From the Vault: The First Monster

the first monsters that humans ever dreamed up? And where this combination of bestial and human body parts comes together and what it means. So let's get right to it. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Stuff to Blow your Mind on the First Monster. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And of course it's October, so we are still doing some of our favorite stuff

of the year. Monster content. That's right, God, did I just say content. I'm the monster. I'm the content creating monster. Let's think of it as is monster cargo, monsters cargo. I think that we're delivering to the listeners years, yeah, to create a cargo cult of our listeners. So I was wondering, just recently, you know what is the oldest monster, Because as you go back in time, monsters become in a way, they become less uniquely scary, and they become

more elementally scary. They become less like I don't know, the Girl in the Ring and all that kind of recent popular monster fad stuff, and they become more like a dragon or a beast with a bull's head or something. And so I was wondering, like, you know what, what's the earliest thing in recorded history? There there are some

things in ancient Sumerian, Assyrian Babylonian texts. I just wanted to read one sort of monster passage I came across from an ancient Assyrian text called the Seven Evil Spirits. This is translated into English by R. C. Thompson in nineteen o three, and it's this ancient Assyrian poem. It goes raging storms evil gods. Are they ruthless demons who in Heaven's vault were created? Are they workers of evil are they? They lift up the head to evil every day,

to evil destruction, to work of the seven. The first is the south Wind. The second is a dragon whose mouth is opened that none can measure. The third is a grim leopard, which carries off the young. The fourth is a terrible shibou. The fifth is a furious wolf who knoweth not to flee. The sixth is a rampant thing is ill and which marches against God and King. The seventh is a storm, an evil wind, which takes vengeance. Well, that those that al sounds remarkable, But I'm instantly thinking

some of those are just animals. Like the wolf is just like a dumb wolf, Like it's just not smart enough to run away. Right. I wonder about the grim leopard. The grim leopard sounds kind of monstrous because it carries off the young. Grim seems to that that implies some kind of human affect. Yeah, well, you know, I guess you get into definitions of monster. Right. Is a monster something that is a combination of things? Is it something that is entirely unreal or is it just something real

that is exaggerated in size? Yeah, well, I mean if it's an evil creature that works destruction upon the earth and marches against God and King. I'd say that's probably a monster or people, you know, But I feel like we're we're actually already too late, because we're muddling around in recorded history, and you can go much deeper. So in August of nineteen thirty nine, a group of archaeologists were doing field work at a Stone Age cave site

in southern Germany. And the cave was called Stottlehol which means stable cave, and it was at Hollenstein near vogel Herd. At this cave site, the researchers uncovered this massive collection of ivory fragments, broken pieces made from the tusks tusks of a Pleistocene mammoth and now it's Ice Age mammoth of Europe, wooly mammoth. Unfortunately, something happened. Just a matter

of days after this initial discovery. World War two broke out, not a great time to be digging in southern Germany, and so the dig had to be quickly abandoned and the dig was filled in and the broken pieces of the mammoth ivory were laid in storage for decades, and then about thirty years later, a German archaeologist named Joachim Han started trying to fit the ivory shards together playing this. You know, if you've ever seen these games, the three

D jig saw puzzle game him of artifactor reconstruction. It looks like a nightmare of trying to see how all these things because obviously some pieces are missing. It's like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle with half half the puzzle. Uh. And so we had more than two fragments, and he discovered that the pieces of ivory were originally part of

the same Paleolithic figurine. It was a statuette about thirty one cimeters long, which is just over a foot, and it was carbon fourteen dated to somewhere between thirty five and forty thousand years old. And once the pieces were put together, it became clear that you could still make out representative features, features that appeared to be both human and non human. And this is the central image I

want to talk about in today's episode. This is the figure that would come to be known as the loan Minch, which is German for the lion man. And if you want to see an image of the Loan Ninch, we will have a picture of it on the landing page of this episode it's stuff to blow your behind dot com it Uh, it's it's rather regal looking. Yeah, well I would say it's regal like it's it's got this upright posture, and it does look very stately, but also in the spirit of the grim leopard of Assyria. It's

kind of grim. It's got this kind of like there is no pity in the lionman's face. No, no pity. I just looked in closer at it, and I don't see I don't see a shred of pity, like it would pass your sentence and and not not heed your tears. So, after this original reconstruction and the following decades, there was this long, multi stage process that led to the final

reconstruction of the artifact in fuller and fuller detail. So in the nineteen eighties there was a paleontologist named Elizabeth Schmidt who added more pieces from additional re excavations of the site, and she corrected some errors and previous reconstructions, and the clear impression of this feline head began to emerge.

And then in the two thousands and other archaeologists named Klaus Joachim kind returned to the Stytle Cave to uncover more original piece is and it led to this amazing version of the artifact that you can go see today. I think it's usually at the Oom Museum in Germany, but I believe it is currently on loan at the British Museum. In fact, I believe it was the British Museum tweeting about the acquisition that acquisition the loan that

made me think about doing this episode. So the lionman, he stands like a human in this two footed bipedal posture, back straight with human arms straped down to the side, human torso maybe lion ish kinds of legs, but this proud menacing head of a big cat. And you've got to wonder. So this is thirty five to forty thousand years ago there, long before recorded history. Nobody was writing down what they were thinking. There apparently was no written language.

So what did this figure mean to the Stone Age people who made it? Yeah, I mean, for the most part, we can only we can only guess. We can certainly look to more increasingly more complex ideals that came afterwards. But you look at it and you think, was this is this a deity. Is this a punishing creature? Is this I've seen the term master of animals thrown around in interpreting similar alleged figures from cave paintings and another

ancient remains. Yeah, there is a sort of intuitive sense in which you could see an ancient person seeing an apex predator like a lion or any any kind of big cat as some sort of god of the wilderness that would have power over other animals because it is at the top of the food chain. But it's a serious question to imagine why people wouldn't make this artifact, because making an artifact like this would have been an

extreme sacrifice. Uh. These would have been people, I think very likely living not always very far from the edge of starvation. Uh. And an artifact like this took resources, It took time, it took energy, It wore down your sharp flint tools and the carving process. In fact, there was a in recent years there was an ex peerman by a guy named Wolf Heine that I watched a video of online. And this guy specializes in replicating ancient artifacts using the methods and tools that would have been

available to the people who made them. And his reconstruction of the low and minch using these flint carving tools. He says it took more than three hundred and seventy hours. And in this video, if you sit and watch it, like the unbelievable laborious nous of the project begins to sink in. You just watch him going over and over

this ivory tusk with this piece of flint. And when you look at the guy's hands, I started to feel how working this flint rock over the ivory for hours and hours would just turn your fingers into hot ground beef. Just terrible. Yeah. And and to your point, these were people that lived on the edge. They were they were wanderers. They had not reached the point in the ascension of human civilization where you had specialists who could set aside

time to create something like this. Uh. And if they created something like this at obviously wasn't going to be just a toy for a child to play with. It was something important, right, And there are signs in the artifact itself that seemed to signify that it had cultural importance, right. Yeah.

