The allure of giant skeletons has captivated imaginations for centuries, sparking tales of ancient races and mythical beings. While many of these stories have proven to be hoaxes or misinterpretations, genuine archaeological discoveries continue to shed light on the complex history of human populations, particularly in regions like Africa and North America.
An artist's rendering of a giant skeleton discovery.
The Myth of the Mound Builders in North America
During the nineteenth century, a widespread belief emerged in North America regarding a prehistoric lost race. European settlers embraced myths of pre-Columbian settlements from the Old World, which reframed colonization as the continuation of a primordial past in which the roles of native peoples were diminished or dismissed. Through a process that historian Douglas Hunter described as "White Tribism", the settlers interpreted signs of "intellectual and cultural capabilities" in North American ruins, as signs of whiteness in their creators.
Based on the legendary voyages of the Welsh prince Madoc, the earliest English settlers sought and failed to uncover evidence of a civilizing Welsh influence in native peoples like the Mandan. By the late eighteenth century, this paternalistic narrative had become strained, due in part to violence against the native peoples on the western frontier. White Americans developed the myth of the mound builder race, which provided a rationale for the colonization of the American Midwest. The various versions of the myth held that the massive earthworks of the Mississippi Valley, like Grave Creek Mound and the Great Serpent Mound, were not built by the ancestors of Native Americans, as is now widely believed.
According to the myth, the Indians had exterminated a prehistoric, white race of mound builders. This cast genocidal violence towards the Native Americans as defensive or retributive. Josiah Priest's American Antiquities, released in 1833, crystallized the idea of a lost race-mentioned in the Book of Genesis-that created the monuments of North America before being exterminated by savages. Between 1812 and the American Civil War (1861-1865), nearly all Americans writing about the continent's history used the myth of the white mound-building race.
Read also: Giant Bullfrog Care Sheet
In literature, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow imagined The Skeleton in Armor (now accepted to be a native leader), as a lovesick Norse Viking eloping with his "fair" and "blue-eyed" lover. Sarah Josepha Hale accompanied her The Genius of Oblivion with end notes that claim "the ancient inhabitants [buried in the mounds] were of a different race from the Indians." Preachers taught a biblical basis for the primordial race, including connections to the lost tribes or the Nephilim, giants from the Book of Genesis. Hundreds of newspaper articles credulously described the purported discovery of giant skeletons, sometimes with anatomical irregularities attributed to the Nephilim.
For example, a massive skeleton unearthed in Tennessee toured the state as a specimen of this lost race. The reconstructed skeleton was mounted to a timber frame in a standing position with missing bones recreated from wood and rawhide. Preachers, doctors, and journalists confirmed it to "belong to the genus homo" despite a standing height estimated up to twenty feet tall. When the giant was taken to New Orleans, medical doctor William Carpenter found it to be a young mastodon's remains. Even after the Smithsonian had proved the mound builders to be Native Americans, the popular press continued to publish accounts of the prehistoric lost race, like this table published by the Omaha World-Herald in 1900.
Throughout the 19th century, some scholars expressed doubt about the excavations of purported giants but had little impact on public perception. Many readers embraced the skeletons as evidence of biblical history, against unpopular experts whose discoveries undermined a literal interpretation of the bible. With a rise in white literacy rates and the emergence of the cheaper penny press newspapers, there was a strong market for these tales that gave them greater impact than university scholarship. Stories frequently ran presenting as straight fact: hoaxes, scams, and misinterpretations of extinct megafauna. Some newspapers outright fabricated stories. The St. Louis Evening Chronicle published the account of researchers who explored a subterranean city beneath Moberly, Missouri.
Ethnologist Cyrus Thomas spent years compiling his Report on the Mound Explorations for the Smithsonian Institution. The 1894 in-depth study on North America's earthworks provided over seven hundred pages of conclusive evidence that they were built by native peoples. Thomas' report shifted academic attitudes but news reports of giant skeletons continued to come out for decades afterward. It was common for the stories to claim that the bones were sent to the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology did encourage those excavating mounds, to send Native American bones to their Mound Exploration Division. Prior to the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the Smithsonian collected over 18,000 of these skeletons.
Debunking the Myths
Giant skeletons reported in the United States until the early 20th century were a combination of hoaxes, scams, fabrications, and the misidentifications of extinct megafauna. Many were reported to have been found in Native American burial mounds. The claims of "giant skeletons" were debunked in 1934 by Aleš Hrdlička, curator of anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution. The Smithsonian Institution opposed the popular myth that an "ancient white race" were the Mound Builders. Hrdlička blamed the reports of giant skeletons on the "will to believe" coupled with "amateur anthropologists" who were unfamiliar with human anatomy.
Read also: Fascinating Millipede Facts
In 2014, an internet story reported that the Smithsonian Institution had custody of many giant skeletons and destroyed "thousands of giant skeletons" in the early 1900s.
