless in the dark. They would have seen glimpses of action, heard roars and screams, and been overwhelmed by fear. An accurate report of what sort of predator had attacked would have been impossible. So the stage was set for normal lions to be transformed into supernatural monsters. This is probably where the concept of invulnerability set in. European lions would have been able to survive a number of wounds before being killed. It is not unlikely that watching a lion continue an attack after being stabbed or shot by an arrow led to the rumor that it was impervious to mortal weapons.
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Even so, could the ancients have actually been right? Could there have really been a lion or boar of mythic proportions?

Many land animals can get really big. The African elephant can reach over 25 feet (7.5 meters) in length, 11 feet (3.3 meters) in height, and can weigh more than 13,000 pounds (6,000 kilograms). Many dinosaurs were even larger. However, big animals leave behind big bones when they die and tend to be conspicuous in the fossil record. Some of these bones could have been interpreted as the bones of predators, particularly if they were found alongside the skull of an extinct saber-toothed cat or cave bear. It is also reasonable to believe that the fossil tusks of one animal, like those of a mammoth or mastodon,
were mistaken by the Greeks to be the tusks of a giant boar. Adrienne Mayor’s book
The First Fossil Hunters
looks at the interactions between ancient people and fossils, and points out that some of these relatives of the modern elephant were once dwelling on the islands in the Mediterranean and that their remains ended up being labeled as having belonged to heroes, giants, Titans, and even the Cyclops.
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There are even some fossil tusks in the Temple of Athena Alea at Tegea that are identified as having belonged to the Calydonian boar. Such discoveries no doubt played a part in the conjuring up of giant animal monsters, but what of living animals? Could a particularly large lion or giant boar species have actually been plaguing ancient humans? In the case of the Nemean lion, the answer is an intriguing yes.

The Eurasian cave lion was similar to the lions of Africa and the recently extinct European lions, but it grew as much as 25 percent larger. And it seems likely that it had interactions with ancient humans since it was alive when people were roaming around much of Europe and Asia. Evidence of the lion does not appear in the fossil record much after 11,000 BC, but numerous cultures that are widely thought to have mastered language and some degree of oral storytelling were already in existence at this time. It is possible that these people captured the essence of this great cat in their tales and passed along stories about it through the generations both to entertain and to warn fellow members of the population about dangerous animals in the surrounding environment.

Moreover, 11,000 BC may not have been the actual date when the cave lion vanished from the face of the earth. Just because nobody has found more recent fossils of the species does not mean it did not linger on. The fossil record is a fickle thing and it often
does not provide a perfect snapshot of ancient history. Fossils form in regions where sediment can quickly fall on top of an animal after it has died. When lions were common in areas near lakes and rivers, their bones would readily get covered up and preserved. Preservation also tends to be good in caves, where lion fossils are often found. However, as humanity spread across the landscape, and freshwater sources along with caves were identified as valuable places to settle, lions would have been driven away from these places and forced into environments where they would be less likely to fossilize after death. They may have died out shortly after being displaced in this way, but it is possible that some small and isolated populations endured for several thousand years longer, particularly in more remote and less hospitable locations at higher altitudes where humans were not commonly spending time. If this was true, then the Mesopotamians of 6000 BC may well have tangled with some very big cats and had more than the stories of their ancestors to give them nightmares.

Moreover, if isolated populations of Eurasian cave lions did hang on in mountainous regions, this may have increased both their size and their resistance to weapons in some rather fascinating ways. To begin with, evolution drives mammal populations dwelling in colder environments to get larger over time. This has to do with the physics of heat. Small bodies have more surface area relative to their overall mass and lose heat from their cores much faster than large bodies. For this reason, big animals are much less resistant to heat loss and tend to better tolerate cold climates. This is why the Kodiak bears living on the frigid Alaskan islands are so much larger than their closely related grizzly bear kin dwelling in milder climates. It is also why the mammals that survived the various ice ages, like the woolly mammoth, giant sloth, and woolly rhinoceros, grew to such enormous sizes. They were extraordinarily resistant to heat loss.

Whether Eurasian cave lions were in fact driven into the mountains and whether natural selection actually did lead to the already large lions getting larger is of course speculation, but the evolutionary
mechanisms that connect cold and size are well known, so the possibility is not mere fantasy. The presence of unusually large and powerful lions in remote mountain areas mixed with the adrenaline-influenced perceptions may well have been responsible for people coming to believe in a monstrous lion.

As for the Nemean lion’s invulnerability, for weapons to have bounced off of its body, as described in Apollodorus’s story, it must have had really tough skin. Is it possible that a lion had such skin?

There is a genetic disease called scleroderma that arises in humans and makes the skin thicken. It is, however, a disease. Those who suffer from it often develop kidney and lung problems that cause a lot of pain. Other animals can develop this condition, but it is hard to imagine scleroderma causing the skin of a lion to thicken to a point where it could deflect an arrow or a sword. Humans who suffer from scleroderma are more fragile than they are invulnerable. Thus, scleroderma as an explanation for the weapon-deflecting properties of the Nemean lion does not make sense. For its skin to have been able to do what Apollodorus said it could, the skin would have had to have been as thick as that of an armadillo.

