Mostri, giganti ed eroi. I fossili e le storie della storia del mondo

Ancient Greece was the first civilisation that discovered fossils and perceived and explained them with its creative think. The present essay is an investigation on the way in which Hellenes read the documentation of the past of Nature and Heart with the instrument of Myth. Frazer (on the basis of the studies by Lyell) guessed that fossils had a function in Greek cults and identified in Typhon myth a telluric matrix, but also the consequence of the discovery of extinct mammals bones. In the same way, we can establish that legends regarding Titans, Cyclops, Gryphon, Cadmus, Jason and sea-monsters awaked by Poseidon and Apollo, were born in connection with the astonishment of Greek man in front of the relics of Mammuthus meridionalis, Protoceratops and Samotherium. Similarly, the myths of Satyrs, Sphinxes and the Marsyas’s skin were produced by a mental and cultural process inspired by the figures and remains of apes and monkeys. Such Greek poetical and philosophical creativity (“corpolentissima”, as said by Vico), was involved with the unconscious recognition of structural homology. Structural homology will become a fundamental instrument for Darwinian evolutionism. Later, it will be Freud’s duty to arrange the evolution (of psyche) with mythological representations.