The dog-headed man-eater trope traveled from pre-Socratic Asia lore to Columbus

Evidence

The typical image of the cannibal-monsters was that of the cynocephalus. The first references to fantastic dog-headed peoples living in Asia date from the pre-Socratic period. They then come to inspire the medieval imagination. Marco Polo discovers, on an island, anthropophagi with dog’s heads. Columbus is the first to mention the presence of man-eaters in the New World, whom he claims have dog’s heads. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 580

Categorization

• XREF: Perfect example for the reader’s ‘monster’ figure category — a specific monster (cynocephalus) with a documented genealogy of image transfer.
• DEFINE: Cynocephalus — the dog-headed man, a specific monster archetype in the Western bestiary — is defined and given a lineage here.
• BMF: The dog-headed man-eater resurfaces as a figure that travels across centuries and continents uncorrupted — evokes the chimeric, unkillable myth-patterns in the shaping of collective fears.