Les scientifiques ont découvert un crâne fossile d'un animal ancien appelé Elasmotherium sibiricum, et il pourrait être la chose la plus proche d'une vraie licorne ayant jamais existé. Cet animal a vécu il y a environ 30 000 ans et ressemblait plus à un immense rhinocéros poilu qu'aux gracieux licornes ressemblant à des chevaux que nous imaginons aujourd'hui. Il avait une seule, grande corne sur le front, mais c'est là que s'arrêtent les similitudes avec les mythes des licornes. Cette créature était énorme - deux fois plus lourde qu'une girafe! Il parcourait probablement les prairies de Sibérie, utilisant sa corne pour se défendre ou pour creuser à la recherche de nourriture. Bien qu'il ne s'agissait pas de la licorne magique des légendes, il est fascinant de penser qu'un vrai animal avec une corne a bien parcouru la Terre il y a longtemps. Animation créée par Sympa. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Musique par Epidemic Sound https://www.epidemicsound.com Pour ne rien perdre de Sympa, abonnez-vous!: https://goo.gl/6E4Xna ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nos réseaux sociaux : Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sympasympacom/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sympa.officiel/ Stock de fichiers (photos, vidéos et autres): https://www.depositphotos.com https://www.shutterstock.com https://www.eastnews.ru ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Si tu en veux encore plus, fais un tour ici: http://sympa-sympa.com
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00:00We are all fascinated by unicorns, these mythical creatures renowned for their enchanting beauty.
00:06You are probably visualizing a white horse with a twisted horn on its forehead.
00:11And it is not uncommon to imagine a rainbow floating in the air.
00:15However, where does this representation come from? And above all, does it have a part of truth?
00:20Well, yes and no.
00:22Let's start from the origin, the name.
00:24From the Latin unicornis, it literally means a single horn.
00:30Nowadays, only one terrestrial animal corresponds to this description, the rhinoceros.
00:35The Greek name for the unicorn, monoceros, also translates as a single horn, which confirms the logic.
00:43However, do we not usually associate the unicorn with a horse?
00:47It seems necessary to call on science to elucidate this mystery.
00:52Researchers have exhumed the skull of a creature that could well be an authentic unicorn,
00:56having roamed our planet about 30,000 years ago, the Elasmotherium sibiricum.
01:01This animal resembled a massive and velvet rhinoceros, far from the gracious image of the unicorn that we know today.
01:08It weighed about twice the weight of a giraffe and mainly fed on grass, a lot of grass.
01:14However, the skull discovered in Central Asia revealed another surprising fact.
01:19The age of this animal.
01:21Previous research had suggested that the species had died 350,000 years ago, thus excluding any coexistence with our ancestors.
01:29However, the dating of the skull indicates a much more recent era, about 29,000 years ago,
01:35a period when humans were already present on Earth.
01:38This is how the legend took shape.
01:41Imagine yourself as a prehistoric human just seeing a unicorn.
01:45What would you do?
01:46There is no smartphone to immortalize this encounter.
01:49The solution would undoubtedly be to represent it on the walls of a cave.
01:53And some of these works have come to us.
01:55In Lascaux, Dordogne, a painting shows an animal that seems to have only one horn, in the famous bullfighting arena.
02:02While all the other animals exhibit two wavy horns, this enigmatic and sharp creature has two lines on its head.
02:10Could these double lines represent a single horn?
02:13Is it the famous unicorn?
02:15Maybe.
02:16This fresco is nicknamed the unicorn sign.
02:22But the representations of unicorns are not limited to rupestrious paintings.
02:26In the Indus Valley, archaeologists have discovered several buckets decorated with a mythical animal wearing only one horn.
02:33Ancient Greek authors believed that unicorns lived in India, a region that, in their eyes, remained exotic.
02:40Although the ancient Greeks never observed unicorns, they made an astonishingly precise description of them,
02:46and even went so far as to note that its flesh had a bitter taste.
02:50But was it a horse or a rhinoceros?
02:53Neither.
02:54In their eyes, the unicorn looked more like a dwarf.
02:58Go figure.
03:01In Chinese mythology, we find a similar creature, called Qilin.
03:06Its name, which translates to male-female in French, describes an animal whose characteristics evoke those of a unicorn.
03:13A single horn on the forehead, a buffalo tail and a deer body.
03:17Like the ancient rhino of Central Asia, it feeds on grass.
03:21When the first living giraffe was presented to Emperor Ming in 1414, it was compared to a unicorn.