The UnXplained: GIANT SKELETONS Found In Wild West Cave (Season 4)
"Giant of Castelnau" refers to three bone fragments (a humerus, tibia, and femoral mid-shaft) discovered by Georges Vacher de Lapouge in 1890 in the sediment used to cover a Bronze Age burial tumulus, and dating possibly back to the Neolithic. Lapouge determined that the fossil bones may belong to one of the largest humans known to have existed. However, in 2022, Katherine Hacanyan asserted that this discovery by Lapouge was most likely a cave bear and not a human, in an undergraduate student paper detailing her examination of photos of the bones. Giant skeletons of animals were often mistaken for giant human bones during previous centuries and during the early 20th century. This was due to a lack of expertise in human bone structure by those who discovered the bones.
In 1984, the anthropologist Sheilagh Brooks examined the Reid Collection, an assemblage of Native American skeletons unearthed in Nevada by John Reid in the early 1900s which was said to contain an individual that measured 9 ft 6 in (2.90 m). However, Brooks found that no skeleton measured more than 5 ft 11 in (1.80 m). In 2024, Nicholas Landol used mathematical formula to determine that the individual was actually only between 153.34 cm and 162.37 cm and that due to the disarticulation that a skeleton experiences after death, a skeleton can appear larger than it is.
Discoveries in the Sahara Desert
Archaeologists uncovered 20 Stone Age skeletons in the Sahara Desert. Archaeologists have uncovered 20 Stone-Age skeletons in and around a rock shelter in Libya's Sahara desert, according to a new study. The skeletons date between 8,000 and 4,200 years ago, meaning the burial place was used for millennia. "It must have been a place of memory," said study co-author Mary Anne Tafuri, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge. "People throughout time have kept it, and they have buried their people, over and over, generation after generation."
About 15 women and children were buried in the rock shelter, while five men and juveniles were buried under giant stone heaps called tumuli outside the shelter during a later period, when the region turned to desert. The findings, which are detailed in the March issue of the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, suggest the culture changed with the climate. From about 8,000 to 6,000 years ago, the Sahara desert region, called Wadi Takarkori, was filled with scrubby vegetation and seasonal green patches. Stunning rock art depicts ancient herding animals, such as cows, which require much more water to graze than the current environment could support, Tafuri said. Tafuri and her colleague Savino di Lernia began excavating the archaeological site between 2003 and 2006. At the same site, archaeologists also uncovered huts, animal bones and pots with traces of the earliest fermented dairy products in Africa.
Read also: Exploring South African Flag Size
To date the skeletons, Tafuri measured the remains for concentrations of isotopes, or molecules of the same element with different weights. The team concluded that the skeletons were buried over four millennia, with most of the remains in the rock shelter buried between 7,300 and 5,600 years ago. The males and juveniles under the stone heaps were buried starting 4,500 years ago, when the region became more arid. Rock art confirms the dry up, as the cave paintings began to depict goats, which need much less water to graze than cows, Tafuri said. The ancient people also grew up not far from the area where they were buried, based on a comparison of isotopes in tooth enamel, which forms early in childhood, with elements in the nearby environment.
The Green Sahara and Ancient Humans
Between 5,000 and 14,000 years ago, the Sahara Desert looked nothing like it does today. But who were these ancient ancestors? Researchers think they finally have some answers to these questions. In the early 2000s, researchers discovered the remains of 15 ancient humans in southwest Libya near the border with Algeria. Archaeologists suspect the individuals buried at the site survived by hunting, fishing and herding animals like goats and sheep. Two of the skeletons were exceptionally well-preserved, with their skin, ligaments and tissues still intact, reports CNN’s Katie Hunt.
At first, researchers were only able to recover the women’s mitochondrial DNA, which gets passed down from mothers. Their analyses revealed the green Sahara individuals likely branched off from the ancestors of sub-Saharan Africans roughly 50,000 years ago. That finding was unexpected, as researchers had long theorized the green Sahara was a human migration corridor between North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa. “It’s surprising,” says Eugenia D’Atanasio, a geneticist at the Sapienza University of Rome who was not involved with the research, to Science’s Andrew Curry. Scientists say they need to conduct more research to fully understand the individuals who lived in the green Sahara. “Research is just beginning to reveal Africa’s complex population history, uncovering lineages barely detectable in the genomes of present-day people,” she writes.
Table: Key Figures in Debunking Giant Skeleton Myths
| Name | Affiliation | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| Aleš Hrdlička | Smithsonian Institution | Debunked claims of giant skeletons, attributing them to hoaxes and misinterpretations. |
| Cyrus Thomas | Smithsonian Institution | Provided conclusive evidence that North American earthworks were built by native peoples. |
| William Carpenter | Medical Doctor | Identified a purported giant skeleton as the remains of a young mastodon. |
| Sheilagh Brooks | Anthropologist | Examined the Reid Collection and found no skeleton measured more than 5 ft 11 in (1.80 m). |
Popular articles:
tags: #Africa
