Dragons

Correction: Without Demons and Wizards there could be no prog.

:3

Ladies and gentlemen, in front of you stands a level four creature with the greatest number of hitpoints in the game - 400! (No, not 400 factorial, it's 400 and an exclamation mark.) Inflicts levels of damage beyond "that hurt like a b$%ch!" and it's completely immune to all magic spells (yes, that includes "Poison", "Lightning Bolt", "Fear", etc.) and I believe it's also immune to bad luck, but not very sure about that one. When you get 100 of those (and the hero that's leading them is level 26), they are pretty much unstoppable.

As early humans were well knowledged in animal anatomy¹ it is perfectly reasonable that they would find bone fossils and recognise they were not from extant species of animal, it is also reasonable to assume they would be be able to reconstruct likely images for these extinct creatures based upon what they did know of existing animals.

 

Also, humans were present during the last ice age when mega-fauna (mastadon, giant sloth, sabre tooth tigers etc.) ruled the land so memory of those creatures could have been preserved in mythology, albeit distorted by the telling and re-telling of aural hsitories often are.

 

One curocity concerning Dragons is their alternative name of "Worm" which is also common to many disparate civilisations form the Wirm, Wyrm or Wurm in Europe to the wingless, legless dragons of China, suggesting that perhaps giant snakes are also part of the dragon mythology. Wurm is also the name of a river. A streak of lightning looks like a river of fire in the sky, the connection between lightning, river, worm and fire is an easy connection to make.

 

 

(¹this is not a wild supposition- early humans existed as hunter-gatherers for 10s of thousands of years, butchering of carcases was an everyday event for them so they knew animal anatomy very well - they also used animal bones for tools so they were aware of their properties and characteristics too)