During the era of European exploration and colonization, as the Columbian Exchange created a flow of crops, diseases, and beliefs between continents, new legends of giants came back from overseas. Early European settlers came to believe that some native inhabitants of the “New World,” that seemingly mythic and alien land across the globe, were themselves giants. But were these merely the exaggerations of explorers seeing for the first time a new people that impressed them, just as in biblical times the Israelites saw the robust inhabitants of Canaan and feared them as giants, as I discussed in part one of this series? For example, it is said that Tuscaloosa, the chieftain of Mississipian tribes in the modern day state of Alabama was a great giant whose stature impressed conquistador Hernán De Soto. But how tall was he really? Apparently he towered at about a foot and a half over all of De Soto’s Spaniards, but this is no precise measurement, and it is a well-known fact that the average height of European colonizers was relatively low, at about five and a half feet, give or take some inches. So it sounds more like Tuscaloosa was just a tall man well over six feet, and given that he was said to be the most impressive of his chiefdom—unsurprising, since an imposing physical presence has helped many a man in many a culture rise to power—we can otherwise infer that the rest of his subjects were of rather more average height. Similarly, when John Smith explored and mapped the Chesapeake region in 1608, he reported a “giant-like people” inhabiting the Susquehanna River’s mouth. Specifically, he described “the greatest of them…The calfe of whose leg was three quarters of a yard about, and all the rest of his limbs so answerable to that proportion.” Now, this description seems rather more focused on the brawn of the tribe he ended up calling the Susquehannocks, with mention of their height curiously absent. And again, like the Israelite spies in Canaan saying, “Hey, we may not want to mess with them, they’re giants,” John Smith gives this description on his maps as a warning to colonists, and we have no way of knowing how exaggerated it may be. We do know that over the next hundred years or so, these Susquehannocks had further contact with European settlers in Maryland and with the French during the Beaver Wars, and there is little further mention of them being giants. So was it hyperbole, or had Smith just seen one really big guy, but not preternaturally large? Even among Native Americans themselves, there are legends of giants, and we see them engaging in the same kind of exaggeration of the other as being gigantic. Among the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, there was legend that the Erie tribe were a bunch of giant cannibals, but again, European contact with the Erie does not bear out such claims. It seems, rather, that the Iroquois Confederacy were just slandering their enemies, whom they would eventually destroy, along with all their allies. As we saw in part one, ancient folklore and poetry cannot be treated as credible evidence, and now we may categorize the reports of explorers in the same realm, as unreliable oral traditions. What is needed, as I stated previously, is an osteological record, one single preternaturally lengthy human femur, to prove the existence of giants in the past.

In 19th century America, the claims of giant bones became part and parcel with baseless claims about the ancient builders of the impressive tumuli, or earthen mounds, that are found across the U.S., throughout the Great Lakes region and the Mississippi River Valley. These burial places fired the imaginations of white farmers and antiquarians alike, who propagated the racist myth that the builders of these mighty structures could not have been related to the Native American peoples they knew, so there must have been some lost race that had inhabited the New World before European settlement. This lost race of mound-builders, unsurprisingly, was said by many to be a lost white race, and in the 1800s to be a lost white race of giants, whose enormous bones were said to be found within these mounds by many a farmer and antiquarian turned grave despoiler. So what of these giant bones? Where are these bones, that we may measure them and determine whether they may indeed belong to mastodon rather than man? Funny story. These bones were often said, rather conveniently, to have self-destructed shortly after discovery. One Harvey Nettleton, writing on the history of Conneaut Township in northwestern Ohio, claimed in 1841 that around 1800 a man named Aaron Wright had been digging up graves in the area, and the bones he discovered not only were gigantic but also “on exposure to the air soon crumbled to dust.” In fact, 20 years prior to Nettleton’s account of Wright’s discovery, an antiquarian named Caleb Atwater, a major proponent of that lost Mound Builder race myth, had actually published a report of his findings in burial mounds near Conneaut, which specifically stated that he had “found skeletons of people of small stature,” but despite that, Nettleton’s larger than life account proved more popular and long-lived. Specifically one image seems to have struck a chord, that a skull Wright had discovered was so large he had been able to place it over his own head like a helmet. Nettleton’s story about Wright was widely reprinted, and reproduced and summarized by various historians, until elements of it became a kind of meme. We see in further stories produced by other antiquarians and recorded by different historians the same claims about massive skulls fitting over the heads of those who find them, and of other giant bones that are witnessed upon excavation but, alas, cannot be examined by experts because they had disintegrated as soon as they had entered local folklore. It may be impossible to tell if elements of this tale were invented out of whole cloth by Harvey Nettleton forty years after the fact, just to spice up his sketch, or if they were told by Aaron Wright and passed into legend and local oral tradition. A simple genealogical search turns up a real Aaron Wright born in 1775 who lived in Ashtabula County, Ohio, and was buried at Conneaut Township. This was likely the same Aaron Wright who gave evidence against the authenticity of Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon in an affidavit collected by Dr. Philastus Hurlbut around 1833. It may be that this little-known individual, who contributed somewhat to the skeptical view of early Mormon claims, also made a hoax claim that has long outlived him and added greatly to the legacy of this false notion.

