独眼巨人神话或源于生物化石

When Odysseus and his men reach Sicily on their 10-year voyage home, they find a formidable foe: a one-eyed giant with a taste for sailors. As told in Homer’s The Odyssey, the Cyclops holds the men captive, eating them two-by-two, until he is outsmarted. Cyclopes may be the stuff of mythology (and now a live-action movie ver- sion of Odysseus’ epic journey), but they have their roots in biology. Homer and the ancient Greeks, though, may have been more inspired by misinterpretations of fossils than by real-life one-eyed critters, which are far from towering — or terrifying. Inspiration for Cyclopes might have come from the fossilized bones of prehistoric elephant ancestors. …