Fossils of prehistoric elephants may have inspired the Greek myth of giant, one-eyed, man-eating creatures, known as cyclopes. In the Odyssey, the ancient Greek poet Homer recounts the hero Odysseus’s near fatal encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus. Stranded with his crew on the island of Sicily, the wily Odysseus blinds the giant and escapes with the remnants of his crew — many of whom had been eaten — beneath a herd of sheep.
It’s possible that visitors to islands in the Mediterranean stumbled across the skulls of ancient elephants in caves with bones scattered around them, conjuring up stories of gigantic, one-eyed, man-eating beasts.
“Anyone who goes to a natural history museum and looks at the skull of an elephant can see that the eye sockets are negligible, you don't even notice those,” says Adrienne Mayor, a research scholar in the Classics Department at Stanford University who has studied fossils and ancient myths extensively. “What you notice is the gigantic hole in the middle of the skull that looks like a single eye.”