Diagram of mound excavations at Conneaut.

The same holds true for other supposedly large bones said to have been recovered from burial mounds throughout the 19th-century. It proves difficult to ascertain whether they were hoaxes or mistaken identifications of mastodon bones or perhaps a combination of the two. One antiquarian, T. Apoleon Cheney, who was known as Doc even though he had not earned the honorific through formal education, claimed to have discovered more than one giant skeleton in a Western New York mound that he excavated with a partner, a bona fide medical doctor, Frederick Larkin. As one of my principal sources, Brad Lockwood’s On Giants, clarifies, Cheney’s most widely cited work, Illustrations of the Ancient Monuments in Western New York, 1859, is actually widely misquoted, since this work really only contains illustrations and no text. However, it is clear, from later editions of his work and from the passages in other works that summarize his supposed findings, that Cheney did indeed claim he had found giant skeletons in a mound, that in fact he staked his reputation and founded a career on the claim. At a mound on Cassadaga Creek, near the town of Conewango, he claims that he “discovered nine human skeletons, which had been buried in a sitting posture…The skeletons were so far decayed as to crumble upon exposure to the atmosphere, but were all of very large size.” Here again, the meme of the self-destructing evidence is reproduced, but Cheney claims that one femur remained, whose measurement of 28 inches proved the stature of the man to whom it belonged. That’s about ten inches longer than the average adult male’s femur, and if such a bone were genuine, and determined by a paleontologist to belong to a human being, it would indeed constitute evidence that it was the remains of a tall person. You’ll find some online claiming that a femur is about a quarter of one’s height, so a 28-inch femur would make for a height of over nine feet. However, from what I have been able to determine, forensic anthropology tells us such a calculation is too simple, and to calculate the likely height of a male by the length of a femur, converted to centimeters, one must instead multiply by 2.32 and then add 65.53, which in the case of the 28-inch femur gives us a likely height of seven and a half feet. Unusually tall indeed, but no monster. The further problem, though, is that this 28-inch femur was never preserved for analysis, and more than that, after Doc Cheney’s death, his excavating partner, Frederick Larkin, the only medical professional on the scene to examine these supposedly gigantic skeletons, ended up writing his own book, Ancient Man in America, in which he revealed Doc Cheney’s claims to have been exaggerated. As Brad Lockwood reveals, having tracked down a copy of this rare text, Larkin writes, referring to Cheney’s claims about the giant skeletons at Cassadaga, “That the Mound-Builders were a trifle larger than the present type, is very probable; but that they were giants eight and ten feet is all fabulous. I have seen many skeletons from mounds in different states, but have seen none that will much exceed the present people now living. … The subject under consideration has enough of the marvelous about it to gratify almost any imagination without resorting to giants.”

