Mer-people, mermaids and mermen, half human and half fish, are among the oldest and most widespread beings in human imagination. They appear in ancient Near Eastern religion, Greek myth, medieval church carvings, sailors’ logbooks, Japanese and African traditions, Victorian sideshows and modern film. They are not cryptids in the usual sense, because no serious researcher proposes an undiscovered species of aquatic human. But their history includes real sightings by famous explorers, real animals that were mistaken for them, and some of the most successful hoaxes ever exhibited.[1]
| Also called | Mermaids, mermen, sirens, merfolk; ningyo (Japan); related to Mami Wata (West and Central Africa) |
|---|---|
| Earliest forms | The Syrian goddess Atargatis (Derketo), described with a fish’s tail in Greek and Roman sources |
| Famous sightings | Christopher Columbus (January 1493); Henry Hudson’s crew (June 1608) |
| Likely real animals | Manatees, dugongs and seals |
| Famous hoax | The “Feejee Mermaid,” exhibited by P. T. Barnum in 1842 |
| Official position | NOAA, 2012: “No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found.” |
Ancient origins
The oldest mermaid-like figure is usually traced to the Syrian goddess Atargatis, known to the Greeks as Derketo, worshipped at Ashkelon and other cities of the eastern Mediterranean. The Greek historian Diodorus Siculus recounted a myth in which she threw herself into a lake and became a fish with a human head, and the Roman-era writer Lucian described a statue of her with a woman’s upper body and a fish’s tail. Fish-tailed gods also appear elsewhere in the ancient Near East, such as the Mesopotamian sage Oannes, described as part man and part fish.[1]
The Greek sirens, whose song lured sailors to their deaths in Homer’s Odyssey, were originally half woman and half bird, not fish. During the Middle Ages, though, they were increasingly shown with fish tails. The earliest text describing fish-tailed sirens is the Liber Monstrorum (“Book of Monsters”), written between the seventh and mid-eighth centuries, which calls them “sea girls.” By the later Middle Ages the siren and the mermaid had merged, and the double-tailed siren became a common carving in European churches. The French fairy Melusine, originally a woman who became a serpent from the waist down, was later shown with a fish’s tail and gave her name to the two-tailed mermaid of heraldry.[1]
Explorers who saw “mermaids”
On 9 January 1493, sailing off the coast of Hispaniola on his first voyage, Christopher Columbus recorded seeing three sirenas rising out of the sea. They were, he wrote, “not as beautiful as they are represented,” though they had something of a human face. Historians and naturalists generally agree that he saw manatees.[1]
On 15 June 1608, during Henry Hudson’s voyage in search of a northern passage, two of his crew reported seeing a mermaid in the Arctic seas north of Norway. In the log, they described a woman’s body from the navel up, with long black hair and white skin, and below the waist a tail like a porpoise’s, speckled like a mackerel. Seals, which often raise their heads and shoulders out of the water and look strikingly human at a distance, are a likely explanation in colder northern waters.[1]
Sea cows: the real “sirens”
The animals most often blamed for mermaid sightings are the sea cows: manatees in the Atlantic and Caribbean and dugongs in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Zoologists group them in the order Sirenia, named after the sirens of legend. They are large, slow, air-breathing mammals that sometimes rest upright in the water, hold their young to their bodies while nursing and have flexible, almost hand-like flippers. In poor light, at a distance and after months at sea, it is easy to see how a sailor expecting mermaids might find one. Several historical “mermaid” specimens described by European naturalists have been identified as manatees or dugongs.[1][2]
The Feejee Mermaid
The most famous mermaid in history was a fake. In 1822 an American sea captain, Samuel Barrett Edes, reportedly paid an enormous sum for a small, shriveled “mermaid” and exhibited it in London. Years later Edes’s son sold it to Moses Kimball of the Boston Museum, who leased it to the showman P. T. Barnum. In 1842 Barnum’s agents planted letters in New York newspapers about a “Dr. J. Griffin” who had caught a mermaid in the South Seas. Griffin was actually Barnum’s associate Levi Lyman in disguise. The “Feejee Mermaid” went on show at Barnum’s American Museum and drew huge crowds.[3]