The surface of the original artifacts seems to have been smoothed from excessive handling, as if it were passed around in a ritual for instance, Right, he said, yeah, so it looks like this is something that was handled a lot. It's got that worn down feeling to it um And this is one reason that the Lowan bench is often

cited is perhaps the earliest evidence that exists of religious beliefs. Now, who would the people that made this artifact have been, Well, it was almost certainly modern humans living in the area at the time. But but it's also worth noting that modern humans and the under dolls um lived in this area at this at the same time they coexisted. And uh.

I did find a quote from a Jeffrey Brantingham, an archaeologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and he says that he doesn't think it's far fetched to think that Neanderthal's uh, you know, could have made similar items.

But for the most part, everyone seems to be on board with the idea that these were modern Homo sapiens that created these artifacts, anatomically modern except not quite so hunched over from watching YouTube, although right, uh yeah, but there may be reasons to think that other members of this this ancient culture or this you know, ancient what would you call it, sort of a loose idea of a culture if it was mostly small bands of people rather than cities or nations, but that whatever, the people

of this time period were made artifacts like this in general, because this isn't the only one, right, Yeah, that's right. In two thousand three, another line was discovered in southwestern Germany or what is now southwestern Germany, and this one has carbon day to do around the same time period. So by by some estimates, it kind of depends who's doing the math and who's you know, doing the figure in But by some estimates, these are the oldest statues

and the oldest examples figurative art. However, we do have the Venus of the Whole Fells and uh, and by some estimates this takes the title. But the estimates here like thirty five thousand and forty thousand years ago, so we're kind of placing it in basically the same time period. They were just discoveries, key discoveries made in two thousand and two thousand and sixteen. If you've if you've looked at a lot of like really ancient human artifacts, you've

probably seen images of these. Uh. The venous images are essentially a feminine figure like you know, kind of kind of a round feminine figure with without a head or or very little detail provided outside of like breasts and belly. Yeah. Yeah, It's often seen as having the what we're perceived as the feminine figures exaggerated, so it would be in large breasts and large tips and stuff like that. And for that reason people often look at this and say that

they think it had some kind of fertility significance. Right now, you know where in depending you can go back and forth over which one could be older than the other. It seems like they likely existed at the same time. But the key difference here is that while the venus is a depiction essentially of the feminine form of something that exists of a human being right uh, that exists in the real world, the loan mench is the human

fused with the beast. And in the words of Clive Gamble, and archaeologist at the University of Southampton, UK, as quoted in Nature quote, they depict the animal world in a semi realistic way. It shows early man moving from his immediate world to an imaginative world. Now this is interesting because yeah, you have to imagine that I don't know, there's no way to get inside, say a chimpanzees head

or a dog's head to some other mammal. But if these animals have any kind of imaginative capacity, and there's no proof, really, I guess that they have any kind of ability to picture objects that are not in front of them. If they do, you kind of have to assume that they're sort of literal right that they'd be, that they would be putting together ideas of images that

are from their direct experience. Yeah, I mean so in this case, I mean, one example that comes to mind, one possible and perhaps nitpicking idea, is that what if, say thag, the member of your tribe, what a fag likes to take a deer head or or a big cat head, and he likes to just kind of hollow that sucker out or get the skin, and they just put it over his own head, and he's famous for this, and he's so famous for this that one decides to

create a statue of it. Like, that's the only scenario I think in which you could you could make the argument. I don't see anybody making that argument, but I feel like that's the only example you can make an argument for this being an image of a thing that was as opposed to an image of a thing that was not.

Let me throw a twist on your example, though, So maybe Fag does put on the head dress or you know, the remains of some of the predator, and to simulate that in that sense, would that not be becoming another

kind of creature at least in symbol? That's true? Yeah, I mean, I mean you can certainly make the argument that that if that did that and bothered to put the beast's skin over his head, that you know, he is pretending to be something else or or participating in an experience that makes him feel as if he's something else. So yeah, it all kind of amounts to the same thing,

doesn't it. Right. So, whether it's Thag inspiring this this lionman carving, or whoever carved it depicting some kind of being that they had never seen in nature, what's going

on is a kind of fusion into unreal creatures. And according to Jill Cook, a curator at the British Museum who has a good blog post about the Loan Minch for the British Museum's acquisition, the Loan Mench is the oldest known representation of a creature that does not exist in nature, not necessarily the oldest piece of art, but the oldest evidence of fantasy, quite literally, the world's oldest monster.

Now by monster, of course, we've got to clarify the way we use the term, I mean an imaginary creature that does not occur in nature, not necessarily a bad or evil creature. So this isn't to say that the people who imagine the loewen men should necessarily would have

thought of it as antagonistic. Though I feel pretty strongly that even if whatever this being was was treated with reverence, I suspect it would have been the kind of awe in the classic sense of awe, not like oh, here's my friend the lionman, but like a solemn blend of wonder and fear. Well, if you try and imagine what life was like at the time, I mean, every every

day would have a certain amount of uncertainty. You're you're depending upon your ability to find the food, to follow the patterns that lead to food, to to hunt prey that will feed and clothe you through the harsh winter months especially, so there's a certain amount uncertainty. There's a certain amount of chaos and therefore we you know, you might expect to find those elements in imagine beings. Yeah, I can see that. So let's look at the ingredients

of this imagine being. Obviously it is one part human. We know about the the upright bipedal human pretty well. But what is the head of this creature and possibly the inspiration for the muscly legs. Yeah, this is this is a great question because I imagine a lot of people are thinking, Okay, southern Germany lions. Lions are in Africa and and or India, so what are they doing

in Europe. Well, given the time frame in the location, experts believe that we're seeing a human or humanoid body with the with the head of a now extinct cave lion. Cave lion. Yeah, now, I think that's that's interesting, isn't it though, because you have a partial likeness of one extinct animal in the very tusk of another ivory. Yeah, and it's created by a species that probably played a role in the extinction of both species. Oh, I hadn't

thought about that. Yeah, there's there's actually there's not a lot of evidence for lion hunting, but a two thousand extin Spanish study published in p. Los One. They looked at fossilized cave lion toe bones and they found human modifications, possibly made with stone tools that were made for skinning. So they think that the ancient peoples might have hunted

them for their pelts. But of course we know even if they didn't directually hunt these lions, they could have contributed to their extinction by encroaching on their habitat, by competition for large fauna and food sources. Now, there were different varieties of cave lion. One was found in America and there were two in Eurasia. There was a Panthera leo of Fossilus, and this was first. This one first appeared in Europe seven hundred thousand years ago and evolved

into Panthera leo Spellia. And this cave lion is the one that continued on. That's the one we're seeing here. And this is the one that they went on to go extinct, probably by fourteen thousand years ago. But so thirty five to forty thousand years ago when this thing

was made, they were still around. Yes. Now I've also read I don't know how much stock we can put in this, but I've also read in the past that some people think it may have survived in the Balkans up to two thousand years ago, But again I don't know to what extent we should buy into that. Then they get into cryptic territory, the grim leopard of the Balkan. Yeah, but to be clear, Panthera leo Spellia was probably the

largest cat that ever lived. It was probably twenty five larger than modern lions and also bigger than today's largest tigers. So we're talking up to eleven feet six inches or three point five meters in length. That is a crazy thing, because something you might not have experienced if you haven't been to a zoo recently. I noticed that I don't really have a correct vision in my head of how large the big cats are, like a lion or a tiger.