As we have discussed more than once, in the 19th century, newspapers regularly ran stories of dubious origins that made improbable claims, hoping that sensational content would increase their circulation. For more on this, see my episode on the prolific newspaper hoaxer, Joseph Mulhatton, or my episode Unfit to Print: A History of Bad News. Anyone today who points to 19th-century newspaper reports about the discovery of giants as ironclad evidence of its truth should rightly be laughed at and mocked until they delete their accounts. Only rarely in the 19th-century might a newspaper follow up on such a report. For example, in 1883, after printing a report about the discovery of a nine foot skeleton in a gravel pit, the Indianapolis Journal afterward published the report of a local physician who investigated and refuted the claim, saying they were more like the remains of a five foot eight inch man, calling the incident “a giant fraud and an imposition on the credulity of the people.” The problem is, such follow-up reports were rare. 19th century newspapers in many states published story upon story of giant skeletons without ever bothering to follow them up with the reports of experts who had determined them to be frauds. It became so common that Mark Twain actually decided to pen his own hoax, getting a spurious tale of a petrified giant published in a Virginia City, Nevada, newspaper, with the telltale detail that the mummified giant had his thumb pressed to the side of his nose and his fingers spread, a well-known gesture showing contempt or derision, as if the giant were taunting the reader, saying “Na-na, na-na, boo-boo. Stick your head in doo-doo.” In this atmosphere of rampant giant hoaxes, it is no surprise that the greatest of them all, the Cardiff Giant hoax, about which I spoke in detail and which I dramatized in fiction in my recent patron exclusive episode, was so credulously received by the public. Mark Twain found this hoax, and especially the fact that P.T. Barnum created a fraudulent version of this fraud, quite hilarious, inspiring him to write a short story about the Cardiff giant’s ghost haunting the wrong remains. The fact that these widespread hoaxes about giant skeletons were publicized so avidly by newspapers but their debunking was not, and the fact that Doc Cheney’s claims about giant bones in burial mounds became so widely read while his more educated partner’s denial of those claims was mostly lost to history, is just clear evidence of the old saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still lacing up its boots.” Ironically, that quotation is typically misattributed to Mark Twain, when really it is a common corruption of an older quote by Jonathan Swift.

Illustration of the Petrified Man from 1882 edition of Twain's *Sketches, New and Old*, depicting position of the supposed giant's hands.

So it seems fake news in newspapers then begets fake news on the Internet today. These tall tales about giants having been discovered in burial mounds in America may have taken a hiatus of several decades, but with the advent of the Internet, they have seen a resurgence. If you spend much time searching for giants online, you’ll find a bevy of paranormal and conspiracy blogs claiming that a race of red-haired, cannibalistic giants was spoken about in the lore of various Native American tribes. One story has it that the Paiutes trapped this race of red-haired giants in a cave, where they suffocated them with smoke. The evidence is the fact that a cave was discovered by guano miners in western Nevada, and there were indeed many artifacts and remains of the native tribe that had lived within, and the hair of some, having been preserved, looked reddish. The problem is, as Brian Dunning has pointed out in an episode of Skeptoid on the topic, none of the remains recovered were actually of an unusual size, nor did the artifacts appear made for the use of larger people, and the redness of their hair was just the loss of pigmentation in hair that was formerlydark. Moreover, the actual Paiute legends do not appear to include red hair or gigantism. As usual, though a genuine archaeological find is cited, the find did not actually support the claims made online. And other stories don’t even rely on real finds. For example, Steve Quayle, a self-proclaimed giantologist, promoted to his website’s readers a claim made on a random blog, perhaps as satire, that mummified giants had been discovered in Iowa by a farmer named Marvin Rainwater on his land near Kossuth Center. According to the story, Rainwater happened upon a stone tomb while digging, and inside he discovered the mummified remains of seven figures, each ten feet tall and with long red hair. The find was apparently even verified by archaeologists from Georg von Podebrad College in the nearby town of Zoar. What is even wilder is that this report was supposed to have been made recently, as it spoke about materials being held at the State Historical Society awaiting DNA testing. However, when someone actually contacted the Historical Society, they discovered not only that such a find had never been reported, but also that, Kossuth Center and Zoar are both ghost towns, and no college named after the 15th-centuiry Bohemian king Georg von Podebrad has ever existed. Moreover, the farmer that the story says discovered the tomb, Marvin Rainwater, appears to have been named after a country-western singer from the 1950s. The Internet abounds with blog posts that to this day repeat this story. If you’re lucky they may include a disclaimer that it may be a false story, urging readers to “please research it out and judge for yourself.”

