Cultural Depictions
The Pleistocene megafauna and their abruptly recent extinctions have captured a large portion of the human imagination, as well as human culture. Their immense size and their nature as fantastic versions of more familiar creatures (giant short-faced kangaroos, dwarf hippos, giant beavers, etc.) make them especially engaging and appealing for wide audiences. Recently, films (10,000 BC, Ice Age) and videogames (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim) have featured megafauna like mammoths and sabertooths, while books (Once and Future Giants) and comics (Zoostalgia) have attempted to celebrate these creatures.
Anthropologists also suggest that some megafauna, like Eurasia's Elasmotherium, Australia's Diprotodon, and the woolly mammoth, may have historically endured in legends of mythical beasts.
Read more about this topic: Pleistocene Megafauna
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or depictions:
“The rumor of a great city goes out beyond its borders, to all the latitudes of the known earth. The city becomes an emblem in remote minds; apart from the tangible export of goods and men, it exerts its cultural instrumentality in a thousand phases.”
—In New York City, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Surely, of all creatures we eat, we are most brutal to snails. Helix optera is dug out of the earth where he has been peacefully enjoying his summer sleep, cracked like an egg, and eaten raw, presumably alive. Or boiled in oil. Or roasted in the hot ashes of a wood fire.... If God is a snail, Bosch’s depictions of Hell are going to look like a vicarage tea-party.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)