Giant People in the bible?

If there were giants running amok in the old days, where are the bones?

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Actually, no.The bones from human evolution are tens of thousands to millions of years old. They would definitely not be in the same location as bones from some tribe mentioned in the Bible. Stuck on a few thousand years? If its an extant tribe mentioned in the Bible what else would it be than within a few thousand years?My point is simple: if there were giants, we should be able to find the bones. The past several thousand years are well explored by archaeologists, and we usually have decent preservation in that time period for anything that was deliberately buried.Also, as was pointed out, we are missing everything else from such a tribe as well--artifacts, dwellings, etc.Given this lack of evidence, I think these "giants" are about as real as the Abominable Snowman (or perhaps less so, as there are eyewitness accounts of the Snowman).

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Sure. Intact skeletons are found all the time. I have excavated several hundred spanning some thousands of years.I am talking about these purported "giants" not something back in evolutionary history. That places it within written/remembered history, say some 5-6 thousand years. Because I am told constantly on various websites that there is nothing older than about 6-10 thousand years. I have been called, variously, an atheist, an evo-cultist, a nazi, a communist and worse for accepting the evidence for evolution and an old earth. (Oh, I missed evo-nazi.) Certainly we don't find bones from billions of years ago. Why would suppose these "giants" were around then? What is the evidence? Certainly these are all factors. The excess weight would not make the bones gigantic. It would contribute to enlarged muscle attachments and possibly some deformation in places, but it would have little effect on the size of the bones. Cremations from the distant past certainly are harder to deal with than skeletons, but they did not traditionally grind the bones (that we know of).But to return to the original point: if you are going to posit "giants" wouldn't it be better to come up with some evidence to support their existence than to make up excuses for why no traces of them can be found? Data is data. Interpretations of that data may vary, but initial assumptions don't change the data. Bones is bones, and we don't have any giant bones of which I have ever seen or heard. Other that the Bible, do you have any confirming evidence?

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Cranial capacity was slightly larger than ours, but not enough to make any difference. The range of variation in modern humans is huge.The bodies seem to have been emphasizing strength over speed. Many muscle attachments are found at a greater distance from the pivot point than in modern humans giving increased power but decreased speed.It is possible that these folks were extremely robust, and adapted to the cold.But "giants" is normally interpreted to mean tall as well as large, so I don't think the Neanderthals would fit the bill.Bigfoot might qualify as a giant, but there's one small problem with that...

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Those descriptions would make Bigfoot look small.Sorry, I don't believe a word of it. (Good hooch that night?)

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Sorry, I misread the tone of your post.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Giants hundreds of feet tall?Where are the bones?We have bones going back hundreds of millions of years, but no bones of human giants. (And no evidence of a global flood either.)Perhaps this is all a myth?

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

I find that height a bit hard to believe. I would appreciate a reference to the scientific journal. I would hesitate to assign a height to an individual when the only remains were the skull. In fact, I would not do so. I know of no regression formulas to extrapolate from the skull to height. There are any number of regression formulas to work with from postcranial remains, so perhaps there were postcranial remains that led to a 7 foot estimate?At any rate, 7 feet is a height that is found among living individuals today, so that would not be an unbelievable height for the recent past. But 11 feet? I would need to see the reference for that one.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

I did a google on those keywords.The only places that discuss this 1890 article are religious sites. I found no scientific sites mentioning that article.The photograph reproduced in one blog, showing the bones, lacks a scale. The measurements given are not very useful either.From this I would suspect you have some sort of pathological condition, not an individual over 11 feet tall.I'm sure if there were verified bones from an individual of that stature they would be mentioned in some of my human osteology or pathology books, of which I have a considerable number.And if there were such a "race of giants" we would have far more than a scattered bone or two.I'm still pretty skeptical about this.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

