Is it possible that unicorns ever existed?
Do you remember a story posted here in Mega Curious about an unbelievable find by North Korean archaeologists? According to information from the country's state agency, scientists reportedly discovered a unicorn cave in a Pyongyang temple underground. The news became a joke and entered the long list of nonsense that have been spread by the North Koreans, after all everyone knows that these beings do not exist.
But ... wait. Did unicorns ever exist, or even if they never did, where did the legends about these creatures come from? The most common descriptions portray these animals as beings who could fly and who were immortal, and had the iconic horn with incredible healing powers.
The first records
According to the Today I Found Out website, the first known unicorn figure was found in the Lascaux caves in France and was reportedly painted in 15, 000 BC. However, although the drawn creature has two horns - and probably represents an antelope or bull - at the time the discoverers were found they thought the animal pictured had only one horn.
With respect to written records, the first dates from the 4th century BC, and appears in a text authored by a Greek physician and historian named Cesarias. During his travels in Persia, Cestias would have heard tales of a mighty wild animal as big as a horse that would be all-white and red-headed, with blue eyes and a single multicolored horn.
Mysterious creatures
Other famous accounts are those of Marco Polo - who described the unicorns as “gross and ugly” - and Genghis Khan, who would have refused to invade India after encountering one of these creatures. However, according to historians, the animals these people probably saw were nothing more than rhinos. As they explained, when describing the “beasts” in their countries of origin, travelers relied on familiar horses.
Unicorns are also described in the bible (at least in King James's version of England), although the mention is believed to be a case of translation error. When the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew to Greek, although there are no references to unicorns in the Torah - the Jewish Bible - there are allusions to an animal (extinct or perhaps the arabian oryx) that was usually drawn in profile. appearing with the overlapping horns.
In Greek, these creatures were described as "monokeros", and the word was translated into Latin as "unicorns". Thus, thanks to a misinterpretation of an ancient drawing, a flesh-and-blood animal eventually became a mythological creature. Finally, there is yet another possible origin for the legend about the existence of unicorns! It would be related to a marine mammal called narwhal.
Aquatic evolution
The narwhals are “relatives” of whales and dolphins, inhabiting the icy waters of the Canadian Arctic and Greenland. They have a large ivory tooth - not a horn - on their heads, and for those who believe that unicorns once existed (like North Koreans), one possibility is that the narwhals were terrestrial creatures who, Feeling threatened by humans, they evolved to survive at sea.
However, genetically speaking, narwhals are much closer to belugas and porpoises than horses, which invalidates the "evolutionary" theory. Therefore, answering the question of the title of this article - whether unicorns ever existed - all available evidence seems to say no.
