If there is one thing I have conclusively demonstrated to myself over the course of my life, it is my ability to lose track of things even in the presence of an immense set of tools to do exactly the opposite. Go me. This is one of the main reasons why I often write about things as I come across them: saving something for later often means it goes to the bottom of some stack somewhere, never to re-surface.

I ran across the topic of this post while I was searching (unsuccessfully, so far) for a 1960's sermon about giants by a Seventh-Day Adventist preacher. I came across that sermon months ago but never wrote about, and I haven't yet been able to relocate it despite being sure I saved it more than once. I can't recall the name of the preacher, the publication, or the sermon. I'll keep searching for that sermon. In the meantime, I give you this account about of a "giant skeleton" from the Holy Land, described in a paragraph from the January 7, 1933, edition of The Gospel Messenger: 

"The mounds and caves of the Near East continue to yield archaeological items of interest. Thus there was recently reported the finding of the skeleton of a giant in a cave at Athlit, Palestine. The find is said to resemble that of Paleanthropus Palestinus found a year ago at Mt. Carmel. These prehistoric men differed from all others in their long limbs, jutting chins, and awninglike ridges over their eyes. Maybe it was the descendants of some of these that the spies saw when they went up to look over the promised land."

The Gospel Messenger (1883-1965) was the official paper of the Church of the Brethren, a Christian denomination that traces its roots to early 1700's Germany.

Several things in the paragraph from The Gospel Messenger caught my attention. First was the use of "Paleanthropus Palestinus," a taxonomic construct that I don't remember seeing before.  Second was, of course, the phrase "skeleton of a giant." Third was the connection made between fossil evidence and biblical stories.

Spoiler alert: the "giant skeletons" recovered from the cave were none other than the Neandertals of Skhul Cave, one of the most well-known Paleolithic sites in the Near East. The remains were described in a detail in a 1937 report. The "giants" of Skhul Cave were not giants in all, ranging in estimated stature from about 5'7" to a staggering 5'10."  In addition to the formal report ( available online for anyone to see), numerous accounts of the discoveries in the popular media discuss the remains without describing them as those of "giants" That hasn't stopped today's giant "researchers" from uncritically embracing a 1932 article in The Milwaukee Journal that added the word "giant" to the text and headline.

The early 1930's was a time of rapid discovery in the Near East.  In 1932, work in the caves of Palestine revealed the first relatively complete remains of Neanderthals outside of Europe (the "Galilee skull," more commonly known to paleoanthropologists today as Zuttiyeh and classified as Homo heidelbergensis was discovered in 1925; the burial of an infant Neanderthal had been reported from Skhul cave in 1931). These discoveries were widely reported in newspapers and magazines: I found nine separate stories about the discoveries printed in The New York Times between May of 1932 and January of 1933. An Associated Press story also made the rounds in the summer of 1932, and an illustrated feature appeared in Every Week Magazine (a Sunday supplement) appeared in the fall. 

The New York Times articles I located trace the discoveries from three skeletons announced in May of 1932, to the announcement of the discovery of four more in June, to the shipment of eight skeletons to London in January of 1933. In on June 26 of 1932, the New York Times ran a piece by Dorothy Garrod that provided a physical description of the remains Garrod, a professor at Cambridge who was involved in the Skhul fieldwork, described the remains as having "powerfully developed" supraorbital ridges (the ridges of bone over the eyes), high cranial vaults, prognathic faces, and "well-marked" chins.  Garrod contrasts these features with those of European Neanderthals, explaining why Sir Arthur Keith proposed that the new taxon of Paleanthropus Palestinus (sic). Garrod says only one thing relevant to the stature of these individuals:

"The limb bones are massive but are markedly longer than those of the dwarfish Neanderthaler."

Theodore McCown, the excavator of the skeletons, was directly quoted in a New York Times piece from August 6, 1932:

"Although they were a tall people, they probably stopped and walked with a shambling gait."

The word "giant" does not appear in the New York Times coverage until a January 11 story (attributed simply to "Wireless") that describes the Skhul remains as "skeletons of eight prehistoric giants" that were shipped "embedded in huge blocks of stone." That story post-dates both the (January 7, 1933) account in The Gospel Messenger that I quoted above and a similar story from The Milwaukee Journal (December 16, 1932) that is reproduced on the websites of several giant enthusiasts (e.g., here, here, and here).  Here is a transcript of the Milwaukee Journal article:

"FIND GIANT SKELETON IN CAVE IN PALESTINE

Another Mousterian skeleton, resembling those of the so-called Mount Carmel men discovered last year, has been found in the caves at Athlit, Palestine. The remains of the Mt. Carmel men were first found by Theodore McCown, a young American archaeologist. The men were a race of giants who were contemporary with the Neanderthal men of Europe. They differed from all other prehistoric men in their long limbs, jutting chins, and in the enormous ridges over their eyes."