That humerus in the middle looks extremely gracile to me, though it is hard to tell from a photo with no scale.Establishing height from long bones is commonly done by forensic anthropologists, and even working from fragmentary bones one can produce decent results. But we use regression formulas to establish height, and I don't know that those formulas were around in the 1890s. The most popular regression formulas are those of Trotter and Glesser, and they date to the early 1950s.Many of the articles published during the 1800s don't measure up (sorry about the pun) to modern standards. It is not uncommon for these types of skeletal anomalies to be described in journals by doctors who were not trained in paleontology--nobody was in those days.I would like to see these types of results cited in current texts or journals. In decades of studying osteology and pathology I've never seen any references in the modern literature to individuals in the 11 foot range. Individuals approaching 8 feet in height are extremely rare, though they do occur.Rumors of "giants" are common, but the bones and other evidence never seems to stick around for modern forensic examination.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

I have a better idea: lets just measure the bones using modern techniques and then we'll know. We can radiocarbon date them, and do mtDNA studies at the same time. Then we'll really know.But that's where the problems come in. So many of these bones somehow disappear when we go to look for them to perform studies with modern techniques.And its not a conspiracy on the part of paleontologists, physical anthropologists, archaeologists and the like. Its a failure of the data--where are all of those bones when we have techniques that can really examine them?!!!But we have found and examined some of these specimens. Unfortunately, many of the archaeological specimens for which great antiquity was claimed failed to exhibit that antiquity when tested with modern techniques.Here's a good reference for this:R.E.Taylor, `Major Revisions in the Pleistocene Age Assignments for the North American Human Skeletons by C-14 Accelerator Mass Spectrometry', American Antiquity, Vol. 50, No.1, 1985, pp. 136-140.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

I saw that article when I was researching the topic.Where are all the bones?Why can't we, now that we have modern techniques, find any bones suggesting people of 11-12 foot stature?I've examined thousands of skeletons and an individual, or even major fragments, of an 11-foot individual would stand out.None of my reference works on human osteology or pathology have any such bones either.About the only articles that describe such bones are centuries old.Thanks, I'll remain skeptical and wait for the bones to show up. Maybe on my next excavation I'll find some, but in the meantime I would consider these to be a myth.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

You are right about the square-cubed problem.And that five-foot femur isn't evidence. It was a sculpture based on a description in a letter.It looks exactly like a robust human femur just scaled up in size.And that is exactly what a femur from a 12-foot individual won't look like. All of that extra weight would require a redesign of the bone because of the square-cubed problem.This is also what catches out a lot of folks who fake bigfoot prints. They just scale up a normal human foot, and that won't work for an 800 lb. critter. The bones would be considerably different, and in slightly different locations.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Or maybe they never existed.Seriously, there are thousands of physical anthropologists, osteologists, archaeologists, paleontologists and the like poking around out there, any one of whom would be able to adequately deal with such bones. Where are those bones? Where are the bones? Mid-shaft circumference of 160 mm would be abnormally large for modern humans. A fragment of 140 mm length would not be that large. Sometimes shaft fragments are difficult to identify, particularly when in poor condition, or pathological. In those circumstances other species, such as bear, can be remarkably similar. Where are the bones? Why do we have to rely on reports scattered from AD 1700-1892? Where are those bones now, so we can see what they were really examining and if needed perform DNA testing and other more modern tests.But those bones have suddenly dried up! Now that we have more accurate methods of testing, and some real experts around, they have disappeared.Maybe, just maybe, there were never there in the first place, eh?

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Sorry, not correct.Gigantopithecis is known from both jaws and teeth.I can't get any images to reproduce here and its late, so I gave up trying.Do a google image search and you'll find them.Jaws can give a huge amount of information beyond that which you can get from just teeth. Just two examples:First, the shape of the tooth rows in relation to one another, whether straight or hyperbolic, is very important.Second, the width of the rear of the jaw, the area between the two ascending ramus (insert correct plural here) is important for determining where the spinal cord entered the cranium. That, in turn, helps to determine posture, whether bipedal or quadrupedal, or somewhere in between.There is no equivalence here to Nebraska man, so any such comparisons are inappropriate.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.