I think of them as I don't know, like maybe large the size of a great Dane or a little bit larger. I really but if if you go to a to a zoo and you get like it up against the glass where these things are, you realize like, oh, oh man, this is like as big as a horse. These things are gigantic. Well they're they're I mean, they're smaller than a horse, but but it seems like a horse, but it does seem that big if you're in the right position to observe them. For instance, here at Zoo Atlanta.

I go to the zoo a lot with my son, and sometimes we get there early. And when you get there early, sometimes you're the only person close to the lion enclosure and they're still kind of active because it's the morning. And I've had some really creepy experiences walking up there with my you know, small snack size child

next to me. Delicious, Yeah, And the way the lion looks at you, you just feel this this primal feeling, and you get a sense of what this this beast is and how I'm supposed to view this beast outside of the artificial confines of the zoo environment. Isn't it funny that we've got spider fear but we don't have

lion fear. Well, it might be very different if you live in proximity to lions, But I feel no natural fear about lions in the same way I do when I see the image of like a spider crawling towards my face. Well, I usually don't, but I feel like in these moments, I'm willing to buy that there's something they're like, like there's something situationally and environmentally that has to be in place and such. It's so standing, you know, beside a small child in in a situation where the

lions attention is on me. It's very creepy, and I can I can buy into an idea that there's something ingrained in me to to to fear them. It is terrifying itself to fear the predatory gaze, like when you when you just see the eyes of the creature that's large enough to eat you and maybe wants to. That comes through a lot in one of our favorite books to talk about in here in Blind Site by Peter Watts,

where he talks about the vampires gaze. Uh, you know, they usually keep their eyes covered because people like they wear the sunglasses because if they don't, people can just constantly feel themselves being looked at as prey. So it's it's easy for I mean, it's it's relatively easy for us to lock eyes with a predator like the lion

if you go to zoos and whatnot. But but try to imagine living in this ancient time like the rare situations where you would make eye contact with this creature and lift to tell about and how powerful that would be. Like that that would have to play a role in

the creation of of this lion man. You can imagine it was a religious experience, like if you came face to face with a cave lion and did not die, that this would make you feel like you had entered a higher plane of existence, you had communed with some with the grim leopard of the skies. Yeah. Now, of course it's worth noting that this this may have been, This may well have been the first lion man lion humanoid hybrid in human beliefs, but we would go on

to have many more. Of course, some of the some of the key examples of the Egyptians had several or at least four may He's pequette segment and tef nut. And then in Hindu is Um you have Nara Sima, which literally means manline in Sanskrit. I've seen people online commenting that they believe that the lowand minch is and is a depiction of Nara Sema. Huh, Well, I mean, it's it's essentially like visually the same idea. It is that it is a humanoid with the lions head, and

this is in Hinduism. It's an avatar of Vishnu and it's often seen. It's often depicted slaying the demon Harran yak a shippoo, and it's always a grizzly scene in which the lion avatar with its multiple arms is if this rating like ripping this this human oid demon apart at the stomach. I'm looking at an image right now. It is. It is rough, yeah, in trails flailing and you know their in trails wrapped around the god's head.

It's it's it's wonderful. Now. The vision of the lion headed man in the Lowan mench is, as we said, it's kind of stately, it's kind of serene, it's kind of pit list, but it's not doing anything overtly threatening. It's more like that that distant predatory gaze that it makes you uneasy. This depiction is roaring, it's got the teeth beard, it's ready to bite you in half. Now, there of course creatures in the myth and legend that

are the reverse of the lion man. Oh yeah, how about the sphinx, right, it's the exact opposite body of a lion with the head of a human. Yeah, and you have you also have similar scenarios with of course, the manticore, the chimera, and some depictions of of dragons are essentially lion headed entities. Now, another creature that came up for me in my research, and this is one I didn't I didn't know much about, and luckily this is one that actually nobody knows a whole lot about.

It's still rather enigmatic. But the leonto Cephaline a creature of myth Reism, which is a mystery religion centered around the god Mithress in the Roman Empire from around the first of the fourth centuries se. Mythriyism is great because it's got all these intriguing artifacts and artistic descriptions, but people are not descriptions depictions from the ancient world, but we don't know that much about it, where there's a

lot of mystery about what the content of this religion was. Yeah, and this is a great example of it, because you have a naked man with a lion's head. He's winged, has like four wings. It looks like there's a serpent entwined around him, much like a caduceus, and it's. Yeah, it's it's. It's also the lion's head seems like it might be screaming or crying aloud and anguish. It's it's been their additional cryptic details in the image as well,

but uh, it's very poorly understood. Well, whatever it's, it's a lot of its secrets have have been lost to time.

Can you imagine if that happened to existing religions today? So, like, imagine you are an archaeologist of the future and you're digging through our artifacts of the twentieth century and you can find some religious art, some religious art, I guess, and some very is depictions and descriptions of what's going on and say Catholicism or modern Hinduism or something like that, but you're mostly unable to discern what the like textual

contents of the religion were. Wouldn't that be fascinating, like trying to piece it together? Yeah? Yeah, I mean you could probably are probably various examples of just fashion shoots and popular imagery from today. And if you didn't know what the various icons were, I mean, how would you figure it out? What's this hand sign that jay Z is making in this image? What does it mean, you know,

it must have some kind of religious significance. Now, speaking of no earlier, you mentioned what happens when Thag puts on the the like lion head on top of his head, and does that represent itself as some kind of alternate creature or are we just looking at Thag wearing his clothes.

There is some debate about whether other ancient depictions of hybrid creatures are in fact hybrids, or whether we're looking at somebody wearing an animal garment, right, yeah, yeah, Like what instantly comes to mind is is something that is at times referred to as the Hornet God, which of course I like, but also known as the Sorcerer. Nice. So this one is from the Sorcerer. The most famous sorcerer here is from a cavern known as the Sanctuary.

And this is from a cave in France, the Cave of Troy fresh ri Age, and this is from around estimates thirteen thousand BC. Now the cave itself discovered was discovered in nineteen fourteen, so it's it's interesting how a lot of these discoveries are occurring in the early part of the twentieth century. And the cave was found to feature mostly cave art of animals, but also a couple of these half human half animal figures. And the dominant figure is the small humanoid again that is known as

the Horned God or the Sorcerer. And it's this humanoid figure loosely with with with the head of of an animal, looks like with it with antlers, with the head of a stag or an elk or something like that. Robert, Yeah, and uh. And the interpretations vary sometimes again there's this masters of animal argument, or that it's a divine figure priest and archaeologist Henry Bruel drew and the sketch of the figure, and I have to say it looks a

little bit more elaborate than the the actual photographs. So I think sometimes, you know it a lot of it falls to interpretation, you know, how do you make sense of this image? And I've also read some some criticism of of interpretations of the Sorcerer, saying that look, what we could be looking at here just just it is just the result of overlaps between depicted forms or cases where one image was painted over by another. Now that being said, you can you can make those kind of

criticisms regarding some of these cave paintings. But the lion man is most deaf. Only a line, right, there's no room for like, oh goodness, I went to just carve this image, to painstakingly spend four hours making this image of a fag here, and then I accidentally gave him a lion's head. It's just it's not gonna happen, right.