The Milwaukee Journal story, the earliest I have seen so far to refer to the Skhul skeletons as "giants," is credited to "Special Cable."  The Milwaukee Journal story is not the ultimate source of the nonsense claim that the Skhul skeletons were giants -- that honor goes to a story that was apparently written for Christian consumption as a supplemented version of another story that I have yet to locate. The earliest version I have found so far is dated January 5, so there must be an earlier one out there that pre-dates the Milwaukee Journal story. Here is a quote from a story titled "There Were Giants" printed in the January 5, 1933, edition of The Harrisburg Telegraph:

" . . . After the manner of many modern demonstrations of the accuracy of Biblical accounts formerly questioned by doubting Thomases among the "higher critics," it is now reported that there really "were giants in those days."
   News has been received that another Mousterian skeleton, resembling those of the so-called "Mt. Carmel men" discovered last year, has been found in the caves of Athlit, Palestine.
   These men were a race of giants contemporary with the Neadnerthal [sic] men of Europe, but differing in that they had exceptionally long limbs and enormous, awning-like ridges over their eyes.
    Here in America we occasionally hear of the finding of the bones of a giant, but except for the admittedly large stature of our own Susquehannock Indians, there is no evidence that giants inhabited this continent."

Based on the use of the distinctive phrase "awning-like ridges," I'm guessing the account in The Gospel Messenger was drawn from a story similar to the one in the Harrisburg Telegraph. "Awning-like" is also used in the later story in the New York Times story with "giants" in the headline. My guess is that sometime in early-to-mid December, someone, somewhere wrote a story about one of the final skeletons uncovered at Skhul and decided to spice it up a little bit by taking these "taller than Neanderthal" people and turning them into giants. Whether or not that original story was packaged intentionally to interest Christians seeking confirmation of the Bible I don't know, but it seems to have been used that way at the time and continues to be used that way today.  Then as now, in the absence of giants you just make hem up.

​So, getting back to reality, you can read the full report of the Skhul remains online if you want to wade through all the nitty gritty and/or don't want to take my word for it that the Milwaukee Journal didn't somehow know something about the remains from Skhul that the original excavators (and The New York Times) did not. If you don't want to read it all yourself, here are some highlights relevant to the size of the skeletons:

"The Skhul men, like the male Cromagnons, were tall; their stature ranged from 5 ft. 6.7 in. (1,700 mm.) to 5 ft. 10.3 in. (1,787 mm)." (pp. 16-17)

"The length of the foot in these fossil people is in no way remarkable." (pg. 20)

"There the longest of the Palestinian tibiae, that of Skhul IV, is set side by side with three others . . . The maximum length in Skhul IV is 430 mm. for the right bone and 434 mm. for the left. If we apply the formula of Pearson (1898) . . . we obtain a mean tibial stature of 1,813 mm. (71.3 in.); using Manouvrier's tables . . . the result is still more, namely 1,875 mm. (73.8 in.)." (pg. 41).

​"It is at once apparent that we are dealing with a tall race of men, with a body conformation very different from the Neanderthaliens of Europe -- short and stout men. . . . The statures of the four men run from 1,709 mm. (5 ft. 7.2 in.) to 1,787 mm. (5 ft. 10 in.)." (pg. 58)

That the "giant skeletons" from Palestine were nothing of the sort is plain to see with a little bit of investigation. They weren't giants, and information about them was not suppressed. I will bet that none of the websites using this case as an example, however, will change: the uncritical embrace of any old piece of paper with the word "giant" printed on it is a staple among today's cut-and-paste giant enthusiasts. ​Systematic scrutiny and culling of nonsense "giant" accounts would leave little if any ammunition available for the "how can all of these accounts be wrong?" baloney cannon. Dumb. What else can you really say about a world where manufactured clay statues are accepted as evidence.

I've often been curious what mainstream Christianity has to say about the Nephilim-centric Christian fringe that espouses a worldview revolving around human-angel interbreeding and the giants that resulted from those supernatural dalliances. Steve Quayle and L. A. Marzulli have made careers from the idea, after all, and promote themselves as prophets (here Quayle says he "has been blessed to receive prophetic visions"). 

I haven't had much time for giants lately, but a link to this podcast sermon from the North Peace MB Church popped up in my email this morning. I listened to it while going through my other emails, prepping more Kirk points for scanning, and getting another set of computer experiments running. In the podcast, titled simply "The Nephilim," Andrew Eby and Don Banman spend about a half hour discussing the familiar passages from Genesis 6 that mention the Nephilim.

If I understood them correctly, the agree with many if not all of the main points of the supernatural-intercourse-wicked-Nephilim-flood narrative that is Quayle and Marzulli's stock in trade.  Pointing to a supernatural world that is part of human existence, they accept that sex with fallen angels played a major role in making humanity wicked (starting about 15:00 in): 

They point out that God has intervened several times to save humanity from corruption, implying, I think, that it will happen again. They discuss the emerging science of genetics and its potential to extend the human life span as something potentially sinister. And that's about as scary as it gets -- no quest to identify and eliminate corrupted bloodlines, no clandestine engineering of giant super soldiers, no giants frozen in underground chambers waiting to be unleashed upon the planet, etc.

This book recommendation is also relevant.

Okay . . . back to work.

I spent a few hours today adding links to the Argumentative Archaeologist website that I maintain. I did a tour through the active skeptical websites that I know of, adding links to Jason Colavito's relevant posts from the last couple of months, some podcasts from Archyfantasies, posts by Michael Heiser on his Paleobabble page, a post by Carl Feagans about cranial deformation, some new stuff on the Ancient Aliens Debunked blog, a bunch of posts about Oak Island on the Oak Island Compendium site (those folks have been writing a lot!), some things from this blog, and a few other odds and ends. I also added a new page for Lemuria.

