amyasleigh said:
oldrover -- mmm... initial thought is, I'll admit, along "gnats and camels" line -- but will pause for thought; will carry on "as previously planned", meanwhile.
Sorry if post as above, seemed a bit snappish – was just having re the discussion, something of an “ever-decreasing circles” moment.
On reflection – yes, word-of-mouth (and later, written) stuff about MHB, has been around among humans, pretty well ever since there have been humans. I’d figure that Swift could have been inspired re his Yahoos, by material which he in Britain in the early 18th century could likely have heard of: (cue list – additional suggestions, welcomed).
British woodwoses; quite likely, Northern European trolls; satyrs, fauns, and similar, from “around-Mediterranean” classical antiquity; “beast-men” in the Far East (not, I think, Himalayas and China) fragmentarily told of, by classical authors, and later by Marco Polo; some vague hints (if I have things rightly) about great apes in Africa; likewise, vague hints from South America – in part, Patagonian giant sloth rumours: 300 years ago, “close enough for government work”, especially if you’re basically a fiction writer, not a scientist.
I’d figure that anything in North America / Russia-cum-Central Asia / Himalayan region / China / Australia (this last, basically undiscovered in his time) would have been outside his scope.
One can speculate and wonder: postulating that basically, in flesh-and-blood terms, MHB do not exist – or have not existed for many centuries back – it might perhaps be, that by the chance concatenation of Swift writing “Gulliver” in the early 18th century, and – for his misanthropic agenda – drawing on “beast-men” lore which he knew, for his horrible Yahoos; and Dan Boone becoming a “Gulliver” fan (and not averse to colourful storytelling, getting into the realms of what Gulliver’s noble equine race, masters of the Yahoos, called “the thing which is not” [the concept of lying, was alien to them]) – tales came to proliferate, mid-18th-century onward, in the south-eastern parts of North America (maybe extending yet further, say to the Bahamas), about MHB, which tended to be called “Yahoos” (or similar) – that whole thing in that corner of the globe, being all about tall tales and nonsense (and various people, for various reasons, claiming that they had seen / encountered Yahoos, whereas in sober fact, they were lying / deluded / mistaken).
Continuing with the assumption that MHB don’t exist: Swift could thus be justly accused of having (though inadvertently) helped to prolong for a couple-or-three centuries, naïve folks’ belief in the existence of MHB, in a fairly restricted part of the globe (including American MHB erroneous-believers taking the myth further west with them). However: as cited above, parts of the world whose reputed MHB Swift couldn’t have known anything about – thus, traditions of same, independent of, and unrelated to, him – which, if one is a staunch debunker, one must attack on terms nothing to do with our friend the Dean ( fl. 1667 – 1745).