Another strange fake news story regarding giants appeared in 2016. This one connects to the biblical story of a giant with extra toes and fingers from Gath, Goliath’s stomping ground, which I spoke about in Part One, and it also incorporated the popular red hair trope of these recent giant hoaxes. The story, which originated from a dubious interview with a supposed military contractor on the YouTube channel of a fringe conspiracist who produces a lot of content on the topic of giants. Already it doesn’t have a lot of credibility. The interview subject, called only Mr. K, described an encounter between an American Special Forces unit and a 13-foot-tall giant wielding a sword. The giant was described as having red hair, of course, and extra toes, a bonus, and also more than one set of teeth—a common detail from old 19th century giant skull discovery stories, which archaeologist Andy White has proven was actually just a common 19th century phrasing used to describe nice teeth, meaning a skull have two intact rows of teeth, top and bottom. Essentially, this hoax purposely incorporated elements from other hoaxes and from old fake news reports and from the bible in order to bolster its claims. Snopes reported a denial of the incident from the Department of Defense, but that isn’t going to do much to convince conspiracy nuts. Hoaxes like these are designed to be nearly impossible to disprove, since any denials are simply proof of the cover-up. Typically, fake giant news on the internet arrives in the form of an image of uncertain origin, shared and gone viral online, purporting to show a person crouched over some ridiculously massive skeleton or skull, with no actual information to fact-check and just the simple claim that the discovery of giants has been covered up. Snopes and National Geographic have debunked such images as manipulated photos and even tracked down the origin to a photoshop contest called “Archaeological Anomalies,” which challenged participants to fake strange pseudo-archaeological discoveries. Yet despite being revealed as fraudulent images, they continue to be spread along with the claim that the scientific community is hiding the discovery of these giants.

This is one manipulated image from the photoshop contest that has been passed off as real in conspiracist memes.

One extremely popular story is of gigantic skeletons with horns having been discovered in Sayre, Pennsylvania, and this one too is typically accompanied by a dubious image of a horned human skull. Even as recently as March this year, fake news memes circulated Facebook about this archaeological discovery in the 1880s, stating that besides the bony projections above the eyebrows of skulls recovered at the site, the skeletons themselves were of an unusual height, averaging 7 feet. The image concludes with the claim that “The bones were sent to the American Investigation Museum in Philadelphia, where they were stolen—never to be seen again.” In fact, there was no such institution as the American Investigating Museum, but there was indeed an excavation in Sayre, which took place in 1916 rather than the 1880s as the Facebook posts claim. Conducted by the so-called “Dean of American Archaeology,” Warren King Moorhead, as well as Pennsylvania historian George Donehoo and Alanson Skinner, archaeologist, ethnographer and curator of the Museum of the American Indian, or the American Indian Museum, which may be the origin of the false American Investigating Museum. This excavation was the culmination of an expedition to find the relics and remains of the Susquehannock tribe that Captain John Smith had long ago suggested were giants, so there may have already been some expectation that the remains uncovered might be those of giants. The New York Times and a variety of other newspapers reported on the find, specifically claiming that the remains of 68 men were found, averaging seven feet, “while many were much taller,” and with them were buried artifacts of unusual size to match their stature. The column further describes their notorious “protuberances of bone.” On first blush this would appear well-documented, but we have seen that we should not trust old newspaper articles and must look further for subsequent corrections. Indeed, only 2 weeks after the first news reports about gigantic, horned skeletons spread far and wide, the archaeologists themselves set the record straight in a lengthier feature article in the Times. In it, they make no mention of horned skulls, and state more specifically that they estimated the height of the skeletons at about six feet six inches, certainly tall enough to appear imposing to a European of average height making first contact with the tribe. In another newspaper column that has been uncovered, Alanson Skinner is quoted as setting the record straight on July 14th, 1916. He states that they had excavated 57 skeletons rather than 68, and that they appeared to be “perfectly normal individuals with the usual relics.” He further explains the origins of the horned skull as the result of a reporter misunderstanding or being misled about, or perhaps purposely misrepresenting, what was actually found: “a deposit of dear antlers,” laid over the bones, “hence, I suppose, the skull with horns on it!” In the Times feature article, they further describe other artifacts placed atop the bones: “Over the head of one of the skeletons was a bear’s jaw, indicating the bearskin headdress,” which the man had presumably worn in life. One wonders that this did not start a further rumor that this had been a fearsome race of men with two sets of jaws!

