Expanding from fire a bit, and stretching the idea of culture from what we think of it as now to something more like learned group behavior, this gets us to Jungian ideas about the collective unconscious. We today have myths and patterns revealed by the stories we tell in cultures across the world which are older than Homo Sapiens and maybe even older than Primates entirely.
People say our collective myths about dragons--flying fire breathing serpents--come from some ancient amalgamation of innate fear of large birds (which would have been predators to small mammals from which we evolved) combined with fear of snakes and other reptiles (same), and all with a healthy dash of the danger and power of fire.
We've been social animals living in (albeit small) social groups for 10s of millions of years with all sorts of accoutrements including functioning hierarchies, acting in ways suited to our environments, knowledge to be able to find food and raise young and so on.
For reference here, homo sapiens is from about 200kya, diverged from our closest relatives (chimps/bonobos) about 8000kya, and primates have been around for 80000kya. And that's just primates.
What the word "dragon" even describes turns out to be incredibly vague across cultures. Some dragons have wings, some don't. Some have four limbs, some have two limbs, a few might even have none. Some have scales, some have feathers. Some are serpentine, some not. Some are vast eldritch beings that circle the world-tree, some hide in tombs and hoard piles of gold. Dragons don't even always breathe fire.
The only commonalities dragons seem to possess across cultures are being terrifyingly dangerous and at least vaguely reptilian (edit: and maybe flight but I'm not sure.) There's enough room in the margins to include a vast assortment of otherwise unrelated mythological beings and say "these are all dragons, these are all basically the same thing."
> People say our collective myths about dragons--flying fire breathing serpents--come from some ancient amalgamation of innate fear of large birds (which would have been predators to small mammals from which we evolved) combined with fear of snakes and other reptiles (same), and all with a healthy dash of the danger and power of fire.
Or just dinosaur skeletons laying around and boys trying to impress
People say our collective myths about dragons--flying fire breathing serpents--come from some ancient amalgamation of innate fear of large birds (which would have been predators to small mammals from which we evolved) combined with fear of snakes and other reptiles (same), and all with a healthy dash of the danger and power of fire.
We've been social animals living in (albeit small) social groups for 10s of millions of years with all sorts of accoutrements including functioning hierarchies, acting in ways suited to our environments, knowledge to be able to find food and raise young and so on.
For reference here, homo sapiens is from about 200kya, diverged from our closest relatives (chimps/bonobos) about 8000kya, and primates have been around for 80000kya. And that's just primates.
This stuff is crazy old, unfathomably old.