Giant People in the bible?

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

I know what the statue of Liberty is.... A giant.

I think that finding parts of the humerus, tibia and femur would be an even better indication for how big Giganto was.For all we know Giganto could have been this 5 foot tall Ape with a head 4 times too large.

Well... I am not a trained scientist, so as much as I would love to find a giant skeleton, I will leave that to the professionals...I will just pull what I can from old science journals. I figure that science journals are a better source than the thousands of news articles that exist. But in the end this is all fiction, and cannot be considered evidence. I should just stop...Then again, the bones from Castelnau are remarkably human looking... Look at the anterior crest on the tibia fragment...

Calypsis4Thank you for those photographs. I had never seen these before. It appears that giants in the vicinity of 7 to 9 feet have been medically documented in the last century alone. The bones at Castelnau indicated someone even taller than this, at roughly 11 feet -- as calculated by the Anthropologist who discovered the bones.From what I have been able to read, the absolute biophysical limits to human stature are not yet completely known, and scientists believe it is possible to grow even taller than 9 feet --according to the documentary: Inside Extraordinary Humans: The Science of Gigantism (2007)).I would suspect anything from 12 - 15 feet would require a complete redesign of the human physique--and would resemble a ground sloth or Cave bear in structure and therefore very unlikely .Sultan Kosen is 8 feet 1, and rather feeble looking. He needs assistance in walking, and so did Wadlow. However, if you look at other giants such as Vin Myllyrinne who stood 8 foot 3, he was as rather fast on his feet for a giant and didn't need assistance from a cane until he was in his middle age.Most of the tallest giants in history have been Acromegalic, or abnormal in growth. But it is by no means impossible that equal height can indeed be achieved through genetics. Look at Yao Ming, a genetic giant who at 7 feet 6 barefoot, had parents who were between 6 1/2 to 7 feet tall. And genetic heights of 8 feet or more have been reported for some individuals among the Dinka and Watutsi in Africa.

Yes it's hard to verify some of the old accounts of giants. Only since the 1800's do we have photographs available to give us an idea. There was also Machnow the Russian, said to be 9 feet 4 inches tall, I think he was closer to 8 feet though.There are also plenty of written accounts of tall human remains, (7 -12 feet) and found right here in the U.S.Remember the cave at Lovelock, Nevada? Someone was trying to equate the giant Indians found there as Bigfoot remains. Utter garbage.Well, In 1911 David Pugh and James Hart excavated that cave and came upon several red-haired mummies of men and women, the most spectacular was of a man who in mummified state was 6 feet 6 inches tall with a noose around his neck-- Hart called him "a giant". In the next 12-13 years over 60 skeletons and mummies were found in that cave, and Mrs Clara Beatty, former Director of Nevada Historical Society in Reno, spoke of the discovery of the "skeletons of giants", together with them stone and bone implements, beads, duck and geese decoys, two giant-sized rabbit skin robes, and sixteen-inch long moccasins. Mrs. Beatty was especially Well qualified to tell of all this as she had daily contact with all the items in the Historical Society's museum in the State Building.(A 16 inch moccasin would equal a size 20 - 22, so apparently they had big feet, suggesting an enormous stature-- but they weren't "Bigfoot").Of course, it doesn't stop there. For what it's worth, the Nevada State Journal in Reno printed a quick "Historical item of the week" for October 3, 1936 which mentioned the discovery of a mummy with reddish hair on the skull, that measured "9 1/2 feet" in length found in a cave near Lovelock, Nevada. The article says, "The mummy is now in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. It is the largest human specimen ever discovered."There is also the case of the curiously gigantic partial mummy which was on display in the Mark Twain museum in Virginia city, Nevada-- said to have been found near Washoe Lake in the 30's or 50's, 7 feet 4 inches tall with hair retaining reddish qualities.Near the rim of Winnemucca Lake, a cave which contained the bones of a man who was estimated at over 7 feet tall was found c. 1953...There's a lot more...
But case in point, big skeletons don't equal Sasquatch.

I emailed the Nevada State Historical society back in April 20-24, 2003 inquiring about the alleged giant skeletons. They replied, and said they weren't sure if they had any remains and whether or not they were the 'red head giants.' They knew about the legend of the giants but weren't sure how much was true. They reminded me that the items pulled from the cave are under NAGPRA laws that were found on BLM land and are securely stored off-site.Similar inquiries have been met with similar results.Kathleen C. Warner, in her book "The quasi-prehistorical validity of Western Numic (Paviotso) oral tradition" 1978, pg. 151 explains that in June 1975, she asked the Secretary of the State Historical Society, Eslie Cann where the Lovelock Cave skeletons and associated material were kept, but was told that the Society had made many inquiries regarding the whereabouts of the red headed remains, but none of the institutions involved had any knowledge of these remains!So, I really don't know where the remains are.A study was conducted in 1976 by the University of Nevada and the Nevada State Museum which re-examined a box of bones found by the amateur archaeologist John T. Reid near Lovelock Cave. Reid had calculated that some of these people were giants, but Dr. Sheilagh Brooks, chair woman of the anthropology department at UN-Las Vegas said that her initial investigation indicated some of the bones were from "cows", and those which were human indicated people of approximately "6 feet tall."

I was content that the study by Dr. Sheilagh Brooks, vaporized the giant Indian myth. But I later discovered more reports of large human remains in the vicinity of central Nevada which made me uneasy. Also, some of the fiber sandals found at Lovelock cave are inescapably huge. Even if they were awkward and primitive tule and reed sandals, they seem excessively large for normal sized people. At least one of them is about 15 to 16 inches long, and as great as 7 inches across the toes. Mrs. Clara Beatty had previously described these artifacts, and others have described them also. I believe the Museum in Reno or Carson city has them.

Since there are occasional people 7 to 9 feet tall nowadays, I don't think it's outlandish to suggest their having existed in "Biblical times" also.The population in Canaan in the Late Bronze to early Iron age, was probably no more than half a million people, and probably less than that. This would likely rule out Goliath as a pituitary giant, because the incidence of pituitary gigantism, is incredibly rare, with only 100 cases reported in the United States to date.If Goliath and king Og were giants that tall, their remarkable height would have been genetic, or "constitutional" like Bol, Ming, Sabonis, Fingelton, Xishun, Liang and other extremely tall men medically documented in the 7 and 8 foot range.

I agree that claiming giants up to 25 feet tall is a pretty outrageous allegation. And bio physically absurd.The vast majority of the reported "giant skeletons" in more modern times (1850-1950) or the encounters with living giants, have usually ranged in height from 7-9 feet, with some reported at 10-12.I have already mentioned my case concerning the find at Castelnau-Le-Lez, of human bones of twice the volume and length of normal man (5 1/2 foot man) suggesting an individual approx. eleven feet stature. And if this approximation is correct, I don't think we can rule out 10 to 12 feet as a possibility for the human species.It should be noted, that the physicians who had known Wallow all his life had predicted that he would surpass 9 feet at age 22. He was 22.4 when he died and 8 feet 11.1 inches. Surprisingly, he was still growing at a rate of 2-3 inches per year and his bones had not fused. So Wadlow's case still leaves open the question... How much taller could he have grown?

Not evidence in the least? That seems rather extreme to say.Bronze age gigantism? I think it would be very rare, but possible, and they would likely live a short life--similar to the giants that have existed in the 17th to 19th centuries. Then again, what was the average lifespan of the dolmen culture, 25 to 40?Or perhaps this Bronze age giant was constitutionally tall... As G. de Lapouge has suggested.