📝 Articles Day 2

The Odyssey is fiction. But its monsters and magic may have been based on real science.

Odysseus faced the cyclops, his men turned into pigs, and he sailed between a six-headed monster and a whirlpool. Each of these, it turns out, have potential real-life explanations.
The Odyssey is a myth. It’s doubtful that a man took a literal decade to make it from Troy on the coast of modern-day Turkey to the Greek island of Ithaca after the Trojan War, cursed to make love to witches, journey to Hades, and pick fights with a cyclops. Or at least, if he did take that long, his curse probably involved not asking for directions.
But the tale of Odysseus’ extra-long journey home contains hints of things that people might have encountered in the ancient world, from a real-life cyclops to killer whirlpools and hallucinogenic plants. As Matt Damon steps into the famous wanderer’s sandals in The Odyssey on July 17, here are some of the scientific realities behind his legendary side quests.
The cyclops
In the story, the cyclops Polyphemus—a giant with a taste for human flesh, and of course, only one eye in the center of his head—traps Odysseus’ crew and munches a few for lunch. Odysseus blinds Polyphemus with a heated spear, and the men make their escape, tied to the bellies of Polyphemus’ sheep.
One hypothesis for the origin of this mythical one-eyed giant lies in the fossils of Deinotherium giganteum, an elephant relative that roamed Europe, Asia and Africa between 23 and 8 million years ago. Paleontologists have unearthed its bones on the island of Crete, where the ancient Greeks could have come across them as well. Elephant skulls have relatively small eye holes, with a massive hole in the center. That hole is for the trunk. But as the elephants stood 15 feet (4.6 meters) tall at the shoulder, the huge skull might have been mistaken for the head of a huge, one-eyed person.
But the Greeks could also have been familiar with cyclopia, a rare and deadly congenital defect where the eye sockets and brain don’t properly divide as the human embryo develops. Instead of a nose, the fetus grows a tubular appendage, which usually appears above a single eye. Cyclopia occurs in only one out of every 100,000 human births. Sadly, 39 percent are stillborn, and those that survive birth do not survive longer than 13 hours.
While it is a very rare condition, scientists have estimated that at the time of The Odyssey, about 53 cases of human cyclopia would have been born around the world every year. In addition, other species can also exhibit cyclopia, including sheep, cattle and goats, especially if the mothers eat plants like hellebore.

From NATIONALGEOGRAPHIC