Please let me know about other sites and posts that I should be aware of. 

Enjoy!

Many of you out there who believe in giants point to artwork from the past in support of the idea that gigantic humans and normal-size humans used to co-exist. People that appear gigantic must have really been gigantic, right? Here is one website claiming that artwork supports the notion of giant ancient Egyptians. Here is another. Here is one about Sumer. Here is another Sumer one.  I wrote here about how Ramses II was depicted as very large in comparison to other humans. Unfortunately for giant enthusiasts, Rameses II's mummy demonstrates that he was about 5'7". My solution to the contradiction presented by a normal-sized Rameses was that all those around him were actually very, very small.

But let's put aside the inconvenient facts for a moment and enjoy this depiction of giant Frenchmen building a fort in the mid-1500's:

The image is a colorized version of one of the engravings of Jacques Le Moyne, who accompanied Jean Ribaut's expedition to the New World. The Ribaut expedition established a settlement (Charlesfort) on Parris Island, South Carolina, in 1562. (The illustration above is typically described as showing Fort Caroline, another Ribaut expedition fort that would have been located to the south on the Georgia or Florida coast. For reasons I won't go into here, there is good reason to think the illustration above depicts the construction of Charlesfort rather than Fort Caroline.  You can read about the controversy over the location of Fort Caroline, which has never been found, here.)

Giant enthusiasts will immediately note the size of the men constructing the fort in Le Moyne's illustration.  The fourteen men (who apparently arrived on the island in the two open canoes) are as tall as the trees and tower over the walls of the fort they are building. They're so big, in fact, that it's unclear to me why they would even need a fort to protect themselves.  What are they afraid of?  The walls and moat are clearly not built to keep out other giants, as it's pretty obvious that our French giants could just hop right over them.  The best I can come up is that these French giants must have been building this fort to protect themselves from the normal-size native population. One problem with this idea, however, is that Spanish accounts from this same region describe the indigenous peoples themselves as being "giants."  So the giant French were trying to protect themselves from the less-giant-but-still-giant Native Americans.  Or the Native Americans were normal-sized and the Spaniards were super small.

Or maybe not everything in these depictions is accurately scaled and represented.

I am happy to announce that Jim Vieira, perhaps best known for his role in the History Channel program "Search for the Lost Giants," has agreed to participate in the Forbidden Archaeology class that I will be teaching at South Carolina in the fall of 2016. I've been writing about "giants" for over a year now and I've gone at Vieira's ideas several times. We had an enjoyable phone conversation a week or two ago about "double rows of teeth" and other things connected to giants, science, and fringe research in general.  Without pretending to speak for him, I'll just say that I got the sense that his ideas about giants have changed/developed somewhat over the past few years. I look forward to hearing his current thoughts and seeing how he interacts with the students in the class.  

Vieria joins Scott Wolter in taking me up on my open offer to "fringe" researchers to participate in my class.

I'm still working on refining the syllabus.  Things seem to be settling in nicely for covering three main topics this time around: giants, Ice Age civilization (i.e., the existence of a progenitor civilization or "mother culture"), and pre-Columbian transoceanic contact between the New World and the Old World. I've got Vieira penciled in for September (the month of giants) and Wolter for November.  My draft syllabus has Fingerprints of the Gods as the book we'll be reading and critiquing (and blogging about) for the section of the class dealing with Ice Age civilization, but I think I'd like to change that up and go with a book that hasn't yet been thoroughly examined with a critical eye.  A switch will be even more likely if I can find a book that fits the bill written by an author willing to participate in the class.  Ideas?  Let me know.

To undergraduates at South Carolina: this is going to be a good one! Although this is listed as an archaeology course (because it deals with evidence about what happened in the past), it is weighted heavily as an exercise in critical thinking and communication.  We're going to use historic, anthropological, and scientific frameworks to assess and evaluate a variety of claims about the past that are not part of mainstream thinking. Where did these ideas and claims come from? What kind of evidence could prove a given claim to be false?  How are the claims connected to social, political, and financial agendas? Is there is a worldwide conspiracy among academics to suppress knowledge about what really happened in the past? What can independently be shown to be wrong and what cannot?  We will engage with and evaluate “fringe” claims about the past through readings, discussions, online research and writing, and guest appearances. Forbidden Archaeology (ANTH 291) will meet MWF at 9:40-10:30. I'll post the syllabus when I get it completed.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post about the "ancient relic of Mu" (a modern copper alloy pot from India), I have just come across Oahspe (pronounced O as in o'clock, AH as in father, SPE as in speak) for the first time. I'm not sure how I never heard of this before, but I'm finding it fascinating. For those of you ignorant of Oahspe, it is an 1882 book of spiritual revelations reportedly produced by John Ballou Newbrough (1828–1891) through automatic writing. The title page contains this description:

Here it is on Google Books.

Several things interest me about Oahspe.  

