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Author | Topic: Giant People in the bible? | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Coyote Member (Idle past 2128 days) Posts: 6117 Joined: |
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. Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.
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John Williams Member (Idle past 5020 days) Posts: 157 From: Oregon, US Joined: |
Maybe this discovery was simply forgotten for the past 120 years until some nerd found it.
hmmm.. religious sites, that can't be good. Well maybe they link up to the original article. I'm no anatomy guru, but if that is indeed a normal sized male humerus in the middle-- even with a pathological condition, that humerus on the left is extremely large, and the broken piece of femur is pretty big as well. Maybe there were a lot more pituitary freaks back then, like 1 in 100 instead of 1 in a million. Just a thought.
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Coyote Member (Idle past 2128 days) Posts: 6117 Joined: |
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. Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.
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John Williams Member (Idle past 5020 days) Posts: 157 From: Oregon, US Joined: |
Let's suppose De Lapouge was over estimating by a foot. We are still left with a 10 foot giant.
Or let's suppose he placed the humerus of a 5 foot woman in the middle of the photo. I still don't see this giant withering to less than 9 feet. But that's just an uneducated guess on my part.
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Coyote Member (Idle past 2128 days) Posts: 6117 Joined: |
Let's suppose De Lapouge was over estimating by a foot. We are still left with a 10 foot giant.
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. Or let's suppose he placed the humerus of a 5 foot woman in the middle of the photo. I still don't see this giant withering to less than 9 feet. But that's just an uneducated guess on my part. 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. Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.
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John Williams Member (Idle past 5020 days) Posts: 157 From: Oregon, US Joined: |
I am all for that. Who knows, maybe the University of Montpellier still has these bones.
In the meantime, I guess we'll have to be content that 1890's anthropologists simply didn't know how to estimate the height of a man based off humerus, tibia, and femur fragments to any real degree of accuracy-- and everything they published in peer review is suspect by virtue of the era in which it was written and cannot be considered evidence of giants. However, we will be happy to accept the possibility that this was a very long limned quadruped who knuckled his way through the Holocene hinterland, plucking berries and feasting on pond frogs...
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terry107 Junior Member (Idle past 3828 days) Posts: 5 From: sacramento ca Joined: |
An Essay Concerning Giants, by Dr. Thomas Molyneux M.D., Philosophical Transactions 1700-Taking the Logic out of Mythological
http://s8int.com/WordPress/?p=1425 A skeptical doctor pens an article to a scientific journal about an undeniable human bone that proves man reached at least 12 feet in height in the past....
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Coyote Member (Idle past 2128 days) Posts: 6117 Joined: |
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. Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.
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Coragyps Member (Idle past 756 days) Posts: 5553 From: Snyder, Texas, USA Joined: |
My post 57, this thread.
That femur still won't support a 12-foot person, even an anorexic one. Mass goes with height cubed.
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Coyote Member (Idle past 2128 days) Posts: 6117 Joined: |
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. Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.
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Theodoric Member Posts: 9143 From: Northwest, WI, USA Joined: Member Rating: 3.3 |
Taken from the website you referenced.
quote: I have gone over this website before and it all is bunk. I know of no out of place artifact that has stood up to scrutiny. Also, you claim the writer of the essay was a skeptic. Does he say he was a a skeptic? You also must realize what was termed a skeptic in 1700 is a bit different than a skeptic today. Oh yeah it sure is amazing that those giant bones don't exist anymore doesn't it. Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts
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John Williams Member (Idle past 5020 days) Posts: 157 From: Oregon, US Joined: |
It is amazing that they don't exist anymore. Or maybe they actually do exist but are not being shown---or both.
But back to the issue of the bones at Castelnau Le Lez. What we have here is a well known French Anthropologist in 1890 publishing in a popular Science Journal his discovery of ancient fossil human bones which are twice the volume and almost twice the length of ordinary. Perhaps ordinary stature was 5 feet 4 for French men of the time... In any case, the bones were confirmed to be of human origin by several anatomists as the article states, and were later carefully examined by Dr. Paul Louis Andr Kiener, Prof. of Pathological Anatomy at the Montpellier Faculty of Medicine, University of Montpellier. His careful analysis was reported in 1892 in the New York Times, and he concluded the individual to whom the bones belonged was of a "very tall race" but of apparent abnormal growth. The report also states that the bones were double the ordinary size. So at the very least, we are not talking about Cave bear or cow bones...I will go ahead and side with Dr. Kiener on that. I agree, height estimates from these bones would only be approximate. The original article (written in French) states that the fragment of which is from the middle shaft of the femur is 16 cm in circumference, and 14 cm long-- That is exceptionally large. Had these bone fragments not been found together in the same burial cist, I think De Lapouge would not have attempted at estimating the stature of the subject.
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Coyote Member (Idle past 2128 days) Posts: 6117 Joined: |
It is amazing that they don't exist anymore. Or maybe they actually do exist but are not being shown---or both. 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?
But back to the issue of the bones at Castelnau Le Lez. What we have here is a well known French Anthropologist in 1890 publishing in a popular Science Journal his discovery of ancient fossil human bones which are twice the volume and almost twice the length of ordinary. Perhaps ordinary stature was 5 feet 4 for French men of the time... In any case, the bones were confirmed to be of human origin by several anatomists as the article states, and were later carefully examined by Dr. Paul Louis Andr Kiener, Prof. of Pathological Anatomy at the Montpellier Faculty of Medicine, University of Montpellier. His careful analysis was reported in 1892 in the New York Times, and he concluded the individual to whom the bones belonged was of a "very tall race" but of apparent abnormal growth. The report also states that the bones were double the ordinary size.
Where are the bones?
So at the very least, we are not talking about Cave bear or cow bones...I will go ahead and side with Dr. Kiener on that. I agree, height estimates from these bones would only be approximate. The original article (written in French) states that the fragment of which is from the middle shaft of the femur is 16 cm in circumference, and 14 cm long-- That is exceptionally large. 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.
Had these bone fragments not been found together in the same burial cist, I think De Lapouge would not have attempted at estimating the stature of the subject. 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? Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.
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Theodoric Member Posts: 9143 From: Northwest, WI, USA Joined: Member Rating: 3.3 |
Where are the bones? Why can't anyone produce them to have them tested by modern means?
Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts
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John Williams Member (Idle past 5020 days) Posts: 157 From: Oregon, US Joined: |
Where are the bones?.. An excellent question, I fully agree needs to be addressed.
"Maybe, just maybe, there were never there in the first place, eh?" I will have to respectfully disagree with you here and side with the academic gentlemen who examined the bones in question (which from the article suggests half a dozen, and no less than Dr. Kiener himself). The Femur fragment was conclusively human, and De Lapouge writes (Google Translation): "The first part is the middle part of shaft of femur. It distinguishes the hole feeder, and above a trace of injury healed. The circumference of the bone is 0m, 16, the length of the fragment, 0m, 14, almost cylindrical shape, the linea aspera strong enough no tendency to pilaster." So I don't think G. de Lapouge wrote an article on bones that didn't exist, yet happened to be examined by 5 or 6 persons....that doesn't really make sense. Even a hoax or something like Piltdown would make more sense than that sort of logic.
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