It was the head and upper body of a young monkey sewn onto the back half of a fish. Such objects were made commercially in Japan, where the ningyo, or “human fish,” was a traditional creature and dried “mermaids” were sold as curiosities. The original Feejee Mermaid disappeared, probably destroyed in one of the fires that ravaged Barnum’s collections, but many imitations still circulate in museums and sideshows.[1][3]
In February 2023 researchers from the Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts in Japan announced the results of their study of a roughly 30-centimeter “mermaid mummy” kept in a sealed box at a temple in Okayama Prefecture. CT scans and other analyses showed that its torso was made mostly of cloth, paper and cotton held together with metal pins and coated with a paste of sand and charcoal, with fish skin, mammal hair, a predatory fish’s jaw, unidentified claws and the tail of a croaker fish. It contained no monkey parts, and radiocarbon dating of its scales suggested it dated from the nineteenth century.[4]
Mami Wata
In West and Central Africa and across the African diaspora, the water spirit Mami Wata (“Mother Water”) is honored as beautiful, protective, seductive and potentially deadly, linked to wealth, fertility and healing. She is often shown as a woman with a fish’s tail or as a snake charmer. The art historian Henry John Drewal has traced how her imagery developed. European mermaid images reached Africa from the fifteenth century, and the earliest known African mermaid is an ivory saltcellar carved on Sherbro Island in Sierra Leone for a Portuguese client, to which the carver added crocodiles. In the 1880s a Hamburg circus poster of a female snake charmer reached West Africa, and by 1901 it was being interpreted as Mami Wata, becoming her best-known image. Mami Wata is a living religious figure, not a reported animal, and she shows how mermaid imagery can be absorbed into very different belief systems.[5]
The Little Mermaid and modern mermaids
Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale “The Little Mermaid,” in which a young mermaid gives up her voice to gain human legs and win a prince, created the gentle, tragic mermaid of modern imagination. Copenhagen’s bronze statue of her, unveiled in 1913, is one of the most photographed sculptures in the world, and Disney’s 1989 animated film reshaped the story again for a global audience.[1]
NOAA: “no evidence of aquatic humanoids”
In 2012 Animal Planet broadcast Mermaids: The Body Found, a fictional documentary presented in the style of a real investigation, which suggested that a species of aquatic humans had been discovered and covered up by the US government. Enough viewers were convinced that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration received inquiries and posted a short statement on its website: “No evidence of aquatic humanoids has ever been found.” It may be the only time a federal science agency has had to officially deny the existence of mermaids.[6]
Our assessment
Mer-people are a product of human imagination, shaped over thousands of years by religion, storytelling and art. Real animals, especially manatees, dugongs and seals, explain the historical sightings by sailors such as Columbus and Hudson, and the most famous physical “specimens” have all turned out to be skillful fakes. There is no scientific evidence for aquatic humans. But as a symbol of the sea’s beauty and danger, the mermaid is one of the most powerful creations in world culture.
For the sea monsters behind other ocean legends, see the Kraken and the Lusca.
References
- “Mermaid,” Wikipedia, citing Diodorus Siculus, Lucian, the Liber Monstrorum, C. Columbus’s journal (1493), H. Hudson’s journal (1608) and others.
- “Sirenia,” Wikipedia.
- “Fiji mermaid,” Wikipedia.
- “‘Mermaid’ mummy found in Japan studied, likely 200 years old & made of different animals,” Mothership (February 2023), reporting the Kurashiki University of Science and the Arts study.
- Henry John Drewal, “Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas,” African Arts 41, no. 2 (2008): 60–82.
- “NOAA: Just to be clear, mermaids do not exist,” NPR (7 July 2012).
Correction note (October 2026): This entry was rewritten from historical and scientific sources, replacing an earlier general description. The illustration above is an artistic impression.