Dragons!

[pitbulllady]

Originally Posted by Kzinistzerg

I think they'd come from several sources; 1) dinosaur bones, 2) tales of dragons carried by storytellers and merchants, and 3) crocodiles. Those people you mentioned in lousiana seems more like they beieved in somehtingmore like an intelligent crocodile rather than dragons per say, htough I haven't researched it, so I don't know.

There are no crocodiles in Louisiana, have never been dinosaurs, and the beliefs and stories of the LeTeche pre-date any contact with Europeans. There ARE alligators, but alligators were simply another animal to the native tribes of that area, and the LeTeche were not thought of as simply intelligent, anthromomorphic alligators, but as a race of reptilian "people", if you will, with their own tribal customs, language, etc. As I pointed out earlier, even the Inuit have traditional dragon stories that also pre-date European contact, so there's no way that their beliefs could have been influenced by tales told by travelers, and there have been no reptiles indigenous to that area for millions of years. At that time that they first arrived in North American via the Berring Land Bridge, virtually the entire upper portion of the Northern Hemispere was coverd in ice, so even those who pushed further south, and might later encounter tribes who'd remained in the far north, would not have so much as encountered a small skink that they could somehow "twist" into a "dragon". It's THAT sort of thing that makes the whole dragon concept so fascinating-just WHAT did the universal belief in dragons stem from?

pitbulllady