Martin Waldseemüller’s 1516 Carta Marina portrays dog-headed men

This got me thinking about the articles I found going back to the Dakotas of dog faced skulls found. Maybe this is the origin of these stories. 🤔 Martin Waldseemüller’s 1516 Carta Marina portrays dog-headed men, known as cynocephali, situated between northern India and the region labeled “Mongal” and “Tartaria.” Marco Polo was one of the early and famous travelers to mention tribes with dog-like heads, notably in his accounts of the Andaman Islands, also called Angamanain in his writings. He described the inhabitants as having heads, teeth, and eyes like big mastiff dogs. Polo portrayed them as cruel idolaters who lived without a king and practiced cannibalism, eating anyone they could catch outside their own race. Despite their ferocity, Polo noted that they had spices but lived like wild beasts. These dog-headed men were said to live primarily off flesh, rice, milk, and various fruits. The idea of dog-headed men also carried over into the Age of Exploration in the New World. Christopher Columbus and other explorers were told by native guides about fearsome dog-faced men or man-eaters inhabiting islands in the Caribbean or nearby regions. These reports are thought to be a mix of native myth, misunderstanding, and European imagination. Such beings appeared in travel literature and maps as late as the 16th century. This confluence of myth, exploration, and indigenous storytelling illustrates how the cynocephali figure in global exploration lore and Spanish encounters with indigenous peoples.