Origins of the Dragon | StarTalk

• How good could be unless it's got dragons? It's no fantasy unless you have a dragon.

• Yeah, you need the dragon.

• Yeah. You need the dragons. And in my home institution, the American Museum of Natural History, we had an exhibit a few years ago that was all about mythical monsters and whether they were the imaginations of people who discovered fossils of extinct dinosaurs.

Oh, wow.

Wow. That's fantastic.

Yeah. So imagine-- you know a triceratops.

Yeah. Imagine that emerging from the eroding side of a cliff.

• That would be pretty--

• Right? Pretty freaky. Now you clearly know that the animal you're seeing-- it's extinct. But the concept of extinction is a modern idea--

• Yeah.

• Of course. --a few hundred years ago. So here's this thing. It can't-- it must be some-- a monster that we fear in the night. And so didn't know about that?

• No, no. I've never really thought about that.

• Yeah! I think you love dragons because they're great if they're your friend, but if they're not, they're a superpredator.

And that's another theory, actually, about where we have this idea of dragons from that's even more ancient than the idea of people discovering fossils-- this idea that it might date back to when we were very frightened of apex predators. An anthropologist called David E. Jones who puts forward this theory. He studied vervet monkeys in Africa. And he noticed that they are particularly anxious about three predators-- lions, eagles, and snakes.

And so they have a particular cry that they make when they see any of these three creatures.

Really?

And if you merge those three creatures together, you sort of get something that resembles a dragon. So he again has used this to theorize--

So snake just gets you like--

Is the cry?

[bleep] Very similar, I think. Very similar.

That's exactly-- HELEN KEEN (VOICEOVER): Yeah, it's more or less. You put it through the monkey translator, it is so that.

HELEN KEEN (VOICEOVER): Yeah, that's what comes out.

Yeah. So when you think about it, if you have something as ferocious as a lion that has the body type of a serpent such as the snake, but it can fly as a flying predator such as an eagle--

• Yeah, I'll give him that.

So that would be tougher. So yes, he has this idea that we would have had this passed down through millions of generations. We would have evolved this fear that's so great that we've created--

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON (VOICEOVER): A primal fear.

--this amalgamation--

yes-- of these three predators. Where does the fire part come from?

We're all scared of-- we would be scared of fire, but that the idea--

They just added that after-- say, we want to make it even more ferocious.

ISAAC WRIGHT (VOICEOVER): Oh, right right, right.