So when I was reading about this whole thing the other day, about the loan manch, I thought, Okay, he might be the oldest known evidence of a monster on earth, but it's probably not the first monster that ever existed in somebody's imagination. And then it hit me, at some point in time, there had to be a first monster.

There had to be the first time a human or maybe some other previous animal human ancestor, was able to form a mental picture of a horrifying creature that was not just some known predator or even some known predator made a little bit bigger, but an unholy being that did not exist in nature. You know, the clause of a crab on the of a lion or something. Yeah, I mean there's a there's a cognitive step involved here.

This is there's a cognitive first step that is that you can't just gloss over, you know, because even you know, if you were to drag in say that you know the content of the bicameral mind episodes that we did, you know, even in that case where you have have you know, something drastically different taking place with the human mind, it would still need to draw that image from somewhere

right right, Yeah, it would have to get put together somehow. Yeah, so at some point the bicameral mind would have to stop. Suddenly it's not just speaking through humans or animals, but it is speaking through a human animal hybrid And what is causing that? Where does that come from? As much as I love it, we we can't keep coming back to the bi cameral mind because people are going to start to think that, yeah they are, but but I know people, people, listeners, minds are going there. So I

had to I had to dip in for a second. Well, I appreciate you doing that, Robert, but I still hold out my skepticis on the bicameral mind. But yeah, so I want to come back to this question for the rest of today's episode. Are there any clues about where this first monster came from? Obviously, it's lost to prehistory.

We can't know when that happened and what the monster consisted of, but we might be able to look at, or at least suppose some things about human monster creation, monster fear that we give us ideas about the circumstances in which this monster might have arisen. And I guess we'll start on that journey when we come back from a break. Thank alright, we're back. So, Robert, what is a monster? Well? You know, I love this question because the answers tend to vary depending on who's thinking hard

about monsters. Give me Jessup's answer first, and Jessup has a more literal interpretation of these things. But uh, one example that I love is that the idea that the word monstrosity originates from the Latin uh monster ary, which means to show or illustrate a point. This is a good point. I mean, very often, if you think about monster legends, they come with the moral, don't they. Yeah, Or there's some idea wrapped up in it, like I'm afraid of this, but why this thing exists? But why?

And he can very you know, it can involve various symbolism, it can involved just very simple metaphorical extrapolations. But yeah, very often there is a there's a message, there's an idea there, And you know, I think this falls in line with what St. Augustine had to say about monsters. He said, the monster is part of God's plan, an adornment of the universe that can also teach us about the dangers of sin. But other medieval commentators also they

just define a monster is a thing that's against nature. Now, for people who believe that nature was thoroughly populated with monsters, what gave them the like? What made the distinction? Right? It's against nature, but nature is full of them? Where did that come from? Well? I mean the other thing, of course, is that even how can it be if it's it's if it's against nature, but it's also it's made of nature. I mean, that's one of the whole things we've been hitting so far, is it's a cave

line plus a man. It's a combination of things that exists. So it's not just whole cloth, you know, because I mean virtually no monster out there is completely removed from our biological world. Most of them have some analog in in the natural world, and there's there's something to be said there about our connection with nature. I mean, even when people try to come up with monsters from the outer dark, some kind of you know, the cosmic kind of monsters, there's still it's like, well, it's a human

with a squid head and it's really big. Yeah, Or you're just struggling to come up with something that doesn't have an analogy in nature, right, Or if you think you've created something that has no analogy in nature, you're just recreating like a Cambrian era organism that you just didn't know about. Hey, if you haven't listened to our Cambrian Monsters episode, you should go back to the I guess it was last week or whenever this air is. Check out the Cambrian monster mash though, as were some

monster with the monsters. Now, speaking of of monsters, particularly sea monsters, thirteenth century theologian Thomas of contemporary he devoted an entire book to see monsters and another to the fish of the sea. So his dividing line here, but you know what goes in which book? This is answering my question, right, nature is full of monsters. How can you tell what the monsters are? Yeah? Yeah, his answer would be what it all comes down to. Rarity in size.

That's what's make that's what makes a sea monster. Um so so like blue whales would be ce monsters, Yeah, because they're just so big. It's I mean, it's quite literally monstrous, and it's it's essentially rare, especially I guess if it's yeah, if it's like an apex predator, so like a megalodon would have been a sea monster. They didn't exist at the time, right, or you know, or say a horse is a rather large creature, but it's not a rarity, so you know, it's not a monster.

But if you had a dog the side of a size of a horse, that would be a rarity. That would be an Okay, I feel like this is a really dumb and unimaginative I don't think that's good at all. No, it doesn't really help us out here. But regardless of how you define monsters, we of course have countless monsters, and not just of course the ones that we've dreamt up to, you know, recently to entertain us. Though I think that in many cases we're not simply entertaining ourselves

with monsters. We are we are creating something that speaks to two deeper fears that speaks to, you know, some level of anxiety about our lives or the modern world. And of course religion and myth and legend folklore are just just totally populated with creatures that are that are hybrids of various forms. Yeah, I like what you said that we I think I've said this on the show before, but one reason. Sometimes people ask me, like, what what do you like about horror movies? I mean, they're so dumb.

It's true that the horror genre has a lot of really really bad movies in it, But think horror movies are interesting because even when they're bad, they sort of show you something. They're instructive about the anxieties of the age in which they're produced, and they they tap into something primal about what our what our deepest fears are, what's occupying occupying our minds when we're in the dark alone.

And I like that about them. I like, even when they're not good stories and they're not told well, they're still instructive about the society and the people that made them. Well, a lot of it comes down to symbols, right, if you can have somebody who has no clue what they're doing, And if you're taking existing symbols and you're combining them one way or another, you're going to inevitably make a statement.

You may be completely deaf to that statement, completely blind to that statement, but that's often when it's the most interesting. Like oh, my goodness, you accidentally created something brilliant. Uh, Like you made that the killer's mask, and you you didn't even think about all of the ramification of of that symbol. Yeah, what does it mean that the killer wears a hockey mask? Yeah? Or a baby mask or a or you know, an obviously store bought ghost face mask.

