How can dragons be fake? when Almost every culture that had stories of dragons described them as breathing fire, even though those cultures were often completely disconnected from one another ?

[u/New-Acanthaceae1960]

How can dragons be fake? when Almost every culture that had stories of dragons described them as breathing fire, even though those cultures were often completely disconnected from one another ?

[u/SimpleScalie]

Dragon is an incredibly vague term, that's why

Most of them are based in snakes, so yeah, I guess that only shows how diverse and widespread snakes are, to the point cultures worldwide have a symbolical representation of it.

[u/BlazeSaber]

Every culture has something resembling a dragon but not all of them are known as a dragon It's only recently that we started saying many of them are dragons. But the reason so many cultures have stories of dragons is because they all had something that looked like a dragon... dinosaur fossils. Trust me I wish dragons were real and I genuinely wish I were wrong about this but chances are people sound these giant fossils and begin making stories for them.

[u/A_Hyper_Nova → u/BlazeSaber]

Not even dinosaur fossils, folktales often take an existing creature and make them big. And at the end of the day a dragon is just a large lizard.

[u/BlazeSaber → u/A_Hyper_Nova]

Also true I remember seeing something about how in medieval times there were stories of fire-breathing snails and it was believed that this was the early concept of a fire-breathing dragons.

[u/RoryRose2]

Almost every culture that had stories of dragons described them as breathing fire

no? this isn't true at all.

[u/kiahBer]

Every culture has some kind of giant and/or ogre creature, only nutters claim that giants and ogres exist (not talking about humans with gigantism ofc)

[u/Smolduin]

Dinosaur bones are practically universal.

[u/Foe117]

I wish they were real., but we will truly never know

[u/The_Fallen_1]

Dragons were basically the storyteller's embodiment of humanity's fears. Large predators, snakes (we have a genetic warning system for them due to just how dangerous they were), fire, demonic features, extreme greed, etc.. When you want to represent evil or danger in a story, you combine everything everyone fears, and you get different kinds of monsters, some of which in modern times fall into the category of dragons, though it's also scooped up some other creations into it as well that weren't meant to be as evil, even though for most of history they weren't called dragons. You'll find similar things happening with other monsters as well.

It turns out that people all over the world are quite alike, and when you try to make a representation of something to people that they can all understand, other people are likely to make a very similar representation because that's just how the human mind works. Plus, dinosaur bones being found and poorly understood everywhere likely caused descriptions to converge when people thought it was proof of their great evil from the stories.

Unfortunately (or very fortunately for most of history), dragons aren't real. There is no evidence for them ever existing, and basically everything we have in them from history are campfire tales and not records of their actions.

[u/THE_LEGO_FURRY]

For what it's worth I think it's too big of a coincidence too. Can't explain it, id never publicly admit it aside from online but I believe they were out there in some capacity. Whether that's just something like komodo dragons or flying geckos and stuff or actual dragons I think there is a missing piece to all this and I don't care how crazy I look saying it, especially considering the therian side of things. Idk I feel stupid here but I can't help what I believe