Forget Wonder Woman's golden lassos and tiaras.

The Amazons of ancient myth were much more gruesome than any DC comic heroine.

According to the legends, they were man-hating, baby-killing war machines who cut off their own breasts just so they could shoot their arrows better.

Amazons were the fearsome, worthy opponents that male heroes had to defeat to prove their battle prowess.

But were these warrior women even real?

Images of fiercely independent Amazons could be found on countless vases, sculptures, and buildings from antiquity.

Yet over time, they faded into myth, along with the dryads and centaurs.

Scholars have debated their existence for decades, but recent archeological discoveries might have finally solved this mystery.

[intriguing music] (host 2) TV shows like "Xena: Warrior Princess" and comics like Wonder Woman paint a seemingly contradictory picture of Amazons as terrifying but attractive, isolated from the world, but still compassionate enough to aid those they deem worthy.

Modern media also gives the distinct impression that Amazons were merely figures of fantastical myth.

These depictions surely wouldn't have sat well with ancient Greek writers, who saw Amazons as very real but savagely brutish people.

The oldest surviving written mention of the Amazons can be found in Homer's "The Iliad," penned around 700 BCE, a time when the boundary between myth and history was so fuzzy, it was almost non-existent.

"The Iliad" tells the story of the Trojan War, which supposedly happened five centuries before Homer's time, though modern archeologists are skeptical that a war of quite that scale actually happened the way Homer described.

Still, the Amazons' presence in the story suggests that they were in the Greek cultural zeitgeist as far back as the Bronze Age.

Recent findings from grave sites in parts of Russia and Ukraine have scholars thinking that his descriptions of the warrior women may have also been exaggerated.

But first, let's take a closer look at how Amazons have been depicted in literature and art.

(host 1) The great Heracles was rumored to have fought the Amazons and emerged victorious during the ninth of his 12 famous labors.

The Amazon queen Hippolyta wore a leather girdle, or belt, that was supposedly gifted to her by her father, Ares, for being her people's fiercest fighter.

King Eurystheus, who assigned Heracles his labors, had a daughter who coveted Hippolyta's belt, so Heracles was sent to retrieve it.

He sailed with a small armada across the Black Sea to the Amazons' distant and mysterious homeland.

When he arrived, Hippolyta agreed to give him the girdle without bloodshed, but the goddess Hera had other ideas.

She convinced the Amazons that their queen was in danger, so they attacked Heracles' forces.

Hippolyta was struck down in the ensuing battle, and Heracles took her belt back to Tiryns and its greedy king.

Despite his many impressive opponents, the moment where Heracles defeats Hippolyta is one of his most oft-depicted labors in classical art.

What a convenient way for artists to uphold male heroism while simultaneously reminding women what can happen if they stray from their designated roles.

In other, later versions of the story, either Hippolyta or another powerful Amazon named Antiope was stolen away to Athens to be King Theseus's bride.

The Amazons besieged Athens to bring her home but were ultimately defeated by this mighty city-state.

This battle, known as the Amazonomachy, is featured on the west side of the Parthenon.

In Homer's epic poem and other accounts of the Trojan War, the Amazons were led into battle by their queen, Penthesilea, to fight for Troy after their hero, Hector, was slain by Achilles.

Penthesilea's motivation for joining the war effort is unclear.

Perhaps she was repaying a debt to her old for, Priam, the last king of Troy, or maybe she and her army were paid mercenaries hired by a desperate monarch.

Some say she was seeking retribution through glory for murdering one of her fellow Amazons.

Whatever her reasoning, the story of Amazons in the Trojan War ends much like every other Greek tale featuring these fearsome warriors.

They fought with enough bravery and skill to diminish the Greek ranks but not enough to turn the tide of war.

Queen Penthesilea herself was eventually slain by the Greek hero Achilles, who, according to some writers, like Arctinus of Miletus, fell in love with her beauty after her helmet was removed in death.

-You're a worthy opponent... -[weapons clang] but no match for the great Achilles.

I think I can handle a little boy who talks about himself in the third person.

Who are you?

You're weak!

You're despicable!

-You're disgusting!

-[spear plunges] -[helmet clatters] -[Achilles gasps] You're beautiful!

Oh no!

what have I done?

I love you!

My Amazon queen!

But wait, don't I also love Patroclus?

Why can't these writers just make up their mind?

In this story, the Amazons serve as little more than convenient plot devices designed to bolster the reputation of Greece's military and give their greatest hero a sharp but romantic edge.

Thanks to misogyny and the fact that no writing survived from anyone who clearly fit the Amazon description, these stories were dismissed as obvious fiction over the next two millennia.

The fearsome Amazons were written off as pro-Athens propaganda or re-imagined as beardless male foreigners who the Greeks mistook for battle-worn women.

That is, until a Swiss law professor named Johann Bachofen published a paper in 1861, making the radically feminist claim that Amazons were more than just myth and that early humans were naturally matriarchal before the disease of patriarchy set in.

But there was no proof of the Amazon's legitimacy until the 1970s, when genetic testing technology made it possible for archeologists to accurately determine the sex of ancient remains.