I mean, you can you can kind of go wild with any of these these examples, and uh and and try and tease out a big academic paper on what the what the meaning of the film is. Obviously it's that hockey will kill us all in the end, fear of Canadians. I think, yeah, all right, Well, to keep chasing this question about where the first monster might have come from, I think maybe we should take a detour and look at this one paper that I found that

that I thought was really interesting. It doesn't directly answer the question we're talking about, but it comes really close and goes along similar pathways of thinking. And it's a paper by a scholar called Steven T. Asthma, and the paper is titled Monsters on the Brain and Evolutionary Epistemology of Horror published in Social Research and International Quarterly, And that's a social science journal that has a lot of

different social science genres in it. And basally, what Asthma is trying to do in this article is trace what the biological origins of the experience of horror are and I think if we look at that, that might provide some insights about where monsters could emerge in our anthropological history. And Asthma starts with an interesting question one that's very common with all kinds of studies about behavior. Our fear

responses modular or conditioned. In other words, are our fear responses and our monster fears instinctual, born into us or they just learned and conditioned by culture and experience. And just to rephrase from the beginning, I think one thing we can eliminate is that it's quite obvious that at least some of our fears are conditioned or learned, Like there is no way you were born with a fear

of airplanes. That's not part of your revolutionary heritage. So though you might have, you know, you might have an inborn fear of heights, you could see how that could be part of evolutionary herit not like silver machine is filled with other humans barreling through the sky. Right, So there might be instinctual elements that go into that fear, but the fear itself, the content there, is clearly conditioned

or learned. But the real question is are any of our fears modular or instinctual or are they all conditioned or learned. So Asthma kicks off this favor by by pretty much stating the obvious fear exists in our bodies and minds. Fearful stimulized stimulates the sympathetic nervous system. So perhaps you'll freeze in the face of fear, maybe you'll flee, maybe you'll you'll suddenly have this burst of bravery, you'll turn around and fight. But the object of terror gives

us a physical jolt, and it demands reaction. And he also points out that there's a strong hormonal component entailing the corticotropin releasing hormone or c r H, cortisol and adrenaline. Asthma points to a study in fact, in which scientists inserted a gene in mice that makes CRH, resulting in more fearful mice, or removing it to make quote an extremely fearless mouse. I would I would venture to say that both prospects are horrifying. So Asthma argues that these

are all old brain systems. So this is the basement of horror, and we advanced organisms. Well, we have an entire haunted house built atop these ancient brain stem ruins. Okay, I like this analogy you're going with. Yeah, you have all the limbic emotional circuits here. You can think of this neural mammalian haunted house containing seven key rooms. You got your fear room, your care room, your lust room, your rage room, your panic room, your your seeking room,

in your playroom. In each room commands specific neural pathways through the brain pipes, wriggling around and diving down into the haunted ruins beneath. So we'd be saying that when you have these different types of affective reactions, so like you're engaged in play behaviors or you're engaged in lust behaviors or fear behaviors, they don't look the same the brain. They take different avenues through your different brain regions and

excite different types of tissue. Now, the million fear is rooted in the amigola, and we can talk about some direct evidence of this later, but this is a pretty well evidenced proposition, right, And we can think of this is a haunted laboratory, and it's probably right next to the memory lated haunted library of the hippocampus, and they

work together to enable conditioned learning. Right, So the amygdala is what regulates fear, and the hippocampus supplies the information content of the fear uh and the and this is condition learning. So the simple version is, let's say somebody puts you in a lab and they keep showing you episodes of TV shows, and every time they show you an episode of Seinfeld you get an electric shock and

it goes for the duration of the episode. You will probably develop a conditioned seinfeld phobia, which is an avoidance or aversion reaction to Jerry Seinfeldt's face. And this is this is a standard accounting of how conditioned fears are developed. Alright, So we have our haunted house here. What's a haunted house without a few ghosts and the ghosts come to us via evolution. This is what ASMA refers to as

the heritable disposition a levels of fear or timidity. Now, refer back to what you mentioned a minute ago, which is those mice, right, You can you can inherit different levels of fear disposition, So you can have these really brave mice that you artificially select for, or these really scared mice that you artificially select for. But also, could the contents of our fears be heritable? That's sort of

part of the question. We're asking, not just how likely you are to become afraid, but what you're afraid of? Can you get that from your parents through your genes? Well, there's some there's some interesting supporting evidence for this. And I imagine a number of you have encountered videos online of cats reacting to cucumbers. You know, they turn around, they see a cucumber, they freak out the ideas that they have this this uh, this ingrained response to something

that is snake like. And they have been experienced experience to show similar reactions in chimps as well. Uh. We also see this along with spider fears in humans. Yeah, one example showing this was in the nineteen forties, the psychologist Donald Hebb found that even infant chimpanzees were terrified of images of snakes, even if they'd never been exposed to images of snakes before. Now there's an interesting update to that, which is that heb found that chimps weren't

just afraid of snakes, but of any quote. And this is Asthma's wording extremely varied morphology, as they encountered so like really odd shapes that weren't part of their normal day to day life. But for more evidence of of the brains conditioning toward reaction to snakes, I found one

recent study. It was about neural pathways for evolution of rapid detection of snakes and it was by Van le Quan at All and it's called Pulvinar neurons reveal neurobiological evidence of past selection for rapid detection of snakes in p N A s U. And basically it found that there are neurons in the primate medial and dorsolateral pulvinar that responds selectively to snakes, seeming to indicate that there's something hardwired in the primate brain to cause this rapid

detection of snakelike shapes as opposed to images of other things like monkey faces, monkey hands, and geometric shapes. And so Asthma in his paper he wonders, quote some of our deep seated monster fears may be rooted in real predators or environmental threats from our prehistory. So we're talking about cognitive model shaped in the Plistocene era, genetically engraved archetypes that continue to resonate, Uh, you know on up into modern times. Now you can totally see why that

would be the case. Right, It's clear that some types of fears could be adaptive. Uh, if you are born with a natural fear of lion shaped things, you're probably going to survive have more often than people not born with the fear of lion shaped things. Right. And so the question is, is is the image of a snake or a spider or anything that conforms to a to a common part of monster imagery somehow encoded deeply in your biology.

Is it an inherited fear response that you get from threats faced by your ancestors, or are these all things we learned to fear from culture and experience. So Asthma site some lines of thinking against heritable fear content. Like, one thing he asks is how does the content itself get transmitted? You know, like, if you're afraid of snakes, how could that image of a snake literally come down

through the generations. Now I'm not sure I buy that objection so much, because I do think it seems likely that we can inherit some types of image re recognition. I mean, here's one example. If you can't inherit any kind of image re recognition from your parents, how would animals know what visual cues to look for in mating?

You could say with humans, you could say, well, maybe it's all culturally conditioned and that's how But what about non human animals, what about non social, non human animals? There seem to be I would think that you can transmit some types of imagery across generations through heritable predispositions. And of course it's important to wonder what kind of

content is actually getting transmitted here. Yeah, and that's one objection that Asthma doesn't really go into is deeply, but I think actually does matter why snakes and spiders, like I can think of animals that are generally much much more dangerous and probably much more dangerous to our direct ancestors on the African savannah than spiders and snakes, and yet they don't inspire nearly the same visual revulsion, Like a hippopotamus is ten thousand times more dangerous than the

average snake or spider, and yet it does not present as a universal phobia. You don't see humans all over the world being terrified of hippopotami. Yeah, so, or at least it's certainly not outside of a direct contact with them, like environmental contact with them. Yeah, unless you've learned to be afraid of them because they're actually dangerous. Otherwise, I think we all have that point growing up where we're told, oh, actually hippos are exceedingly dangerous, and they're more dangerous than

the crocodiles. Yeah, as always take that with the caveat that we don't want to demonize animals, So those are wonderful, right, don't go killing hippos. I can't watch enough hippo videos on line of their of what of their their viral explosive defecation. No, well that I think that's a fabulous topic as well. There's a lot to that actually, Um, I've read papers about the way that they spin their tails to distribute the fecal matter and the different theories

as to why. I mean, it gets into parasides and leeches. It's fabulous stuff. But their babies are super cute, That's what I'm getting at. You ever watched the baby babies someone with their their their mom's amazing. Yeah, they'll grow up to bite your legs off, but they're they're very cute as babies. But yeah, no demonization of hippos. Don't

go killing hippos or anything anyway. But back to Asthma. Okay, so we do have these potential pitfalls and the idea that our fears are predatory fears are inherited directly and biologically from our parents. But Asthma thinks he sort of has a solution to this dilemma, right, Yeah, he gets into this topic of specific versus generic pattern recognition systems.

