Mutants, Human

Antiquity

Monstrous races and beings have been cited since antiquity. Greek,Scandinavian, and Asian mythologies rendered tales of beasts with fantastic skills and/or outlandish proportions. Debate over the origins of these creatures has often focused on whether the images might be based on some remote fact, on pure fancy, or perhaps on both. Pliny the Elder, in his influential book Natural History, catalogued hundreds of bizarre creatures culled from the existing texts of the times. The Cynocephali, for example, were a race with dog-faced heads on human torsos. Could these animals have derived from crude descriptions of real humans with exaggerated facial slopes, hypertrichosis, or elongated noses?Alternatively, many of Pliny's other eclectic entities might well have sprung simply from a vivid imagination and an interest in a good story.

During this pre-Christian era, most true birth deformities were ascribed to the supernatural, and explanations abounded. Abnormal infants could be thought to be the result of an inauspicious copulation, perhaps involving the descent of an incubus, or merely of bestial relations. Even if the fertilizing union were pure, however, a developing fetus might be altered, positively or negatively, by environmental influences such as eclipses, comets, and floods. A related concept, propagated through the next several centuries, was the theory of maternal impressions. According to this theory, a trauma or fright to the mother would then transfer to the embryo. Even self-induced maternal imagination or dreams might have an effect. Later investigators soon discounted these beliefs, although the understanding of teratological nutritional and toxic exposures (e.g., thalidomide, alcohol) has advanced.

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