First, it contains a tale of human racial history and dispersal from a "lost continent" in the Pacific. I'm interested in how the ideas in Oahspe articulate with political and scientific thinking in late 1800's America. 

Second, it's one of several nineteenth century American religious developments based on received revelations. Unlike the Book of Mormon (1830) and the prophecies of Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Ellen G. White (experienced from 1844-1863), however, the writings in Oahspe did not develop a large following (I don't know how many Faithists there are today, but certainly many fewer than there are Mormons or Seventh-Day Adventists).

Third, I'm interested in the person and the process. Newbrough was born near where I grew up (Wikipedia says Mohicanville, Ohio, while I've seen other sources online specify Wooster, Ohio, and Springfield, Ohio) and apparently used a typewriter for his "automatic writing." And there are apparently connections between his dental practice and his spirituality.

Anyway, the first thing I did was look for giants in Oahspe.  They're pretty much absent from the Book of Mormon. In SDA and Young Earth Creationist traditions, humans closer to creation were "bigger, better, and smarter" than the degenerated humans of today. What does Oahspe have to say?

Here are the passages from "First Book of the First Lords" (Chapters 1-3) that describe the various interbreedings among animal, human, and spiritual beings:

That's a whole lot of inter-breeding going on.  I made a chart so I could keep it straight:

It appears to me that you can arrange these "races" described in Oahspe on a continuum from "spiritual/angelic" to "animal."  The "sacred beings" that are the products of matings between angels and Asu (apparently some kind of non-spiritual biped) are the I'hin.  The I'hin are rather small, light-skinned people.

In the Oahspe version of prehistory, it's the crossing of spiritual and animal beings that produces "true" humans that are apparently rather small.  This contrasts sharply with the Nephilim-centric view of the past wherein such matings produced corrupt, giant, evil beings.  

When humans (I'hin) go against instructions and mate with the non-human hominds (Asu), they produce something called a druk (druk is equated with "giant" only once that I see in Oahspe -- The Lord's First Book, chapter 1, verse 29). Druks are not fully human. Yaks, the products of matings between druks and the animal Asu, are even worse off. Matings between the not-fully-human druks and the I'hin produce the tall, strong, red-skinned, "half-breed" I'huan, which Faithists apparently take as Native Americans.

I've stumbled across several online attempts to reconcile the racial scheme of Oahspe with the fossil record (druks as Neanderthals, I'hin as Homo floriensis, Asu as Ardipithecus ramidus, etc.). The timing of Oahspe is particularly interesting in that regard. It was written decades after publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) but just prior to the discovery and/or recognition of human fossil remains in Indonesia and Europe in the late 1880's and 1890's. The idea of a sunken continent in the Pacific seemed plausible at the time, and was proposed as a way to account for the geographic distribution of plants and animals as well as the lack of a human fossil record.

As I wrote yesterday, I was hoping that my next post would be about body size estimates for Gigantopithecus. It's taking more time than I hoped to track down some of the information I want for that one, so it will be on hold for a bit. I'm trying to find a source of raw metrics for individual Gigantopithecus teeth (I think there may be some in this new paper by Zhang et al., but I haven't been able to access the supplementary information from off campus) and I'd like to have a look at Russell Ciochon et al.'s (1990) book Other Origins (which I'll have to get in hard copy through the library, the old-fashioned way).

I'm interested in Gigantopithecus both out of professional curiosity and because it's one of those topics (like the Nephilim) that is nicely situated at the intersection of science/pseudoscience.  That's what makes it interesting to write about on a blog: it's a legitimate area of scientific inquiry that matters to the "fringe."

There's no question that the strongest fringe appeal of Gigantopithecus is among Bigfoot enthusiasts, some of whom contend that Sasquatch and the giant ape are one and the same. I'm not really that into the Bigfoot phenomenon, but when you talk Gigantopithecus online you get attention from the Bigfoot crowd. So I'm learning a little bit about how that world works.

(Aside: In my opinion, Bigfoot fans are the soccer hooligans of the fringe world.  If you want to see some ridiculous displays of racist, sexist, homophobic, scatological, immature, ad hominem attacks, go and read some of the comments on Bigfoot forums like this one. I get discussed on there when I write something related to Bigfoot.  What a compliment. I can't even tell who is who or what exactly they're trying to say . . . anyway, moving on.)

Perusing one of the Bigfoot forums, I stumbled across this story about a possible "skunk ape" arm being investigated by Stacy Brown, Jr. Brown has apparently proclaimed himself to be the best Bigfoot researcher on the planet, so we should take his claims seriously, right?  The links in the story are no longer active, so I'll reproduce a quote and an image that is reportedly from Stacy Brown's  original announcement (you can get the same information from this video):

"We recieved a non-human primate arm this morning. FWC officials ruled out bear and human by the makeup of the bones. What kind of primate arm this is we dont know as of yet. Here is a photograph of the arm. We are in talks now with people to test the samples we send. We are hopeful this may be a skunk ape's arm."

That was on September 1 of 2014.  A week or so later, the verdict was returned: alligator limb.

Case closed, right?

Wrong!