So he points to the universality of snake and spider phobias as we've been discussing, but also to studies by ethologists Wolfgang Schleet who he carried out these experiments where he took bird chicks and he exposed them to fly over silhouettes of both hawks and goose and geese the hawk caused fear, but seemingly not the goose. But if they were exposed to repeated hawk fly over shapes very earlier in the development, they feared the goose but not

the hawk. So it's it's curious. So you basically it was about what they were exposed too early on. And by the way, I have to add the fact these were turkey chicks, your your butterballs were being experimented on a little bit in infancy. By the way, I love that idea of of fearing the goose. I think we should we should incorporate that into our discussions of fear. If you have an unfounded fear, you can say, oh,

you're really fearing the goose on that one. So that's like when you're afraid of something that isn't really dangerous, but it's because you had a bad experience with it as a child. Yeah, I mean, but you know, as we're discussing the development of fears, like that's kind of that's how we work. That's how you survive in the wild. You the person who fears the lion that is not there has a better chance of surviving than the person who does not fear the lions. That may be there.

It's true you'd rather have false positives than false negatives. I should correct myself there, because fearing the goose wouldn't be that you had a bad experience with the goose, would be that you never had an experience with a goose. Un Thus, you're afraid of them because they don't they don't fit into your your picture of the world. Maybe it's a good expression for like when your kid won't try some new food or something's like, stop fearing the goose.

Don't just go for it, baby, tryan Oh, I should stop laughing at my own jokes. Okay. Uh. So slights work focused on replications of older experiments originally carried out by Lorenz and ten Bergen in the nineteen thirties, And to quote from Asthma, this is quote corroborating Hebb's idea. Remember Donald Hebb from earlier idea that some discrepancy between a new perception and previous background stored experiences causes the fearful response. Remember how the chimps were frightened by any

unfamiliar morphology shapes they weren't familiar with. So Asthma continues quote, Theoretically, one could condition an animal to be unresponsive to snakes and hawks but utterly terrified of fluffy bunnies. So this is Asthma's position. Um, he's sort of working towards this thing. Well, let's let's let's get there on our own time. Yeah. He says that all of this makes sense though if

you look at it in the light of Darwin. Right, he's talking about the generic conditioning idea, right, Yeah, because he talks about the quote fearful reaction to categorical mismatch. So, as Asthma puts it, quote, the local environment will condition the infant animal, and then the cognitive development will lock in the categories, creating a software program that recognizes some animals and mismatches novelties. So Asthma is sort of proposing

a hybrid model of the origins of fear imagery. Not necessarily that it's that it's received imagery from your ancestors, and not necessarily that it's all learned in life, but it's one that combines elements that are automatic and instinctual along with elements that are modifiable and learned. Yeah. He

calls it a quote content free recognition system. And so the basis of this is that we whatever we are exposed to an early childhood becomes part of our okay category, and whatever we're not exposed to become as part of the fear category. Exactly, And in fact he points to

a specific study. This is the studies, uh that we're conducted by Mary Ainsworth in the nineties seventies, the strange situation experiments, and uh, these these backed up the notion that there's a window of opportunity for template formation and it closes after six months. This is great, This is

part of the freaking out your children genre experiments. Everything is stored as normal in those first six months, the argument goes, and only after that are the new experiences initially stored a strange and novel and judged in light of existing templates. That's why if you encounter a child that is less than six months, they're looking at everything

the same. You're not going to get those shifty baby eyes and those shifty toddler ized till later, you know, because we've all encountered those kids that like instantly distrust you. They look at you and you can tell they distrust you. You're like, what are you doing? Yeah? I just got here? What are you basing this on, and they're basing it on the template that they have. You were not in that template. So this would seem to back up his idea of the fact that there's a sort of content

free recognition system. Uh. And it also would would help answer this question of how come infants, if this is the case, don't become terrified of every new image they encounter right right now, it's it's uh, it's worth noting. Asthma in all this, he points out some of the obvious that many of our monsters are hybrids of threatening creatures, and specifically he points out the alien face hugger because this is essentially a spider and a snake fused together

into one awful crab like entity. You know, is the worst parts of the spider and the worst parts of a snake and the worst parts of an oyster. Well yeah, once you start cutting into it, for sure, but there's no worst part of an oyster. It's all good. Uh. So Asthma says that this what we have here is the phylogenetic memory of ancient danger and monstrous hybrids allow us to to further strengthen, augment, and transmit those fears, right, and that would seem to go to this like instinctual

fear read but Asthma has this other interesting hypothesis. He discusses about what what contributes to what makes spiders and snakes specifically scary, And this might answer some of my problems with why them and not hippopotamus? Is uh, if you assume that babies are generally carried and kept off the ground outside for their first six months of life, they won't be seeing many spiders or snakes, but they will be able to see people and other larger, non

threatening animals. So Asthma seems to think this sort of fits the category violation model. That would make sense. Yeah, I don't see a lot of adults even today taking their baby well, I mean uns you're taking to the zoo, I guess. But even then they're not they're encountering them in the zoo. And I've already talked a little bit about the differences between encountering an anim in the wild

and encountering them in an artificial environment right now. Of course, another way to violate these categories is to present beings with totally nonsensical ontologies, creatures that could never be conditioned in a natural environment. Or sorry that you could never be conditioned to accept in a natural environment because they don't exist in a natural environment. Here, maybe the origin of our hybrid monsters, our lion headed humans, and the

grim sentient leopards and other beasts. All right, well, on that note, we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back we will return to our discussion of ancient monsters. Thank you, thank you. All right, we're

back now. Asthma invokes a concept in his paper invented by the philosopher Nuel Carrol, which is called category jamming, and in his two thousand three book The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart, Carol makes a distinction between what he calls the monsters of myth and the

monsters of horror. I thought this was pretty interesting. So he writes about, how, you know, there might be fearsome creatures in the world of myths, but they are not quote unnatural, and they can be accommodated by the metaphysics of the cosmology that produced them. All right, So this idea is that, say, the medusa, is that if you take the meduce and you put it in our real world. Yeah,

it's breaking all these laws of physics and nature. But the Medusa encountered within the world of Greek myth, Well, then she's just part of this world, like she's not breaking any laws exactly. But then he says, quote, the monsters of horror breach the norms of ontological propriety presumed by the positive human characters in the story. That is, in examples of horror, it would appear that the monster is an extraordinary character in our ordinary world. I like

this because this is a distinction. I feel very much like there are different kinds of monsters, and they even the same monster, could be more or less terrifying given different context. Next, and so it makes me think back to the Loan Mench, which one was the Loan Mench. Was this a monster of myth that existed within some kind of epic poem that these people, you know, recited orally or something like that, something outside the world that

could be accommodated by its own cosmology. Or was this the monster of horror, something that haunted the woods beyond the cave. Yeah. To glimpse this creature, or to imagine glimpsing this creature, is it to see something broken in the world or something that is just part of its fabric and we have no way of knowing. Yeah, though clearly I think if it is part of that broken vision of the world, then there is a stronger fear

element to it. It's not part of a fantasy. It is a fantastical deviation from your day to day life. But Carol also writes about this idea that monsters are jamming of categories. He says, quote monsters are repelling because they violate standing categories and another quote also elsewhere, um quote.

