Andy White Anthropology
  • Home
  • Research Interests
    • Complexity Science
    • Prehistoric Social Networks
    • Eastern Woodlands Prehistory
    • Ancient Giants
  • Blog
  • Work in Progress
    • The Kirk Project >
      • Kirk 3D Models list
      • Kirk 3D Models embedded
      • Kirk 2D images >
        • Indiana
        • Kentucky
        • Michigan
        • Ontario
      • Kirk Project Datasets
    • Computational Modeling >
      • FN3D_V3
    • Radiocarbon Compilation
    • Fake Hercules Swords
    • Wild Carolina >
      • Plants >
        • Mosses
        • Ferns
        • Conifers
        • Flowering Plants >
          • Grasses
          • Trees
          • Other Flowering Plants
      • Animals >
        • Birds
        • Mammals
        • Crustaceans
        • Insects
        • Arachnids
        • Millipedes and Centipedes
        • Reptiles and Amphibians
      • Fungi
  • Annotated Publications
    • Journal Articles
    • Technical Reports
    • Doctoral Dissertation
  • Bibliography
  • Data

"Giant" Humbugs, Past and Present

12/18/2014

1 Comment

 
PictureP. T. Barnum: not afraid to sell you what you want to buy.
I do not think the majority of the “giant” accounts from the 19th and early 20th century can be classified as intentional hoaxes.  There are, however, several clear cases where “remains” were fabricated and intentionally misrepresented.  The most famous of these is, of course, the Cardiff Giant (1869).  I don’t really have anything to add to the discussion of that hoax, other than to note that the unauthorized replica of the giant created by P. T. Barnum is apparently on display at Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum in Farmington Hills, Michigan, fortuitously close to where I live.  I smell a road trip.

The motive for creating hoax giants in the 19th century was, in at least some cases, financial: significant profits were possible from charging a fee to view the remains of a giant. This is why P. T. Barnum created his own copy of the Cardiff Giant, a proven money maker.  In a speech published in 1854 (transcript below from the Grand River Times, November 15, 1854), Barnum describes the business of “humbug” and his plan to construct, “discover,” and then exhibit the skeleton of a manufactured giant:

BARNUM'S SPEECH ON HUMBUGS.
Delivered at Stamford, on the occasion of the Agricultural fair, Fairfield County.

    It seems to be a most unfortunate circumstance that I should be selected to speak on Humbug, as looking on the ladies, whose profession it peculiarly is, I find it hard to express myself in their presence. Everything is humbug; the whole state is humbug, except our Agricultural Society that alone is not.
    Humbug is generally defined, "deceit or imposition." A burglar who breaks into your house, a forger who cheats you of your property, or a rascal, is not a humbug, a humbug is an imposter; but in my opinion the true meaning of humbug is management tact to take an old truth and put it in an attractive form.
    . . .
    I have not the vanity to call myself a real scientific humbug, I am only an humble member of the profession.
    My ambition to be the prince of Humbugs I will resign, but I hope the public will take the will for the deed; I can assure them that if I had been able to give them all the humbugs that I have thought of, they would have been amply satisfied.
    Before I went to England with Tom Thumb I had a skeleton prepared from various bones. It was to have been made 18 feet high; it was to have been buried a year in Ohio, and then dug up by accident, so that the public might learn there were giants of old. The price I was to pay the person who proposed to put the skeleton together was to have been $225.
    But finding Tom Thumb more successful than I tho't, I sent word not to proceed with the skeleton. My manager who never tho't as highly of the scheme as it deserved, sold the skeleton for $50 or $75.
    Seven years afterwards I received from the south an account of a gigantic skeleton that had been found. Accompanying it were certificates of scientific and medical men as to genuineness. The owner asked $20,000 or $1,000 a month; I wrote to him if he brought it on I would take it if I found it as represented or would pay his expenses if not; I found it was my own old original humbug come back to me again; of course I refused it, and I never heard of it afterwards.


