ANCIENT ARCHAEOLOGISTS HOME
In Greece, they have found ancient grave sites where a mishmash of odd dinosaur bones have been loosely laid out in the shapes of men. The head might be a mastodon, the arms and legs, put together from mixed dinosaur bones to form a weird extra tall, man shaped skeleton. In Greece, there were fossils so thick that, in places 1000s of bones jutted from the hillsides.
Greek historian Solinus, (c. AD 200) wrote: "Before there were any humans on Pallene, the story goes that a battle was fought between the gods and the giants. (They) Continue to be seen to this day, whenever torrents swell with rain and excessive water breaks their banks and floods the fields. They say that even now in gullies and ravines the people discover bones of immeasurable enormity, like men's carcasses but far bigger."
Historians believe this may have been where the concept of Greek gods came from. It makes sense. The Greeks found large unexplainable bones in piles. Where did they come from? They didn't know about dinosaurs, they thought some great battle had been fought by giants. The skulls of elephants and mastodons have one large hole in the front where the trunk attaches, it must have looked to them like some kind of monster. If you use your imagination, like a cyclops!
The American Museum of Natural History has an article which says,
"Eyeing the
Evidence
The one-eyed giants, called Cyclopes, of Greek myths are usually said to
live on the island of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea. Significantly, the
island was once home to ancient elephants whose enormous, fossilized
skulls and bones can still be found today eroding out of cliffs and
hillsides. As far back as the 1370s, scholars have suggested that
when the first inhabitants of the island encountered elephant skulls, they
might have mistaken the large central hole where the trunk was attached for
the enormous single eye socket of a Cyclops."
That is a common sense explanation of how the Greek gods and mythology
came to be. Many of these gods were part animal, part human. The
bone fields were mixed parts of bones, and they were a mystery to them, and
they had no way of knowing about dinosaurs as we do today.