Beyond the claim about horns, which is rather unique among such stories, the claims of gigantism among the skeletons excavated at Sayre are pretty tame. A height of seven feet is not unheard of, though it may have been unusual for that to be the average among more than fifty people in a group. However, the archaeologists themselves corrected that to more like six and a half feet, which of course is even less difficult to believe. But it must be pointed out that determining the actual height of any of these persons in life would have been exceedingly difficult. As mentioned previously, modern forensic anthropologists have gotten it down to a science, able to determine the likely height of a man or woman based entirely on the length of a femur, but in the infancy of the science, skeletons were often measured as they lay, or if found in a sitting or curled position, manually laid out to be measured, a process that would not yield an accurate result. The reason for this is that once the flesh and cartilage of vertebrate remains have decomposed entirely, skeletons become more spread out and scattered than they would be when the bones are tightly attached with tendon and ligament and encased within the body’s musculature. This process is called disarticulation, and the effects of bone dispersion during disarticulation was not the subject of much scientific study until the 1970s. Indeed, the fact that skeletons dug out of burial mounds in the Americas were often reported to be unusually tall could be entirely explained by the fact that the farmers and antiquarians measuring them did not adequately understand the spreading of disarticulated bones. Even among the experts digging up the Susquehannock graves at Sayre, Pennsylvania, all were archaeologists and ethnographers, not anatomists or experts in fossilized remains, and therefore might not even be expected to know how best to measure the remains they disinterred. Moreover, their description of the graves they excavated seems to indicate that assembling a single skeleton would not have been a simple task. In the New York Times feature, they explain that “in some cases the bones had been buried long after death when the flesh had disappeared, and in these instances, the skull was usually deposited in the grave, and the long bones, fingers, and ribs heaped beside or over it. …in some of the graves a number of skeletons were found heaped together.” Just how they reassembled and measured remains deposited in such communal graves is a pressing question, as are the calculations they may have used if they reached their height estimations based on the measurements of long bones.

This image of the supposedly genuine horned skull that accompanies most online claims about giants skeletons in Sayre, Pennsylvania, can only be found online at Surnateum, the Museum of Supernatural History, which claims to have the object in its possession. It is easy to see here that it is NOT a giant skull.

So the horned giants of Sayre, Pennsylvania, appears to have been a fake news story from a bygone era recycled as a fake news Internet meme today that continues to convince Facebook aunties that preternatural skeletons have been discovered in Native American burial grounds. Further investigation into the image that always accompanies the post, of a seemingly human skull with horns and a kind of wreath around it, unsurprisingly reveals that it is not related to the Sayre, Pennsylvania, excavation at all. The paranormal podcast Astonishing Legends did some admirable investigation into this image in their series on giants, The Tall Ones, particularly in Part Two, and determined that the skull is supposedly held by an online Museum of Supernatural History called Surnateum, and they claim it is of normal human size but originated in France as a ceremonial object for cult worship of the Horned God of Wiccan belief. The fact that this website has more than one photo of the skull, the image typically spread with the Sayre excavation story and another with the skull sitting atop a basket—an image that I have been unable to find on any other website using reverse image searches—tends to support their claim that it is in their possession. However, as Astonishing Legends rightly pointed out, Surnateum appears to just be a website, with no physical location to visit and view exhibitions. Moreover, the Internet Archive shows their website has been active for about 10 years, since 2012, and searches of Google Books and the Ngram viewer turn up no publications mentioning the museum, which tends to cast doubt on their claim of having acquired the skull in 1952. However, using reverse image search and the Wayback Machine, I was able to track down the earliest surviving posting of this image, to an old StumbleUpon post in 2006 that mentions Surnateum and its claims that the skull came from France in the first half of the 20th century. However, on this post, which appears to be one of the first times the image was shared on the Internet as far as I can determine—the poster links to a mysticism messaging board page at Thothweb.com that is no longer working and is not archived in the Wayback Machine—the poster states that the skull’s whereabouts were at the time unknown, contradicting the museum’s current claim. All that remains would be for an expert in photo manipulation to examine the images for signs of falsification. But even without such analysis, I think it is fair to conclude that this artifact, if it even exists, is a fake. If the person or persons running Surnateum want the public to believe their claims that they possess this object, have examined it and have determined that “the horns are genuinely part of the skull,” they need to make the object available for scientific examination and public scrutiny. Regardless, even according to them, it is not the skull of a giant.