Barnum’s speech identifies that a successful "humbug" has to tap into an existing appetite of the public.  There is no point in creating a “giant” if no-one is interested in paying to see it.  In other words, a good “humbug” does not create a demand, but gives the people what they already want.

Why was there an appetite for giants in the 19th century?  That is a great question, worthy of a book all by itself. While I can’t yet provide anything approaching a complete answer, I can state with some confidence that there was a connection between the public's interest in giants and the mention of “giants” in the Old Testament.  A story with the headline “Giants of Olden Times” or “There Were Giants in Those Days,” listing various giants from Europe ranging in height from 10’ to 40’, was reprinted numerous times in American newspapers from the 1840s through the 1870s.  The headline of the story makes a clear allusion the words of Genesis 6:4: “There were giants in the earth in those days” (King James Bible).

That passage from Genesis and the small number of other references to “giants” in the Bible continue to feature prominently in the claims of those who profess to believe in giants today.  Sometimes the connection between “giants” and religion is submerged, and sometimes it is more explicit.  Creationists seem to like giants because their demonstrated existence would serve the dual purpose of (1) discrediting evolutionary theory and (2) “proving” the Bible to be literally true (more on that later).

PictureWidely-distributed picture of a giant skeleton, originally created for a photo manipulation contest.
The practice of creating “humbug” giants, like the public's appetite for consuming them, has not gone extinct.  Do a Google image search for “giant skeleton” and have a look at what comes up: dozens of images showing the excavation of truly giant human skeletons.  These are all fake, and the debunking of many of them is easy to find online (an example from the Christian Telegraph).  As explained by National Geographic, for example, the photo at the right was originally produced for a Canadian photo manipulation contest. This is the case for several others as well.

These faked photographs have now, ironically, become part of both the case for giants and the claim that there is a conspiracy to discredit giants. 

I recently joined Pinterest because I wondered if it could be another avenue for promoting my evidence-based analysis of the “giants” phenomenon.  Last night I spent a few minutes looking around. 

Oh my.

Giants were not in short supply.  I do not recall ever before having seen such a jumbled tangle of truth and untruth. Among the pins under “Giants” and “Nephilim” there is so little overlap between the words and images that it leaves little doubt (in my mind, anyway) about the intentions of the posters: they’re using fakery to sell a story that the public is ready to buy and the actual truth of a claim or accuracy of a statement is completely immaterial. That was humbug under P. T. Barnum’s definition in 1854, and it’s humbug today.

PictureHuman skeletons from India, not giant Nephilim skeletons from Canada.
One post on Pinterest had the caption “The Nephilim Chronicles: Fallen Angels in the Ohio Valley: Giant Nephilim Skeletons Uncovered in Canada” along with a photograph of skeletons from the “massacre” at Mohenjo Daro in India.  I followed the link to Fritz Zimmerman’s website where, indeed, the photograph from Mohenjo Daro is presented under the title “Giant Nephilim Skeletons Uncovered in Canada.”  I’ll let someone else try to explain what one has to do with the other.  I certainly can’t figure it out.

Zimmerman’s blog proclaims that “Giant humans called the Nephilim once roamed the earth. This blog is dedicated to the historic documents that shows this mysterious chapter in the Bible was true.” 

There’s your market, and there’s your humbug.

1 Comment
write my papers for cheap link
1/24/2021 02:45:56 am

Hum bugs is a website that tells about the location of the people who have GPS in their mobiles or laptops. It can track only those things which have GPS installed in write my papers for cheap them. this website has great reviews for others. It is doing a good job.

Reply



Leave a Reply.


    All views expressed in my blog posts are my own. The views of those that comment are their own. That's how it works.

    I reserve the right to take down comments that I deem to be defamatory or harassing. 

    Andy White

    Follow me on Twitter: @Andrew_A_White

    Email me: andy.white.zpm@gmail.com

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner


    Picture

    Sick of the woo?  Want to help keep honest and open dialogue about pseudo-archaeology on the internet? Please consider contributing to Woo War Two.
    Picture

    Follow updates on posts related to giants on the Modern Mythology of Giants page on Facebook.

