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.
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