Believers in such giant hoaxes, though, fail to be convinced by the point that such bones do not appear to exist, for none are today exhibited publicly or have been surrendered for scientific examination. Instead of this logical evidence that such bones do not exist, conspiracists take it as evidence that the bones have been hidden away and covered up! We see some insinuation of this in the text on the viral horned skull image, and it was there all the way back in 2006 on the obscure StumpleUpon posting of the image I managed to find. The notion that the scientific community’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of giants was tantamount to a cover-up is not exactly new. Even during the Cardiff Giant hoax, critics of the statue passed off as a petrified giant were dismissed as obfuscators attempting to make the public doubt the truth of the Bible. But today, this conspiracy theory has gelled into a specific claim found on many websites and in numerous conspiracist books that the Smithsonian Institution is in particular responsible, taking giant bones and then purposely losing them so that they can never be examined again. These conspiracists even see NAGPRA, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, as part of the plot. This admirable law, passed in 1990, made it illegal to dig up burial mounds and required the return of items to culturally affiliated Native American tribes. Well-known scholar and skeptical writer Jason Colavito has written the most extensively on the absurdity of this claim and has even traced it to its recent origins. Having done the research, Colavito makes a strong case that no claims of a Smithsonian cover-up ever existed before fringe researcher David Childress began to make them in the 1990s. Childress is not much of a reliable researcher, as he is known for making a lot of baseless claims about lost civilizations, UFOs and sasquatch, many of which rely on conspiracy speculation. Childress seems to have started the idea of “Smithsoniangate” in 1993, in defense of his racist ideas about a lost white race of Mound Builders, and the entire idea, ludicrously, may have been inspired by the iconic scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, cited by Childress as an analogy, in which the crate containing the Ark of the Covenant is hidden away in a massive warehouse. As Colavito points out, though, it is strange to think that these conspiracists believe the Smithsonian is some monolithic organization that controls the entire narrative of physical anthropology in the world. Such a conspiracy would need to be global, including every museum and research university on the planet. We know that such a conspiracy just defies simple logic. Furthermore, he points out that NAGPRA is only enforced on Federal land, so any extant giant skeletons out there on private or state land would not be subject to this supposed cover-up, yet we still find no big bones to support these claims. Lastly, though since the 1860s the Smithsonian has been on board with the Cuvier explanation of massive bones as belonging to extinct megafauna, it has been pointed out that, in the late 19th century the Smithsonian was still known to publish the work of antiquarians and archaeologists who claimed to have measured skeletons between 7 and 8 feet uncovered in mound explorations. Though these heights are not superhuman, and could still be explained by the spreading of disarticulated bones improperly measured, the reports seem to prove beyond doubt that back when such claims were commonly made, the Smithsonian was just as likely to amplify them as to silence them.

To conclude this series, perhaps it is time to take a wider and simpler view of the phenomenon, taking into account some relevant findings of modern science. If the claims about giants were accurate, it would mean that mankind has greatly reduced in size over the millennia of our existence. This is the concept of the degeneracy of humanity that lies behind all these tall tales. But modern science tells us that we are not shrinking over time, but rather growing. The average height of Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries was in the mid-five-foot range, and today we creep closer to a six-foot average. There are many reasons for a growth or reduction in average height among populations, though, and it tends to be dependent upon local conditions, making any calculation of worldwide averages misleading. Think about the shorter Europeans arriving in America and encountering the taller Native Americans that they thought to be giants simply because the natives might have had a half a foot or a foot’s greater height. Scholars who study average height across the ages argue that the height we reach depends on health trends related to climate and the availability of food. Considering this, it may be no surprise that Europeans were of shorter stock than the Native Americans they encountered. Science tells us that childhood nutrition has a lot to do with eventual height. A welcoming climate and plenty of food signals to the hypothalamus that living conditions are optimal, and thus the body should grow as quickly as possible in order to develop sexually and procreate. This further explains why heights have continued to grow on average in modern times, as nutrition and medicine have improved. However, rather than a steady growth over time, studies show cycles of height fluctuation. In the Middle Ages, it appears mankind was taller, but then heights began to fall before rising again centuries later. Fossil records of archaic man and subspecies like Neanderthals tend to show that we started out shorter, around five foot, five foot two, not as towering monstrosities or as diminutive little gnomes. And all the data we’ve gathered shows that our fluctuations in height have remained within a certain range, between about 5 feet and six feet, where average height tends to plateau. Of course there are exceptions, outliers typically related to physical conditions like those I’ve already discussed, but all signs point to the existence of giants as nothing more than fantasies that have always loomed large in our collective imaginations.

Until next time, remember the words of not Mark Twain, but rather Jonathan Swift, who in full, wrote, “[a]s the vilest Writer has his Readers, so the greatest Liar has his Believers; and it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect…”

No Bones About It! Part Two: GIANTS in the "New World"

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