    Archives

    January 2023
    January 2022
    November 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    March 2021
    June 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014

    Categories

    All
    3D Models
    AAA
    Adena
    Afrocentrism
    Agent Based Modeling
    Agent-based Modeling
    Aircraft
    Alabama
    Aliens
    Ancient Artifact Preservation Society
    Androgynous Fish Gods
    ANTH 227
    ANTH 291
    ANTH 322
    Anthropology History
    Anunnaki
    Appalachia
    Archaeology
    Ardipithecus
    Art
    Atlantis
    Australia
    Australopithecines
    Aviation History
    Bigfoot
    Birds
    Boas
    Book Of Mormon
    Broad River Archaeological Field School
    Bronze Age
    Caribou
    Carolina Bays
    Ceramics
    China
    Clovis
    Complexity
    Copper Culture
    Cotton Mather
    COVID-19
    Creationism
    Croatia
    Crow
    Demography
    Denisovans
    Diffusionism
    DINAA
    Dinosaurs
    Dirt Dance Floor
    Double Rows Of Teeth
    Dragonflies
    Early Archaic
    Early Woodland
    Earthworks
    Eastern Woodlands
    Eastern Woodlands Household Archaeology Data Project
    Education
    Egypt
    Europe
    Evolution
    Ewhadp
    Fake Hercules Swords
    Fetal Head Molding
    Field School
    Film
    Florida
    Forbidden Archaeology
    Forbidden History
    Four Field Anthropology
    Four-field Anthropology
    France
    Genetics
    Genus Homo
    Geology
    Geometry
    Geophysics
    Georgia
    Giants
    Giants Of Olden Times
    Gigantism
    Gigantopithecus
    Graham Hancock
    Grand Valley State
    Great Lakes
    Hollow Earth
    Homo Erectus
    Hunter Gatherers
    Hunter-gatherers
    Illinois
    India
    Indiana
    Indonesia
    Iowa
    Iraq
    Israel
    Jim Vieira
    Jobs
    Kensington Rune Stone
    Kentucky
    Kirk Project
    Late Archaic
    Lemuria
    Lithic Raw Materials
    Lithics
    Lizard Man
    Lomekwi
    Lost Continents
    Mack
    Mammoths
    Mastodons
    Maya
    Megafauna
    Megaliths
    Mesolithic
    Michigan
    Middle Archaic
    Middle Pleistocene
    Middle Woodland
    Midwest
    Minnesota
    Mississippi
    Mississippian
    Missouri
    Modeling
    Morphometric
    Mound Builder Myth
    Mu
    Music
    Nazis
    Neandertals
    Near East
    Nephilim
    Nevada
    New Mexico
    Newspapers
    New York
    North Carolina
    Oahspe
    Oak Island
    Obstetrics
    Ohio
    Ohio Valley
    Oldowan
    Olmec
    Open Data
    Paleoindian
    Paleolithic
    Pilumgate
    Pleistocene
    Pliocene
    Pre Clovis
    Pre-Clovis
    Prehistoric Families
    Pseudo Science
    Pseudo-science
    Radiocarbon
    Reality Check
    Rome
    Russia
    SAA
    Sardinia
    SCIAA
    Science
    Scientific Racism
    Sculpture
    SEAC
    Search For The Lost Giants
    Sexual Dimorphism
    Sitchin
    Social Complexity
    Social Networks
    Solutrean Hypothesis
    South Africa
    South America
    South Carolina
    Southeast
    Stone Holes
    Subsistence
    Swordgate
    Teaching
    Technology
    Teeth
    Television
    Tennessee
    Texas
    Topper
    Travel
    Travel Diaries
    Vaccines
    Washington
    Whatzit
    White Supremacists
    Wisconsin
    Woo War Two
    World War I
    World War II
    Writing
    Younger Dryas

    RSS Feed

    Picture
Proudly powered by Weebly