Everyone knows from childhood stories about unicorns - fabulous creatures of the past that lived during the time of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. The unicorn served as the personification of power, a force that resists the forces of darkness, maintaining balance in the universe.
Many traditions speak of the unicorn as a mythical animal, symbolizing the supreme power of Being, but, unfortunately, does not exist. But what if this creature really inhabited our planet, and not so long ago, even if it did not look quite the way we imagine? The latest discovery of scientists made in Siberia allows shedding light on this question.
The discovery belongs to scientists from Tomsk State University. They report that part of the skull of a rhinoceros (Elasmotherium sibiricum), a fossil animal that lived in Eurasia, was found in Kazakhstan in the village of Kozhamzhar. After conducting radiocarbon analysis, paleontologists found out that the animal lived some 26 thousand years ago, that is, it caught the appearance of Homo sapiens. Earlier, the Elasmotherium rhino was considered extinct 350 thousand years ago.
According to the head of the study, Andrei Shpansky, the bones belonged to the largest specimen of Elasmotherium discovered earlier. Most likely, it was a very old and large male. Unfortunately, it was impossible to determine the individual age of the animal, as the teeth in its jaws were not preserved.
The newly-born unicorn destroys all the stereotypes about this animal: instead of a graceful horse with a spirally twisted horn in its forehead, we have rather a huge woolly rhinoceros, reaching up to five meters in length and weighing more than five tons. Its horn reached a length of two meters. The diet of this unicorn consisted mainly of tubers and plant bulbs.
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The research results indicate that the species found by Tomsk scientists lived for a long time in the southeastern part of the West Siberian Plain. Before that, it was believed that unicorns did not visit this territory at all, being thermophilic animals. And this allows us to conclude that, perhaps, the climate in the Urals and Siberia was completely different from what it was described earlier. “There is another possibility - they could migrate and just live in more southern regions for a while,” said Andrey Shpansky.
This find also allows us to draw another conclusion - since the representatives of Elasmotherium existed until the Upper Paleolithic, ancient people could have time to see them with their own eyes. Consequently, the unicorns depicted on the cave paintings were not simply the fruit of the unfolding fantasy of our distant ancestors.