The question of whether dragons exist has been debated since ancient times. In the eyes of many people, the occurrence of so many "dragon-dropping" incidents shows that dragons are a real animal, but this is not the case. The existence of dragons is unscientific. The "dragon-lowering" incident happened only because there are many animals similar to the legendary dragon in the world.
Dragon is just a kind of spiritual totem produced by people's worship of supernatural power, which is not real. This is just a concrete manifestation of people's yearning for a peaceful and beautiful life in primitive society.
There are loopholes in the ecliptic theory
Many people think that dragons are real, because other animals in the zodiac are also real. According to this law, people infer that dragons are real. This view is all wet.
At the beginning of the birth of the zodiac, it was not the zodiac we are familiar with now. According to the bamboo slips "Japanese Book" unearthed from Qin tombs in Shuihudi, the beast corresponding to "Chen" in the zodiac at that time was not a dragon or other animals, but a "thief". In addition, the responses of other animals are very different from ours now. "Noon horse" became "noon deer" and "sheep" became "horse".
By combing the literature, we can find that most of the zodiac signs before the Han Dynasty were "insects", which refer to scaly "scale insects", that is, fish and reptiles. It was not until the Eastern Han Dynasty that dragons were said, probably because in legend, dragons were "the length of scale worms".
It can be seen that the dragon did not exist at the beginning of the zodiac, and the zodiac was not formed at once. It is very unscientific to infer the existence of dragons from the zodiac.
There are differences in records in different times.
There are different records about the shape and ability of dragons in different times, which is a typical feature of virtual things. The gods in these virtual things are like this. In different cultures, the power and relationship of these gods are very different.
We can see these differences in the pictures of unearthed cultural relics and handed down documents. As can be seen from the unearthed dragon-shaped Yu Pei of Shang Dynasty, Shang people thought that the dragon was a semicircle with no patterns on its feet. In the Qin and Han dynasties, the image of the dragon became a mixture of snakes and lizards. It was not until the Ming and Qing Dynasties that we saw the image of the dragon.
The evolution of dragon image is closely related to the development of human society. For people in ancient society, the river is the source of life, and the river itself contains mysterious power. Therefore, crocodiles or other large reptiles in the river are easily worshipped, because it is difficult to figure out what is going on underwater, so ancestors often have various associations with underwater animals.
Later, with the war between tribes, inland civilization and marine civilization, grassland civilization and alpine civilization merged with each other, and people's image of reptiles further merged. At this stage, people's cognition of the dragon image tends to be consistent, mostly the image of a serpent. After the dragon was given the meaning of emperor, it began to be created and processed by the government and gradually evolved into the dragon we see today.
The existence of dragons lacks biological rationality.
In ancient legends, dragons can call the shots and ride clouds and fog, but from a scientific point of view, this creature is obviously impossible to exist. In ancient times, people's understanding of animals was not as perfect as ours, and it was easy to mistake other animals for legendary dragons.
From a biological point of view, the legendary dragon horn is like a deer, with rabbit eyes, snake neck, eagle claws, tiger palms and cow ears. There are too many unreasonable biological structures and collocations to survive in nature.
So how to explain the ancient "Imperial Dragon" incident? This should all be the subjective imagination of the ancients, just as Zheng He met a giraffe on his voyage to the West and mistook it for a unicorn. The dragons people meet on land should be animals like pythons. The dragons encountered at sea are probably crocodiles or large fish such as imperial fish. As for the dragon seen in the sky, it is probably a climatic phenomenon caused by some climatic reasons.
Dragon is just a bright and beautiful imagination in ancient times, and it is a beautiful sustenance of our ancestors in an environment where they can't overcome natural disasters. Although dragons contain the beautiful imagination of China people, from a scientific point of view, animal dragons obviously do not exist.