If what is of primary importance about horrific creatures is that they're very impossibility visa v our conceptual categories is what makes them function so compelling lee in dramas of discovery and confirmation, then their disclosure, insofar as their categorical violations will be attached to some sense of disturbance, distress, and disgust. Consequently, the role of the horrific creature in such narratives where their disclosure captures our interest and delivers pleasure,

will simultaneously mandate some probable revulsion. That is, in order to reward our interest by the disclosure of the putatively impossible beings of the plot, said beings ought to be disturbing, distressing, and repulsive in the way that theorists like Douglas and there is referring to Dame Mary Douglas predict phenomena that ill fit cultural classifications will be So the idea is that creatures that holate our culturally established categories of existence

we will find repulsive and distressing. And this is definitely a very common way of explaining horrific creatures, right, the category confusion model. There's a lion, there's a man, but a man with a lion's head that just that breaks all the rules. It's the thing that should not be exactly Yeah, but then again, I have so on one hand, I'm attracted to this theory, and I find that lots of horror creatures very much seemed to fit this theory.

But at the same time, I wonder, is it really possible that our experience of monster horror could be so thoroughly cognitive, because like, comparing these categories like this established by culture that really would seem to be like it takes some kind of thought, Right, do you really have to think about a monster to find it scary? No? I mean, like we've been discussing with something like like Jason, say,

Jason Vories from the Friday of their tenth series. You don't have to think very hard in those films to find Jason terrifying. Though there's there's plenty of stuff going on to make you feel tearor right down to the music and uh and and and other forms of priming. Uh. But if you if you tease it apart, you can say, yes, this is an unnatural thing. It's what it's depending on your interpretation, is either a dead person that's walking around killing people, or at the very least, it is an

unrealistically relentless and unstoppable humanoid killer. And it's equally terrifying no matter how much thought you put into it. Right, and that whenever I feel monster fear, the initial pang of monster fear definitely feels deeper than cognitive category analysis, Like I don't feel like I'm comparing anything in my mind. It hits me on the same level as like, you know, seeing something flying at my face. Anyway, Well, we'll come

back to the cognitive elements in a minute. I wanted to discuss one other tangent that's really interesting that asthma goes on, that might provide some kind of light on this. I loved his section about horror blindness. Oh yeah, I don't think i'd ever read about this before. So here's how to get into it. A question that might help us understand the origin of monsters is why do we keep creating them? Like? Why can't we stop making monsters even if they make us feel the putatively negative emotion

of fear. Well, I think that they're kind of like cocktails, right, Like, there's a there's a basic reason that humans consume alcohol, and there's a basic reason humans consume various other elements that have specific tastes. But we can't stop coming up with new combinations, a new novel, combinations that will give us the same and then in increasingly varied experiences based on that original. We like to fear, and so we're going to continue to to tweak what makes us feel

that that tear? But do well? Okay, So that's one theory. You could say that we like to fear. Yes, I think there's another possibility, which is that we don't actually like to fear. We like something else that comes with fear. That fear has sort of a secret hidden cousin. Whenever the fear pathways in the brain are ignited. There's something that happens along with that, and that's the thing we like, and we mistake it for its cousin, the fear, the main emotion. So let's look at an example and see

what we think. One way to study the biological roots of horror monster, or of monster fear, would be to look at the behavior of a person who is incapable of feeling that fear, and strangely enough, such a person does exist, Asthma points to the case of this person, known in the scientific literature only as s M, who is a woman with horror blindness. SM has a brain anomaly.

She has a focal bilateral amygdala, allegians, and because the amygdala is so bound up so important in generating the brain's fear response, these allegions mean that SM has an extreme fear deficiency, sometimes characterized as the complete inability to fear, and researchers have tested her with all kinds of fear inducing stimuli like haunted houses, horror movies, snakes and spiders, and these experiments showed that for SM, what would normally

be horrifying stimuli were indeed attention grabbing, but did not cause avoidance behaviors in fact, and they found that this combination of attentional arousal, the attention grabbing nature of it, and the lack of fear response tended to manifest itself as something like an attraction. So this study was there's one study by Justin S. Feinstein at All called the Human Amygdala and the Induction UH and the Induction and

Experience of Fear and Current Biology INN. And what they what the researchers did is they took SM to a haunted house put together at the Waverly Hills Sanatorium, which is an abandoned medical facility in Louisville, Kentucky. And I want to read a quote about what happened when they went with s M through this facility, which had people addressed as monsters jumping out and scaring. They said, quote, the hidden monsters attempted to scare SM numerous times, but

to no avail. She reacted to the monsters by smiling, laughing, or trying to talk to them. In contrast, their scare tactics typically elicited loud screams of fright from the other members of the group more than showing a lack of fear, SM exhibited an unusual inclination to approach and touch the monsters. Ironically, SM scared one of the monsters when she poked it in the head because she was quote curious as to what it would feel like. Oh, you're not supposed to

touch the actors that a haunted attraction. SM should have known that, well, apparently she didn't. Now I thought this was really interesting because what they're saying is that in this condition where you don't have the normal avoidance behaviors, because you've got a deficiency of fear, if you're amygdalus damaged and you can't feel fear, things that would normally make you fear aren't just neutral. It's not like I don't care about that. You you find yourself attracted to it.

It's like you love it, you want to touch it. Well, I mean I totally buy into that, because I mean, there are plenty of examples, I think in our own lives where we see like a really cool monster design in a film or a book or some art and yeah, we're not thinking, oh my goodness, I'm so afraid right now. We think, oh man, that's pretty gnarly, that's pretty cool. Yeah, And so I think that maybe what's going on with fear now I I accepted that the opposite could be true.

It could be true that in some way the fear itself is satisfying, is thrilling, is fun well, and of course the after effect of the monster not killing you, you get that that surge of relief as well, the endorphin and the adrenaline rush. Yeah, there's that hormonal element to it as well. But yeah, I do think that part of what the appeal must be is what's happening with s M. Here. It's that she's only getting the good half of the horror feeling. She's not feeling the fear.

