Noble unicorns are the most popular characters in numerous legends. They have always been considered in scholarly circles to be one hundred percent fictional creatures, although the image of unique animals is suspiciously often used in the mythology of almost the entire Ancient World.
Some images of a unicorn on the territory of Hindustan are over 4000 years old, later similar drawings appear from Egypt to Western Asia and Rome. Persian healers as early as 500 BC. e. wrote treatises on how to escape from poisons and diseases with the help of powder from the horn of a mythical creature.
Can it be argued that such creatures lived in reality in the neighborhood with a reasonable man?
There was no consensus about the appearance of a unicorn in the ancient world. He was often depicted with the body of an already known animal - a horse, a donkey, a bull. There were drawings where the mythical creature had a pig's tail and elephant legs, strongly resembling a modern rhinoceros.
Maybe the ancient manuscripts were about single specimens of the Eurasian fossil species Elasmotherium sibiricum, which once inhabited the vastness of this continent?
Studies of the remains of this rhino have previously yielded disappointing results, even its earliest bones were more than 350,000 years old. The sensation came after the radiocarbon analysis of samples found near the Kazakh village of Kozhamzhar. The fossils of the large Elasmotherium were strikingly young, no more than 26,000 years old. This means that the powerful animal that lived on the banks of the Irtysh was one hundred percent contemporary of Homo sapiens.
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The Elasmotherium looked little like the legendary horse with a spiral horn. These were five-ton giants with a two-meter outgrowth on the forehead and a body length of about 5 meters. The herbivorous fossil rhinos that inhabited the West Siberian Plain preferred to eat tubers, grass, and bulbs. In search of warmth, they could migrate quite freely to more southern regions, and when warming, return to the vastness of Siberia.
Skull with a horn.
The likelihood of finding even earlier unicorn bones is quite high, chic discoveries in paleontology are increasingly common. It is worth recalling the mini-sensation of 2013, when the bones of a two-horned rhinoceros Merck were discovered near Chelyabinsk, which was previously considered extinct 200,000 years ago. The Ural remains of this creature turned out to be as much as 80,000 years younger.
Elasmotherium and his other relatives, whose bones have yet to be discovered, may well have turned out to be heroes of ancient real stories, which later, thanks to folk art, turned into beautiful fairy tales.
