Prehistoric Werewolves

This is the place for discussion and voting on various aspects of werewolf life, social ideas, physical appearance, etc. Also a place to vote on how a werewolf should look.
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Windigo
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Prehistoric Werewolves

Post by Windigo »

After watching a few documentaries on human prehistory, a thought popped into my head, what would it be like for werewolves in the paleolithic(the stone age in laymans). Their culture, reactions to the climate, animals, and the reations of the prehistoric humans and neanderthals that would also lived at that time. Crurious to what your thoughts would be on this subject. :D
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Re: Prehistoric Werewolves

Post by wolfwand »

Ah! Very interesting question! I think it must have been much more easy! :lol:
Not that there was news guys, people with cameras and people with hunting rifles.
A werewolf today, probably has to be careful to not be seen. Right? Living with fear must be really hard :cry:
So I think they was great hunters and very fit for the life style :D Natural coats! :wink:
Probably just their culture was... more animal... and wild...
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Re: Prehistoric Werewolves

Post by Volkodlak »

Well in my opinion werewolfs would come too exist no earlier than 350 BC, but first sighting of werewolf was 1591.

as for your question wolfwand sumed it nicely.
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Re: Prehistoric Werewolves

Post by Uniform Two Six »

Windigo wrote: Their culture, reactions to the climate, animals, and the reations of the prehistoric humans and neanderthals that would also lived at that time.
Hmmm... So that's what happened to the Neanderthals.
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Re: Prehistoric Werewolves

Post by Terastas »

Probably not much different from the prehistoric humans: Semi-nomadic hunter gatherers with strong communal ties who trade with some tribes and are hostile with others. And even if they were shunned by civilization, with so much else of the planet still uninhabited, all they'd have to do is relocate.
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Re: Prehistoric Werewolves

Post by Uniform Two Six »

lovec1990 wrote: ...but first sighting of werewolf was 1591.
What about Petronius' account of werewolves during the Roman era? Supposedly his was the first to establish a connection between werewolves and the cycle of the moon. I believe that even earlier in classical Greece, Herodotus also wrote an account that included an encounter with werewolves.
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Re: Prehistoric Werewolves

Post by Volkodlak »

Uniform Two Six: my mistake. let me fix this:

We can trace the history of werewolves goes back to Turkish cave paintings in 8,000 B.C. and even written, documented cases exist from as early as 2, 000 B.C. In that era, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and epic poem and one of the earliest forms of literary fiction, was penned and included several references to werewolves. Many centuries later, around 400 B.C., we find recorded Grecian stories of Damarchus, an Arcadian werewolf who changed back to a man after nine years and was reported to have won a boxing medal at the Greek Olympics. In 1020 A.D. we find our first record of the word “werewolf”. It is at this point in time that the legend begins to take off.
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Re: Prehistoric Werewolves

Post by Uniform Two Six »

lovec1990 wrote: In 1020 A.D. we find our first record of the word “werewolf”. It is at this point in time that the legend begins to take off.
Well, I'm not sure what you mean by "the legend taking off" exactly. The werewolf as an iconic bad-guy for the Christians certainly became something of a boogey-man around that time and you start having people (often the Church) accusing people of lycanthropy. However, the same could also be said for witchcraft, vampirism, and all sorts of other forms of devil-worship. One could argue that it was more a side-effect of the politics of the day (the Church using the superstitions of the common-folk to gain temporal power). Regardless, the werewolf had been part of the folkloric (I'm sure that's actually a word) landscape for millennia. I mean the Curse of Lycaon is clearly a werewolf story and that one predates the birth of Christ by a few hundred years.

As for the word "werewolf" emerging during the middle ages, that may well be true, but remember that it's because of the rise of the Germanic peoples at that time -- "werewolf" being a Germanic word "were" (man), and "wolf" (actually "wulf", for -- you know). However an earlier word for a werewolf would be "lycanthrope" from Greek "lykos" (wolf) and "anthropos" (human), a term that was used from the Late Antiquity period in Greece, forward. There were a few other regional languages that had latched onto the werewolf as a concept before the tribes of modern-day Germany did.

I will agree that (primarily due to the influence of the Chruch) the concept of the werewolf started to become somewhat standardized (for lack of a better term) around that time (although still subject to significant regional variation).
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Re: Prehistoric Werewolves

Post by Terastas »

Uniform Two Six wrote:
lovec1990 wrote: ...but first sighting of werewolf was 1591.
What about Petronius' account of werewolves during the Roman era? Supposedly his was the first to establish a connection between werewolves and the cycle of the moon. I believe that even earlier in classical Greece, Herodotus also wrote an account that included an encounter with werewolves.
1951 may have just been the first sighting of a modern werewolf.

If we assume that lycanthropy is caused by a virus (or at least something virus-like), we should assume in turn that there have been yearly generations of lycanthropy. Just as the flu needs to be vaccinated against yearly because each new generation is descended from the virus that survived the previous vaccination attempt, assume lycanthropy has survived and evolved through its own adaptations.

The first things we could expect from lycanthropy would be increased infectiousness and a decrease in the likelihood of it killing the host. Then, if we assume lycanthropy has been discovered by humans who were none too thrilled to be sharing the planet with a bunch of occasionally savage wolf-people, evolution would favor werewolves who are either strong enough to fight back against their attackers, or able to suppress the symptoms and pass themselves off as human.

So the "first sighting" in 1951 might have been more of a rediscovery of a breed of werewolf that, through a process of natural selection hastened by religious fervor and the dark ages, became adapted to allowing werewolves to hide in plain sight.
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Re: Prehistoric Werewolves

Post by Kveldulf »

Also, given the strong presence of animal masking/ritual transformation in the earliest visual arts (and pretty much every hunter-gatherer society everywhere), I would expect that a prehistoric werewolf, Neandertaler, Denisovian, or Cro-Magnon, might well function as shaman to a tribe. And quite effectively, too, especially before the domestication of natural wolves as hunting companions - the wolf can smell out the game, scout a much wider area than the humans in less time, tell when things are really getting scarce and bad, sense earthquakes before they come (as natural animals and allegedly a few humans do), and so forth. Tribal packs might also exist; and when most tribes (probably) have totems, whose shape the shaman may take by means of masking, dance, and trance-ritual...your neighbors might go quite a while before noticing that you were wolves ("Day 28: they still haven't noticed that I'm a...").

My favourite T-shirt ever shows a white bipedal werewolf dressed in that primitive "shaman" feathers&bones aesthetic, armed with stone knife and stone-headed spear. As far as I know, it doesn't have an official name, but I always call it, "Not all of us are descended from monkeys"...

One other thing I do occasionally wonder about prehistoric werewolves: whether the North American dire wolf survived, if not as a natural species, at least in the lycanthropy strains of the early hominid dwellers. That would be, I've got to say, pretty cool. I know the "European werewolves invading Native American werewolf territory and subsequent tragic clashes" has been done at least a couple of times before and definitely doesn't need to be overdone, but throwing a real lupine-species difference into the mix might add a certain something to prospective interactions.
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