A few weeks later, Robert Lindsay reported that the "alligator leg" story was actually a fabrication designed to cover up the discovery and sale of a possibly legitimate partial skeleton of a Bigfoot.  Lindsay alleges that

"Within one hour after taking possession of the arm, Brown received a phone call from a very wealthy Bigfoot enthusiast in Ohio. He wanted to get involved. Brown said no. The man asked how much would it take you to give up that arm. Brown quoted a very high figure – I can now reveal that that figure was $500,000. The man bit, unbelievably enough. The sale was made immediately, and incredibly, the entire $500K was wired into Stacy’s account, and the arm was in the mail just like that."

Lindsay goes on to say that Brown then went and bought an alligator arm from a taxidermist and "started putting out fake stories about how they were going to test the arm even though they didn’t even have possession of it anymore."  While the actual Bigfoot arm was in a mail truck, Lindsay alleges, Stacy Brown was covering his tracks and counting his money.

The reason I'm relating this tale is not because I care much about any of this nonsense, but because the story has so many of the elements of the accounts of "giant" skeletons discoveries from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Note these four similarities:

Appeal to Authority: First, there is an appeal to an authority to establish the credibility of the find.  How do we know we're onto something out of the ordinary?  Because an FWC (Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission) or FWS official said so! Interestingly, Lindsay also made an appeal to authority to bolster his counter-claim of conspiracy:

"I know someone who saw the arm with hair on it and was there when the FWS made that determination. In order to believe Stacy Brown’s insane story, we have to believe that a FWS biologist is so stupid that he cannot tell a reptile arm from a mammal arm."

Well . . . I doubt "stupid" is really the issue.  I would not expect every employee of a wildlife management service to have enough expertise in comparative anatomy to correctly identify a set of isolated limb bones. There are numerous documented examples of medical and anatomy professionals making mistakes in the past, identifying the bones of animals such as mastodons, salamanders, and turtles as those of giant humans. And I know from anecdotes that medical professionals of today don't have a great track record of being able to differentiate isolated human and animal bones from one another (and there's no reason to expect that of them - it's not part of their job or their training).  Anyway, the FWC/FWS person on the scene was actually not "stupid," but correct as quoted: the bones were not those of a human or a bear.

Jumping to Conclusions: Second, it seems that it was important to Brown for whatever reason to announce the "find" prior to doing even basic investigation.  My guess is that the FWC/FWS person was called to the scene to rule out the possibility that the bones were human (and thus not the purview of law enforcement).  In my opinion, if you go from an on-the-scene FWC/FWS conclusion of "not human" to "let's announce to the world that we MAY have a Bigfoot arm," you're skipping over a few steps that you could've taken yourself to avoid some embarrassment. I'm no expert on reptile bones, but it seems to me the "is it from an alligator" question would be a natural one to ask, given that you're in Florida.  If you Google "alligator skeleton" you come up with some pretty good drawings and photos (here's the source of the taxidermy image).  It's not that tough to see the resemblance to the alligator, or to discern that the limb has very different proportions than the arm of any primate.

So what's the rush? As in many old accounts of "giants," the sensationalism of the claim comes through loud and clear. Announcing that you found something that turned out to be part of an alligator doesn't get you much attention. Announcing that you found something that COULD be Bigfoot does get you attention.  So if attention is what you want, it makes sense to go ahead and announce your "discovery" before it has time to come under any scrutiny. Searching on the phrase "Stacy Brown skunk ape arm" returns thousands of hits. I would guess that most of those are about the "discovery" story rather than the "oh sorry it's just an alligator" story.

Conflicting and Foggy Details: Some of the stories/postings about the arm say that Stacy Brown found it. Others say that it was found by someone else and reported to Stacy Brown's team, which then went to investigate. None of the stories that I saw provide much additional detail about the "discovery," which should be a red flag to anyone who is paying attention.  When even the basic details are absent and what's there doesn't line up, your story has problems from the get-go. Just as in accounts of "giants," however, the absence or inconsistency of details doesn't really seem bother those who just want the story to be true (e.g., Joe Taylor's 47" femur sculpture, the "eyewitness" account of a giant skeleton from New York).

Conspiracy to Hide Evidence.  Those familiar with the conspiracy thread woven through giantology will immediately find familiar the "evidence purloined by a mysterious outsider" component of this story. Once the evidence is swept away, we'll never really know what happened, will we? So there's still a possibility that the story could be true, isn't there?  Making evidence disappear actually helps those who like to tell tales that could be falsified by that evidence: if the alligator limb was still out there, it would make it much harder to insist that it was the arm of a Bigfoot. But saying it was purchased by some millionaire in Ohio both makes it seem more likely it was legitimate (why else would the man have paid half a million dollars for it?) and explains why you can't see it anymore. That's pretty convenient, just like the Smithsonian-evolutionist conspiracy to hide all the giant skeletons.

The Stacy Brown alligator limb story makes me wonder if we're in the midst of a Bigfoot "fad" that will, in retrospect, look a lot like the giants fad that reached its peak in the late 1800's.  I think many of the fundamental ingredients are there: public interest, lack of basic scientific acumen about the actual evidence, profit motivations, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.  We're clearly not in the 19th century, however, in terms of our communication infrastructure. The internet is both a faster and more democratic speader than traditional print media, and one would expect that those differences would have some significant effects on the patterns and processes of information spread, persistence, and error creation and transmission.  I think the rise of the internet probably underlies (and maybe even partially explains) the current re-emergence of the giants fad. Maybe the same could be said for Bigfoot.  Maybe I'll figure it out someday.  There's no rush:  I doubt that either giants or Bigfoot are going to disappear anytime soon. 