Because despite what some corners of the internet claim, you cannot tell the sex of a long-deceased person just by looking at the shape of their skeleton.

In the 1940s, archeologists uncovered hundreds of burial mounds called kurgans in the great steppes of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, a region of dry, open grasslands to the northeast of Greece.

The kurgans were left around the fifth century BCE by the myriad nomadic tribes famous for their horse handling, known to the Greeks as Scythians, Thracians, or Sauromatians.

Hey, boss, I found a grave site.

-What's in it?

-A bow, some daggers.

[party popper pops] It's a male warrior!

Do you wanna look at the actual remains first?

Oh, no.

That'd be silly.

What can those bones tell me that the weapons in my rigid notion of gender roles cannot?

Originally, the archeologists assumed the bodies buried with weapons were all male, because, well, of course they did.

Twenty-five hundred years after Homer, and our scientists still couldn't imagine a society that allowed, let alone encouraged, their women to fight.

But the genetic testing revealed that one-third of the kurgans were eternal resting places for female warriors, buried with weapons, armor, and evidence of battle wounds, just like the men.

Suddenly the puzzle pieces started falling into place.

Most myths have a kernel of truth in them if you know how to look for it.

And this archeological evidence was the magnifying glass scholars had been waiting for.

Adrienne Mayor, a folklorist and historian who literally wrote the book on separating Amazon fact from fiction, believed Scythian women were the real-world inspiration for ancient Greece's mythical opponents.

Early artistic depictions of the Amazons even showed them wearing Scythian fashion.

There has never been evidence of an all-female society of warriors across the Black Sea who modify their chests and murder their male children.

But we do know that the Scythians were active and roaming near the Black Sea by 900 BCE.

By the time Homer wrote "The Iliad," Greeks interacted with Scythians regularly, and it's not hard to imagine how they could have invented such monstrous figures by embellishing some of their Northeastern neighbors' more unfamiliar traits.

Homer was an author trying to write a memorable story, after all.

The reality of Greek mythology's favorite war girlies is much more mundane.

The great steppes are a harsh environment with few resources, so the Scythians had to travel and fight to survive.

This bred a culture where girls learned to ride their prized horses and shoot their innovative bows just like the boys did.

Still, many of the men were likely to have died during hunts or raids, giving the impression that there weren't many of them around.

The myth about Amazons killing or abandoning their male children could have arisen from the common nomadic practice of fosterage, where a family leaves their son with a neighboring tribe for safety, education, or to strengthen an alliance.

It was also a convenient way for the Greeks to support their false claim that Amazons shunned all men.

Oh, and that myth about their chests?

That one is just flimflam from the fifth century BCE.

So-called historian Hellanicos was trying to derive the meaning of the word "Amazon" by using Greek roots, even though it wasn't a Greek word.

He claimed it meant "without breast," but Amazons were almost never shown with this particular adaptation in art, and even his contemporaries dismissed his idea as absurd.

The true origin of the word "Amazon" remains a mystery.

So it seems that the brutal, misandrist Amazons of lore didn't really exist, but they were caricatures of a real culture remarkably different from ancient Greece, one where women weren't relegated to prim and proper domestic roles.

Consider me disappointed, then, that Greek writers didn't include some of the coolest and most deviant aspects of Scythian culture into their monstrous myths, like the abundant tattoos, or the fact that most of them carried hemp-burning kits in their travel packs.

Most of the world was fooled by the Amazons' descent into myth, but there's a tiny island off the coast of Turkey that still honors the memory of the real Amazons, women of the Eurasian nomadic tribes who fought with just as much bravery and skill as the men.

This Aksu festival on Giresun Island is celebrated every May and heavily features the sacred Hamza Stone, which locals believe was worshiped by the Amazons who lived there millennia ago.

(host 1) We can learn so much from Giresun Island about the power of local memory.

Imagine how different the last 2,000 years might have been if we had all remembered that women can fight for ferociously enough to give demigod heroes a run for their money in even the most biased stories.

Unlike Homer, we can't change history through our embellishments, but moving forward, we can all embody more of what Adrienne Mayor calls the Amazon spirit.

Essentially, this is the belief that women are equal to men in courage and skill.

You know, the very message that characters like Wonder Woman and Xena were created to convey.

(host 2) Now it's time for the next Pantheon Pick, and I'm excited to bring some Amazon spirit to our utopia with Hippolyta.

-Yes!

-Yes!

I feel like our utopia needs some leadership energy, and it doesn't have to be a monarchy.

We can choose whatever type of government we want, but we need someone who can lead the people, and if that person can also defend against any incoming raids, then that's great.

Added bonus.

I think that's a great pick, and I like the idea of taking almost a demigod or someone more human, and adding them, 'cause what's utopia without diversity?

Exactly.

I love it.

So that's our Pantheon Pick for this episode, but be sure to tune in for the rest of the season, because we will be picking a new deity at the end of every episode.

And next time, it's Dr. Z's turn to pick.

I can't wait to see what you think.

With Dr. McKeys... McKeys?

[laughing] I gotta go.

Dr. McZ... Oh my God!

You almost did it too!

[laughing] -McKey!

-Dr. McKeys.

-Dr. McKey!

-[both laughing]