Could some mutant lion with skin as thick as an armadillo have been around in ancient Greece? Anything is possible when it comes to genetic mutation, where the DNA in an animal spontaneously changes and leads to the expression of physical characteristics that are distinctly different from those of others, but such a lion would hardly have been a threat. A lion with thick armadillolike skin would barely be able to move, let alone hunt and kill humans. So a big, fierce lion that was capable of dodging arrows and shrugging off injuries seems plausible, but a lion with skin that could deflect weapons is hard to believe. However, fur raises some intriguing possibilities.

Just as animals with larger size tend to thrive in cold environments, so too do animals with thicker fur. This is the reason why woolly mammoths dominated much of the landscape during the most recent ice age, and why mammals dwelling in cold environments have much heavier coats than mammals of the same species
dwelling in warmer climates. Fur does not fossilize well, so it is hard to know if the Eurasian cave lion had a particularly thick coat to begin with, but if it was driven into cooler regions and forced to endure the cold for a few thousand years, individuals in the population with the thickest and densest fur should have been selected for, leading to the evolution of a great cat with a very thick coat. Of course, a very thick coat of fur can’t stop a bullet from a high-powered rifle, but for ancient human hunters wielding bronze daggers and wooden spears, such a coat may have afforded just enough protection to make the lions seem impervious.
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But what of the Calydonian boar? Could a boar of such size have actually existed? Unlike the Nemean lion, which might have been the result of ancient humans tangling with a large, but now extinct, species, no boar species of particularly large size seems to have existed during recent human history. Even so, there is the possibility of a truly giant boar having existed if mutation is considered. In theory, there could have been a small population of mutant boars that happened to live near ancient Greece and grew to twice the size of all other normal boars.
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Regardless of species, all individual animals are limited by the genes that are given to them by their parents. The mixing of genetic material that takes place when sperm and egg unite creates variety, with maternal and paternal characteristics getting shuffled together
into a novel mix, but the mixing does not lead to the birth of offspring that have traits totally unlike any seen in the parents or extended family. Take human families as an example: Two tall parents are likely to have tall kids. Some of these kids might even ultimately grow taller than their parents, but only by inches. It would be preposterous for a child to grow to twice the size of his parents, unless he was a mutant.

This discussion may sound like it belongs in a comic book with optic blasts, adamantium, and superhuman healing, but mutants are very real and they are among us.

The pituitary gland, located at the base of the brain, is responsible for releasing hormones that control various functions of the body, including growth. Growth hormones are critical for human development, but too much of them circulating in the blood can lead to abnormal growth. Normally, the pituitary does exactly what it is supposed to and releases growth hormones in strictly controlled levels. However, sometimes benign tumors develop in the pituitary gland and cause it to secrete higher growth hormone levels than it is supposed to. In most cases, these tumors develop during adulthood after bones in the body have stopped growing in length. In these situations, the released hormones cause the forehead to become more prominent, the jaw to thicken, and hands and feet to become steadily larger, leading to the disease known as acromegaly. The body becomes deformed and more robust, but it does not become significantly longer or taller. However, in some uncommon cases, growth-hormone-secreting tumors in the pituitary can develop during childhood before the body has stopped growing. This early tumor growth leads to increased growth hormone levels, which drive the bones to grow much more than they normally would. In most of these cases, this situation can be made even worse if puberty is delayed or disrupted due to the effect of the growing tumor on the other cells of the pituitary gland regulating puberty. Under these circumstances, the bones just keep on growing and people can end up at the extreme height of up to 9 feet (2.8 meters). Most intriguingly, it is possible for these tumors to be associated with a mutant gene that can be passed along from parent to child, meaning that populations of very large people can emerge in locations where these genes are common.

Such musings are not mere speculation. Charles Byrne, the Irish Giant, who was 7 feet 7 inches (2.3 meters) tall, left Ireland for England in the mid-1700s to make a career on the carnival circuit. He was initially thought to be an isolated individual. When he died in London in 1783, researchers kept his skeleton in a museum and speculated about the cause of his disease. In 1909, with the discovery of the pituitary gland tumors that can cause gigantism, Byrne’s skull was cut open, and it was found that he had suffered from exactly such a tumor. Another hundred years later, after seeing a historic picture of Byrne standing next to two twin giants from a nearby village in Ireland, a team led by Márta Korbonits at the London School of Medicine started speculating that perhaps Byrne was not an isolated rarity after all. “There were a lot of stories, folktales, and names of places, hills related to giants exactly in the region where Byrne was coming from,” explains Korbonits.

Keen to look at this more closely, Korbonits and her team collected DNA from one of Byrne’s molars, which had been preserved for more than two hundred years in a museum. They analyzed the DNA for the possible presence of a mutant gene. Remarkably, they found something.

In 2011, they explained in the
New England Journal of Medicine
that Byrne did indeed have a genetic mutation predisposing him to develop a pituitary tumor leading to his extreme height. Moreover, when they analyzed extremely tall, living patients from the region where Byrne had been born 250 years earlier, they found they also carried the mutant gene. Interestingly, some people carry the abnormal gene but never develop a pituitary tumor. Why the gene causes only some people to become giants is still unknown, but the results make it clear that giant humans have existed throughout history, and while giants themselves are often sterile and cannot give birth to more giants, their siblings who carry the gene, but who never develop the tumor, have the genetic potential to create concentrated clusters of giants by having many children.