The large teeth of a creature that would become known as Gigantopithecus were first encountered by science in 1935 after several were purchased from a Hong Kong drugstore.  Those teeth -- without any other parts of the skeleton -- were interpreted by physical anthropologists working in Asia as the remains of a huge creature.  While there were differing opinions as to whether the teeth had belonged to gigantic apes or gigantic humans, Ralph von Koenigswald, Franz Weidenreich, and W. C. Pei all agreed that Gigantopithecus was enormous.  

Those large teeth still fuel discussions of what the anatomy of Gigantopithecus was like. Estimates of very large body size (1000 lbs . . . 1200 lbs . . . ) attract a quantity of attention from Bigfoot enthusiasts, Creationists, and other "fringe" theorists that far exceeds that paid to other fossil apes. But where do those estimates come from? As I discussed briefly in this post, all of our information about Gigantopithecus is based on isolated teeth and a handful of mandibles.  That's something to go on, but not a lot. The complicated nature of the relationships between body size and tooth size, problematic when the first teeth of Gigantopithecus were discovered in the 1930's, remains an analytical issue today.  

How do we go from tooth size to body size?  Very carefully. Stanley Garn and Arthur Lewis discussed the matter in a 1958 paper in American Anthropologist titled "Tooth-Size, Body-Size and 'Giant' Fossil Man:"  

    "On the basis of morphology and size together, Von Koenigswald decided that the Hong Kong and Sangiran teeth and jaw fragments came from “giant apes.” However, Weidenreich later concluded that both the 1935-1939 Hong Kong [Gigantopithecus] teeth and the 1939-1941 Sangiran [Meganthropus] tooth-jaw fossils were the remains of true men, though extraordinarily large men, from the early Sino-Malaysian fauna (Weidenreich 1945:123-24). Finally, in his recent article, W. C. Pei reverted to the idea of a giant anthropoid and estimated that the “giant” ape of Luntsai stood “some twelve feet” high (Pei 1957:836).
    What is the evidence that these three sets of finds, separated from each other by space and time, all came from gigantic beings? How convincing is the evidence that big teeth necessarily indicate extraordinary stature? Lacking the postcranial skeletons, direct proof of body size does not exist. What remains is such indirect proof as can be gleaned from tooth-size relationships in man and apes. “This” admitted Franz Weidenreich . . . “is a very ticklish question. . . "

The question is "ticklish" because of the fact that tooth size, in addition to being related to body size, is also related to things like diet.  Similar-sized animals that eat different things emphasize different teeth. Animals that have to grind a lot of tough plant food tend to have cheek teeth (molars and premolars) with large grinding surfaces.  Animals whose diet consists of softer foods (like fruits) or involves lots of cutting and tearing (as in carnivores) typically don't have large chewing teeth relative to their body size because they don't need them (they're not selected for).

At the time Weidenreich wrote his 1945 monograph "Giant Early Man from Java and South China," the known fossil remains of Gigantopithecus consisted of just three teeth. Weidenreich's detailed comparative analysis of those teeth convinced him that Gigantopithecus was a hominid and a human ancestor. His discussion of the possible size of Gigantopithecus, while following from that conclusion, was cautious (pg. 111):

'In Gigantopithecus the length of the lower molar row is only twice that of modern man, not eight times, as in the lemur example. When the dimensions for the femur are calculated on the basis of the lemur ratio for the femur and the hominid ratio for the length of the molar row, the Gigantopithecus femur proves to be little longer than the femur of modern man and only slightly thicker. The same holds true for Meganthropus. Therefore, we can dismiss the body dimensions of the giant hominids, Gigantopithecus and Meganthropus, with the very general statement that they must have had large, heavy, and massive skulls, large strong trunks, but only slightly longer and stronger leg bones. No more precise statement can be made." 

Weidenreich died in 1948 and never got to see the Gigantopithecus mandibles that were discovered in the late 1950's. Consideration of those mandibles (and the growing number of isolated teeth available for study), led Elwyn Simons and Peter Ettel to argue in a 1970 article in Scientific American that Gigantopithecus was a large, herbivorous ape weighing as much as 600 lbs (272 kg) and standing about 9' (2.7 m) tall when upright. Simons and Ettel reconstructed Gigantopithecus with a posture and body plan like a gorilla. The body size estimate of Simons and Ettel was somewhat informal, based on a general appraisal of the size of jaw and assuming ​a proportional relationship between jaw size and body size.  

The 1980's saw the publication of studies that considered the allometry of tooth/body size relationships across primate taxa. A 1982 paper by Philip Gingerich et al. ("Allometric Scaling in the Dentition of Primates and Prediction of Body Weight From Tooth Size in Fossils") considered how tooth area scales to body weight among extant primates and used that information to estimate the weight of fossil primates. I have reproduced the figure from their paper that shows the logarithmic relationship and the regression formula based on that relationship.

