In 1995, Joan Mark wrote The "King of the World in the Land of the Pygmies", an interpretive biography of Patrick Tracy Lowell Putnam, the anthropologist who spent 25 years living among the Bambuti "pygmies" in Zaire. Mark writes that Aristotle, in 340 B.C, was the first to relate, in his Historia Animalium, the small men Homer accounted for in the Iliad, to those seen previously on the African coast. He goes on to explain that, due to the chasm that existed between Europe and Africa after the collapse of the Roman Empire, most Europeans living in the 18th century believed "pygmies" to be mythical creatures.