Brian Regal, assistant professor of the history of science at Kean University, says that for much of recorded history, humans have reserved their greatest fears for dog-human hybrids like the werewolf once thought to be real, hiding behind every tree waiting for the unsuspecting traveler.
In Greek mythology, the story of Lycaon provides one of the earliest examples of the werewolf legend and Herodotus in 440 BC wrote in his Histories that the Neuri, a tribe he places to the north-east of Scythia, were transformed into wolves once every nine years while the Roman poet Ovid vividly described stories of men who roamed the woods of Arcadia in the form of wolves.
However from the late 19th century onwards, stories of werewolf encounters tailed off significantly. “The spread of the idea of evolution helped kill off the werewolf because a canid-human hybrid makes no sense from an evolutionary point of view,” says Regal. “The ape-human hybrid, however, is not only evolutionarily acceptable, it is the basis of human evolution.” Since the publication of Charles Darwin’s "On the Origin of Species" 150 years ago men's minds have been focused on a different kind of monster – ape-men such as the Yeti, Bigfoot, and Sasquatch which emerged as a facet of Western popular culture in the 19th century, relegating werewolves to films and fantasy. When it comes to the actual monster scene, Bigfoot is the cryptid that now dominates.
Photo: werewolf-night-2 by poul_iversen13375 Flickr Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic
The landlord may also retain all of the deposit if the tenant owes back rent or broke the lease early.
Posted by: security systems | November 29, 2011 at 08:01 AM