03:27However, the sovereign concluded that the animal could not be this mythical creature.
03:31The legend persisted nevertheless in this part of the world.
03:34Moreover, the modern Japanese term for giraffe, Qilin, derives from Chinese, designating this mythological creature.
03:43The Persians also mentioned the existence of unicorns, as evidenced by a representation of the creature in their ancient capital of Persepolis.
03:50However, it has two great wings, an intriguing particularity.
03:55The Persians, them neither, had never seen a unicorn with their own eyes.
03:59They imagined it as a creature from a supernatural world.
04:03And it is this gap with reality that still fuels our fascination for unicorns today.
04:08We find references to these creatures in the writings of Aristotle, and even of Julius Caesar,
04:13who reported that animals similar to unicorns hid in the forests of Germany.
04:18The image we have of the unicorn today only emerged from the Middle Ages, shortly before the Renaissance.
04:25At the time, people were overflowing with imagination and unicorns often appeared in the spotlight.
04:30According to ancient scribes, this animal was formidable, and its main opponent was none other than the elephant.
04:36The people of the Middle Ages had a deep respect for this creature that they had never seen.
04:41Considered agile and ferocious, it had to be tracked.
04:45But how to attract a unicorn?
04:47With the charm of a beautiful young girl, Pardee.
04:50It may seem coquettish nowadays, but we must not forget that the Middle Ages was a singular period.
04:56At the time, doctors treated their patients with blood.
05:00It was a perfect context to see the myth of the unicorn born.
05:05History takes an even more rocambolesque turn.
05:08A young lady was adventuring in the forest, and when a unicorn noticed her, she came to stand against her knees.
05:14Once the animal was asleep, hunters arose to capture it and present it to the king.
05:19But why did the unicorn arouse so much admiration in Europe?
05:23It was above all because of its horn, to which magical virtues were attributed.
05:28It would have been able to detect poison in food, and once reduced to powder, it would even have had the power to whiten teeth.
05:36This was only part of the wonderful qualities that surrounded the unicorn horn.
05:41This folklore was so present that, when it was not possible to obtain real unicorns,
05:47people fell back on a life-saving solution, the narwhal horns.
05:52These cetaceans have long, defensive teeth that come out of their mouths.
05:59In England, the unicorn symbolized something perfectly unspeakable.
06:03In the 16th and 17th centuries, it began to embody imagination,
06:07and it was at this time that the rainbow was associated with this fantastic creature.
06:12The Victorians were the first to establish this link.
06:15The unicorn made its first appearance in fantasy literature with the novel of 1871,
06:21On the Other Side of the Mirror, intended for young readers.
06:24This work, which followed the more famous work of Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland,
06:29made the unicorn a symbol of hope and purity.
06:33However, there was no evidence of observation of the unicorn that had been scientifically verified.
06:38In 1663, a German scientist, Otto von Guericke, claimed to have discovered a unicorn skeleton.
06:45The story seemed too beautiful to be true, and it was indeed the case.
06:49This skeleton had been assembled from bones of various animals,
06:52in order to make people believe in the existence of the creature.
06:55This fake is now exhibited at the Natural History Museum of Magdeburg, in Germany.
07:00However, this did not discourage people who continued to look for unicorns wherever they went.
07:07In the 20th century, a British explorer made the discovery of a new species in Africa,
07:12characterized by a small bump on the corner of the head.
07:15The public nicknamed it the African unicorn.
07:18However, it was actually an okapi, a animal closer to the giraffe,
07:23although its back looks like that of a zebra, and its head evokes that of a deer.
07:28Despite its singular appearance, the okapi had nothing in common with the unsearchable unicorn.
07:34In 1991, a new observation report scared the news,
07:38when an Austrian biologist declared that he had seen a unicorn in a German forest,
07:43thus perpetuating the myth that these creatures lived in enchanted woods.
07:48However, the total absence of tangible evidence was a problem.
07:52Some historians even claim that unicorns never existed,
07:56and would be the result of a mistaken interpretation of rupestrial paintings,
07:59which could actually represent two-horned animals.
08:03After all, it is not easy to give depth to a two-dimensional image.
08:10But in 2013, the word unicorn came back,
08:13not to designate the animal, but to illustrate an economic concept.
08:17Aileen Lee, an American capital risk investor,
08:20used this term to qualify startups whose valuation exceeded the billion dollars,
08:25judging these companies as rare as the legendary animal.
08:29There are only a thousand in the world,
08:31among which we find the famous SpaceX company.