8 Ancient Myths That Turned Out To Be True, Explained in 10 Minutes

An old Greek sailor swears a whole city sank in one night. A historian swears there are ants the size of foxes that dig up gold. You laugh. Pfft, just a myth. Big mistake.

In 1907, on the Indonesian island of Simeulue, people ran down to the beach to watch the sea pull back. Many died. The survivors turned what happened into a story called smong: if the sea pulls back, run to the hills. In 2004, when the tsunami came, an island of about 80,000 people lost seven. Laughing at the wrong old story can cost you more than your pride. Here are eight ancient myths everyone laughed at, from a city that vanished overnight to a story that might be 37,000 years old. Before each verdict, make your call.

Helike: the city that sank in one night

Greece, 373 BC. Imagine you're a Spartan sailor parking your warship in Helike's harbour for the night, next to nine others. On a winter night an earthquake hits, a wave rolls in, and the city, the harbour and all ten ships go under. Worst parking spot in history.

An attempt with 2,000 men to recover the bodies failed. About 150 years later, a bronze Poseidon was still standing in the water, snagging fishermen's nets. So when modern researchers went looking, they swept the seabed with sonar and found nothing. Not one wall.

In 2001 they found Helike about 2 km inland, buried under farmland in an old lagoon. Everyone had been looking in the sea.

About a decade after Helike sank, Plato wrote about Atlantis, swallowed by the sea "in a single day and night". Some think that's no coincidence. That part is only a suggestion. The city is real.

Verdict: true.

The smoke tents: Herodotus's five-star steam bath

Around 440 BC, the Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the Scythians crawled into felt tents, threw hemp seeds onto red-hot stones and howled with joy. That was their bath. His review: "no Greek vapor-bath could surpass it." Five stars, would howl again.

Critics called him the Father of Lies. Then, in 2019, a lab tested 10 wooden braziers from a tomb about 10,000 feet up in western China. Nine of them had cannabis residue, stronger than any ancient sample found before. The people buried there weren't necessarily Herodotus's Scythians, but it was the same habit in the same wider world of the steppe.

The Father of Lies is now the father of I told you so.

Verdict: true.

The gold-digging ants: smaller than dogs, bigger than foxes

Herodotus also says that in India live giant ants, "somewhat less than dogs, but bigger than foxes", and the sand they throw up as they dig is full of gold. Buddy, that's just a dog.

He even gives you the heist plan. Take three camels, with a female who has just had a baby in the middle so she races home, and go in the hottest part of the day, while the ants hide from the heat.

In 1996, the French explorer Michel Peissel reached a plateau about 10,000 feet up, after 14 years of waiting for permits. Villagers there told him their elders had collected gold dust from marmot burrows. Fat, fluffy marmots, digging up gold-rich soil from three feet down. And in Persian, he said, the word for marmot was like "mountain ant". History's most expensive translation slip.

The catch is that this comes from a travel book and a newspaper story, not a study, and the Oxford scholar Stephanie West says Herodotus "could have got it wrong".

Verdict: maybe.

The Oracle of Delphi: was the god a gas leak?

For about 1,100 years, people walked for weeks to ask Apollo a question at Delphi. He was open one day a month, nine months a year. Worse opening hours than your bank.

The priestess, the Pythia, sat on a tripod over an opening in the rock. Plutarch, a priest there, wrote that the room filled with a smell like "the sweetest and most expensive perfumes".

In 1904 an expert, Adolphe Oppé, declared that "no chasm or vapor ever existed". Everyone agreed, for 97 years. Then, in 2001, a team of scientists found two faults crossing right under the temple, and spring water containing ethylene, a sweet-smelling gas that can cause a trance.

Plot twist number two: later studies found far too little ethylene to drug anyone. The cracks and the gases are real. The trance is unproven.

Verdict: maybe.

Those first four stories were all written down, and anyone can remember with a pen. The stories nobody wrote down are a harder test. Many scholars have said oral traditions survive intact for no more than about 800 years.