While there is a general, positive relationship between tooth area and body weight among extant primates (which is a good thing for those of us interested in fossils), Gingerich et al.'s (1982) analysis makes it clear that there's a lot more going on than a simple, direct relationship.  What part of the relationship is based on geometry (bigger teeth as a result of bigger bodies) and what part is based on dietary adaptations (tooth size related to diet)? Good question.  Gingerich et al. (1982:99) concluded that

"Much remains to be learned about allometric scaling of tooth size and body weight in the dentition of primates and other mammals.  Our results demonstrate that there is a coherent pattern of differences in scaling at different tooth positions across the whole range of generalized primates.  We have not investigated how this general pattern might change if primates were subdivided into smaller taxonomic groups or into dietary guilds." 

As far as I can tell, that remains at least somewhat true today (I have yet to make a concerted effort to get into the current literature on tooth/body size scaling . . . hopefully I can get around to it soon).  Although we clearly know more about tooth/body size relationships than we used to, the estimation of primate body size from isolated teeth remains problematic.  While there are general relationships, they're not necessarily proportional. A big tooth doesn't necessarily mean a proportionally giant creature.

The large tooth from Denisova Cave is good example of how "big" is still equated with "giant" in the absence of other evidence.  According to this 2010 paper, the Denisovan tooth (probably a second molar) is the largest human tooth ever discovered. Because of its size (and because there aren't any other Denisovan fossils that can tell us something directly about body size), it has been interpreted by the fringe as evidence of giants (I wrote a little about it here). The tooth reportedly measures 13.1 mm by 14.7 mm, giving an area estimate of 192.5 square mm. Notably, it is smaller than the corresponding teeth of some austalopithecines (who were smaller in body size than humans but had a very tough diet, and, hence, big chewing teeth).  If I plug that area into the Gingerich et al. (1982) regression shown above (yes, I know it was based on areas of first molars, not second molars, but bear with me for the sake of general comparisons)  I get a body mass estimate of about 200 lbs (91 kg).  

Two hundred pounds: is that a giant? It's surely above average for humans today, but it's really a stretch to call a 200-lb individual a "giant."  Even allowing for that 200 lbs to be an underestimate (because it's based on a second molar rather than a first molar), how do we know that the the large tooth size isn't somehow related to the evolutionary history and/or diet of Denisovan populations? There are just a few teeth to go on - that's it. Just like with Gigantopithecus, I think we've really got to be aware that we're effectively blindfolded on the issue of body size until we've got some decent postcrania to look at.

As a final note, I think it's fascinating that Weidenreich saw the East and South Asian fossil record as supporting the idea that body size decrease through time was a major trend in human evolution. That is, of course, opposite of what the African record from the last 4 million years or so has now demonstrated. Weidenreich was wrong, but he was no lightweight and no dummy.  He based his ideas on the direct evidence that he had: fossils.  We'll never know what he what he would have thought of the decidedly un-human Gigantopithecus mandibles that were discovered just a few years after his death, but I would bet a large sum of money that he would not have stuck with the "giant phase of Man" idea that he outlined in his 1945 monograph.  Accepting that new evidence can falsify a hypotheses is part of doing science. 

Weidenreich's published ideas about also give the lie to the fringe/Creationist notion that 20th century academics have conspired and are continuing to conspire to suppress the "truth" about giants in the past. Or maybe someone just forgot to send Weidenreich his conspiracy brochure. I guess that's possible, since I have yet to receive mine, either.

Next up:  The history of body size estimates of Gigantopithecus.

References
​
Garn, Stanley M., and Arthur B. Lewis. 1958. Tooth-Size, Body-Size and “Giant” Fossil Man.  American Anthropologist 60(5):874-880.  

Gingerich, Philip D., B. Holly Smith, and Karen Rosenberg.  1982.  Allometric Scaling in the Dentition of Primates and Prediction of Body Weight From Tooth Size in Fossils.  American Journal of Physical Anthropology 58:81-100.
​
Simons, Elwyn L., and Peter C. Ettel. 1970. Gigantopithecus. Scientific American (January 1, 1970).

Weidenreich, Franz. 1945. Giant Early Man from Java and South China. Anthropological papers of the AMNH, Volume 40, Part 1.

I'm neck-deep in end-of-semester grading, and probably won't have time today to finish the blog post I've been working on.  Without the benefit of the PlagiarismCat, I'm forced to go through the tedious process of researching and writing my own content, which just takes a while sometimes. It doesn't seem fair, but I guess that's life.

In lieu of a blog post today, I offer you the song "Antediluvian Man" by the Reno-based trio Red Mercury (here is a studio version).  Add this one to Rasputina's "Holocaust of Giants" and the musical starts to write itself.   

I've occasionally been accused by those on the "fringe" side of being too hard on them and too easy on mainstream scholars and skeptics. I don't really think that's true. I think I call BS when I see it. I attribute the perception of unfairness to a couple of different factors.  First, I'm probably a little more careful about my choice of words when I'm discussing the work of those who are genuinely interested in answering a question or solving a problem (rather than just selling books). That's much more common among mainstream scholars.  Second, I think "fringe" theorists tend to be more sensitive to criticism because they're not used to having their ideas openly challenged on the basis of evidence.  Sometimes, unfortunately, scrutiny hurts their feelings. Third, some "fringe" theorists probably assume that I'm part of some wide-ranging conspiracy to suppress their ideas.