But when we experience horror in the good way and the pleasurable way that makes us keep returning to it. It's what's whatever is happening with her. They're except not tempered by by the normal kind of avoidance response we would have. So essentially what's being proposed is that is that fear and arousal are separate things, but they're deeply linked. And and in in SMS case, she is attracted to the novelty of it. It is the novelty of this thing that is a hybrid creation or just an unreal

entity that doesn't match up with the existing expectations. Right, She's being excited by the neural pathway that says, look at this, this is worth your attention. You should pay attention to it. But she's not getting the part that says, get the hell away. Interesting Now, on the other hand, if you think this condition of having a fear deficiency sounds great, like like you're like, I wish I had

an amygdala religion, Uh, think again. Asthma reports that researchers have repeatedly had to prevent sm from putting herself in actual danger because the fear that would have prevented her from endangering herself was simply not operative. Of in the same way, you might not enjoy pain, but you wouldn't actually want to have the condition that prevents you from

feeling pain because pain is very useful for survival. Well, I mean that matches up with touching the actors at a haunted attraction, Like it shows like a lack of boundaries and understanding of those boundaries. I mean, not that the the actor is going to physically attack you, but you know she's she's breaking certain rules and expectations there. So yeah, I wonder what role these types of arousal play in what led somebody in the ice age to

create a lionman figuring. I mean, assuming that this figure had some kind of fear or all inducing uh significance. We don't know that it did, but you think, you know, monsters usually have some kind of fear inducing properties. If that's what was part of the attitude towards this creature. Could it be that it was created for this attentional arousal, this feeling of like this isn't part of what I

normally see, you know, the stimulation of the imagination. Yeah, I mean, what if what if this thing was crafted and as it was passed, it passed around like they were just feeling the novelty of it. They were and maybe you know, engaging with with certain feelings of fear that came out of it. But they didn't have, say, a whole cosmology built up around it. Maybe it didn't have a name or a purpose in the in the magical world around them, but it was it was almost

like like doing shots of espresso. You know, it's it's difficulse. It's simplifying here, it's but it's it is very difficult to try and put ourselves in in the mind of of of such people. Yeah, No, I mean I think that's worth considering. Like, we tend to assume it had something like what we would think of as a sacred or religious significance right now, where you'd you'd participate in a ritual with it. But what if it was much more like us watching a horror movie or going to

a haunted house. I think that's not impossible. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like say an image of of of the Hindu God that we were talking about earlier, Narasima, Like, you can look at that image without knowing anything about Hinduism, anything about the story that's being told, anything about the you know, the various symbols that are at play here, and you can still have a very this or reaction

to it. You kind of a you feel something when you look at it, uh, And then you can you can feel something rather different when you have this additional information about it. So it could be that maybe the lionman was part of a religious ritual or religious belief, but it could also just be that for some people who had a shallower engagement, it was just a thrill. It was just facing the monster again, because how many we have so many unreal things in our world. We

have so many monsters to turn to. But imagine living in a world where there's one unreal thing, There's one unreal image that's it, and you get to touch it once a week. That's given me the creeps man a world with only one months her. Yeah, all right, Well, I want to get on one more aspect of Asthma's

paper before we finish out today. He actually talks about a bunch more stuff in his paper, like the second half of it is all about like xenophobia and the social implications of monster fear, And I want to talk about one more idea that he goes to, which is that monster horror is not just cognitive recognition but also

an affective emotional state. So Asthma writes, quote, the emotion slash cognition complex in horror is a yannis faced experience, partly imperative as in I should run away, and partly indicative that creature is part man and part snake. According to some philosophers of mine, like Ruth Milliken, this yannis faced and representation is strongly coupled together in lower animals mice, for example, simultaneously recognized cats as a kind of thing in a category and as dangerous, So that's the fear

affect I should run away. Humans, on the other hand, can decouple the two pathways indicative and imperative, and fear can be reattached to alternative kinds of creatures and perceptions. So here's where he's getting into the monster generative capacity. It's like, we've got these monster recognition pathways in the brain, but they're made for natural predators, and once we've got the power to put imaginative content on them, they can

still be used in the same way. And in this way, Asthma seems to think, monster fear is caused by a system of what's known as quote somatic markers. Essentially these trainable neural pathways that can be filled with emotional content based on experience. One more quote of his quote. The point is that these emotional responses are not instincts in

the sense of prewired or genetically engraved responses. The affective systems are ancient in the sense that they have many homologies with non human animals, but in our individual lives their idiosyncratically assigned and have significant plasticity. So you can fill up with whatever monsters happened to catch your fancy. And and the idea here is that imaginative monsters have this adaptive survival value. I mean, we talked in uh not to go again to the bi cameral mind episode.

But one thing that apart from the whole bi cameral mind hypothesis just taking out the whole all of the bi camerality, one thing Julian Jaynes talked about was that he thought that the primary adaptive benefit of consciousness is that you could run simulations in your mind. When you've got conscious thought, you've got this mind space where you

can experiment with things. And uh, Ultimately, Asthma talks about fear of monsters being a similar thing, monsters in your mind can provide a kind of mental training simulator, a place to work out emotional and behavioral responses to danger within the safety of the imagination. But because horror images have such strong access to our emotional reactions, he says,

and this is an interesting bridge. They don't just train our behaviors, they train our values, which gives them great power for good and ill in conditioning our moral judgments and opinions. This takes us back to St. Augustine right that monsters instruct a point. Stories about monsters so often have a moral or they teach some virtue. They tell you what you should do in a certain situation and

condition your responses to it. And they're much more effective than normal teaching and instruction because they get at you emotionally that you know that you don't have to be lectured about what you should do. If you see an illustration within a monster story, you just feel emotionally what you should do. Yeah, Because on one hand, they're simply saying, hey, kids don't go swim in that creek without the adults around.

And then there's hey, kids don't go swimming that creek without the adults around, because there's electric turtle man drown you, you know. And yet we see that, of course time and time again in folklore's where there is some sort

of ow creature who will drown you if you swim unattended. Yeah, And so I think this could be a very plausible explanation for the emergence of monsters in human history, that they could have emerged around the same time as language as a social cohesion technique and as a social value instilling technique. They're they're there to get people to believe things that would be hard to convince them to believe just by telling them. I like that. Yeah, I shouldn't

go off the path. I shouldn't mess around with somebody else's spouse. I shouldn't you know all these things? Because why because a monster will get you if you do. Yeah. So many monsters are tied to boundaries. Cross the boundary and face the monster. Yeah so so Yeah, I guess that's the end that we We don't have ultimately the answer about when the first monster arose, But I think it's very plausible that they could have their their roots

in social teaching. Yeah, I think so. I think I feel like we've given we've given everybody some tremendous food for thought in trying to unravel the meaning of that lion headed figure and what what it meant to people then and what the idea of monster of the monster has continued to mean for people in all subsequent generations. So what do you think, mab what what could the lionman have been teaching was the low and men's uh

a story about how don't go in strange caves? Or uh? Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm will based on things I've read in the past, I'm more inclined to give it sort of a chaotic vibe, you know, like thinking of it in terms of ancient gods of the hunt and whatnot, that that this is some sort of an entity that represented, to whatever extent they were able to really think about it, this is a figure that represented the uncertainty of the wild world they lived in. Now, was it chaotic good,

chaotic neutral, or chaotic evil? I think just chaotic neutral. Like the world has a certain amount of chaos in it, and some days you're gonna go to the cave and there's gonna be and you will face the lionman and then you know, maybe you'll lock eyes with it and walk away, but maybe not. Some days you eat the loan mench and some days the loan mench. It's you, amen, partner.

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