Cascadia: one night, remembered for 300 years

Imagine you're a village official in Japan on 26 January 1700. Around midnight, a wave wrecks 13 houses and fires destroy 20 more. Nobody felt an earthquake. Now write a disaster report with no cause, for your samurai boss.

Across the Pacific, at Pachena Bay on Vancouver Island, the Huu-ay-aht people never wrote it down. They told it. As it was recorded: "I think it was at nighttime that the land shook. I think a big wave smashed into the beach. The Pachena Bay people were lost." Only Masit, about 23 metres up the hillside, wasn't wiped out.

Scientists counted back the wave's nine-and-a-half-hour trip to Japan and landed on 26 January 1700, about 9 at night. A winter evening, after bedtime, exactly as the story said. A fault at least 1,000 kilometres long had snapped. Magnitude 9, give or take.

Here's the part that isn't history. That fault, the Cascadia subduction zone, runs right off Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, and it has about a 15% chance of another magnitude 9 in the next 50 years. In 1990 the Huu-ay-aht community moved its new homes uphill. Meanwhile, you're still wondering if a sea view is worth it.

Verdict: true.

Crater Lake: the mountain that deleted itself

The Klamath people of Oregon tell of Llao, chief of the world below, who lived in a mountain and fought Skell, the spirit of the sky. In one telling, the mountain stood no more. A huge crater opened, rain filled it, and Llao's head became an island.

About 7,700 years ago, Mount Mazama had the biggest eruption in the Cascades in a million years. It lost about a mile of height, probably in a matter of days. It didn't erupt so much as delete itself. Ash fell on eight US states and three Canadian provinces.

And people were there. Archaeologists have found sandals buried under its ash.

The story has no date, but its order is the rocks' order: the mountain gone, a giant hole, rain, then Wizard Island.

Verdict: probably true.

The drowned coasts: a group chat the size of a continent

An Aboriginal story from Melbourne tells of the sea breaking in and covering a kangaroo hunting ground. That's Port Phillip Bay. Today it's full of boats.

In 2016, the researchers Patrick Nunn and Nicholas Reid found stories like this at 21 places around Australia's coast, each describing a time when the sea was much lower than today. Australia's seas reached their present level about 7,000 years ago, so any story of dry land out there has to be older than that. Matched to the depth of water each story needs, they come out at about 7,000 to 13,000 years old. The 800-year rule just lost an arm.

The paper became the most-read article in its journal's 116-year history. Not everyone bought it: the archaeologist Peter Hiscock called it "fantastical and not believable".

Verdict: probably true.

Budj Bim: possibly the oldest story on Earth

The Gunditjmara people of south-west Victoria tell of four giant beings. One of them became the volcano Budj Bim. The mountain is his forehead, and the stones are his teeth.

In 2020, Erin Matchan's team dated the eruption by the decay of potassium in its rock: about 37,000 years ago, give or take 3,000. Tower Hill, a volcano nearby, erupted at the same time, and under its ash someone found a stone axe. People were there. (For what else people were making back then, see every prehistoric invention, explained.)

These volcanoes grew in days to months. Faster than your town builds a roundabout.

If the story remembers that, it was passed down about 1,230 times, at 30 years a generation. That's 46 times longer than the 800-year rule allows. But the scientists themselves only say "if" and "could", so it gets two stamps.

Verdict: people were there, true. The story remembers it, maybe.

Before anyone wrote a single word, somebody told this story, and somebody listened.

The short version

• Helike, the Greek city that sank in one night in 373 BC, was real. It was found in 2001, 2 km inland under farmland.
• Herodotus's hemp smoke tents were real, his gold-digging ants might have been marmots, and Delphi's faults and gases are real, though the drugged trance is unproven.
• Stories nobody wrote down lasted far longer than the supposed 800-year limit: about 300 years for Cascadia, 7,700 for Crater Lake, up to 13,000 for Australia's drowned coasts, and maybe 37,000 for Budj Bim.
• The Cascadia fault has about a 15% chance of a magnitude 9 in the next 50 years.
• If an old story tells you to run uphill when the sea pulls back, run first and fact-check later.
• Next time someone says "it's just a myth", ask them one thing: how old?