CYCLOPS – in Greek mythology the one-eyed giant living in the cave. The legends about one-eyed giants exist in many Nations. About Cyclops all basically know thanks to the immortal Homer’s “the Odyssey”, in which brave Greek sailors were trapped on a desert island, we decided to spend the night in the cave and as a result found themselves captured by a one-eyed giant-the Cyclops Polyphemus. The easiest, of course, would be to assume a one-eyed giant fiction rich imagination of ancient people, which Homer wrote down the verses.
However, it is still serious evidence for the existence of Cyclops was found. As believed by some modern researchers, the emergence of the legend of the Cyclops was able to contribute. archaeological error. Greeks could be found in some cave on the island of Sicily, the skull of a mammoth (which is still found in Siberia). Large opening of the nasal cavity in the center of the skull could be taken as a single large orbit of the eye, and the relatively small real eye orbit on the sides of the skull would quite not pay attention [“VAW” 1997, N 5]. Today, scientists have information that several thousand years ago around the Mediterranean was inhabited by dwarf elephants, the size of the “one-eyed” of skulls which exceeded several times the human.
How could things be, really? Imagine a Hellenic shepherd herding a flock of goats on an island somewhere in the year 800 BC. Sudden rain forces him to drive the goats into a large cave. In the dim light he stumbles on something round. Looking closely, he sees a huge skull, and on it only one eye socket in the center of the forehead. However, this assumption implies that the ancient Greeks must have been pretty stupid. And the underestimation of the mind of our ancestors is a thankless job. Moreover, this assumption is not supported by any actual findings.