If I'm part of a conspiracy, I have yet to be told about it.  Maybe someday "they" will let me in on the secret and I can start writing blog posts on a laptop with a fully functional keyboard and a working battery, maybe even while not at home watching kids on evenings and weekends. Just think how effective I could be if I could work without also being responsible for wiping noses, stopping couch wrestling, and pretending to eat imaginary pasta.

​The fact is, professionals get things wrong also. Today's "whoops" comes from Paolo Viscardi, a natural history curator at the Grant Museum of Zoology in London.  This "Ask a Biologist" page includes Viscardi's answer to the question "Were there ever giant humans?, which includes the following:

​"Next I would say that there were Pleistocene apes called Gigantopithecus that stood about 10 feet tall. Their remains are very similar to those of humans, particularly when the skull is damaged. Mammoth and elephant skulls are also remarkably humanoid in appearance when they are damaged."

The appeal to the remains of Gigantopithecus is as unfortunate as it is wrong.

While there was a genus of ape (that we call Gigantopithecus) that existed in South and East Asia during the Pleistocene, we only know of these creatures through a few mandibles and teeth.  No-one has ever found a Gigantipthecus skull or any other part of the skeleton. Just teeth and mandibles. So how could we say the remains of a Gigantopithecus look like those of a giant human?  We can't, because we've never seen them.

The teeth and mandibles of Gigantopithecus are large.  Those teeth and mandibles form the sole basis of our estimates of body size. Big teeth and jaws mean a big primate, right?  Well, sort of. The problem is that there is a lot of variation among primates in the relationship between tooth size and body size (I touched on this subject in this post about why the original owner of the large Denisovan tooth wasn't necessarily a giant).  Tooth size alone doesn't necessarily tell us much because tooth size is related to diet. Relatively small-bodied australopithecines had large grinding teeth because they had a diet that included a lot of tough, low quality foods that needed to be heavily masticated.  The teeth and jaws of robust australopithecines (which were also small-bodied compared to modern humans) were even larger and were accompanied by a skull and chewing muscles that were clearly designed to produce and resist massive chewing forces.

So how do we estimate the body size of Gigantopithecus?  If you model the size relationship between teeth and body based on something like a gorilla (a primate with a relatively soft, fruit-based diet and small chewing teeth) you get a very large primate. If you use a model more like a robust australopithecine (a primate with a relatively tough diet and large chewing teeth), body size estimates are smaller.  Gigantopithecus was large, but I don't think we'll know how large until someone finds some postcranial bones. I'm sure they're out there somewhere. When I have the opportunity to talk about Gigantopithecus in my classes, I show pretty pictures of Liuzhou in China (image source) hoping they will inspire someone to go out and look.  Finding some Gigantopithecus bones other than teeth and jaws would be sweet.

Anyway, the figure of a 10' tall ape is repeated often. Maybe Gigantopithecus was that large, and maybe it wasn't. Bigfoot enthusiasts love a big Gigantopithecus, as do some advocates of the idea that humans have "degenerated" in size over time. There is zero evidence that Gigantopithecus is a human ancestor, and, in fact, we don't even know that it was a biped.  As with body size, ideas about whether Gigantopithecus walked upright on two legs are based on a few jaws and teeth. Anthropologist Grover Krantz's celebrated reconstruction of a Gigantopithecus skull, beloved by Bigfoot enthusiasts, was based on the same tooth and mandible fragments as all of our other interpretations. Krantz extrapolated a bipedal posture for Gigantopithecus based on the morphology of the mandible.  Not a lot to go on there, but I guess that doesn't matter much if you already know the answer. (See this post for more discussion.)

The academic imagineering was further amplified recently when Jeff Meldrum and Idaho State University produced a "full-size" skeleton of Bigfoot to help the History Channel create more schlock programming for its already crowded schedule of crap.  

"Meldrum borrowed from the physical looks of extinct animals such as the Gigantopithecus blacki — an ancient ape that was twice the size of apes today — and the Neanderthal — a species of human that is said to have became extinct 40,000 years ago."

So this "Bigfoot skeleton" is based partially on the "looks of extinct animals such as the Gigantopithethecus blacki"? Oh my.  If you've read this far, you know that we really don't know much about what those extinct animals actually did look like. We've got some teeth and mandibles - that's it. From those meager remains, wishful thinkers (including academics) have built up several real-looking reconstructions that will probably be cited for years to come as actual evidence. That's why Viscardi's statement ("Their remains are very similar to those of humans, particularly when the skull is damaged") is so unfortunate: he's reinforcing the incorrect notion that all of this business about the giant, bipedal Gigantopithecus is fact, established based on the existence of skeletons and skulls.

That's just not true.

Maybe Gigantopithecus was a 10' tall biped. But maybe it wasn't. What we don't know about Gigantopithecus far outweighs what we do know. That vacuum of knowledge is what allows all kinds of notions (not all of which can be correct) to survive. Some of those notions will be killed off when actual postcranial remains are found. In the meantime, I hope that academics will take care to convey to the public what we actually do and do not know about this creature.