Giant human skeletons
Giant skeletons reported in the United States until the early twentieth century were a combination of hoaxes, scams, fabrications, and the misidentifications of extinct megafauna.
Contemporary with the whole race of men, and older than the first man, Niagara is strong, and fresh to-day as ten thousand years ago.
European settlers embraced myths of pre-Columbian settlements from the Old World, which reframed colonization as the continuation of a primordial past in which the roles of native peoples were diminished or dismissed.
[4] By the late eighteenth century, this paternalistic narrative had become strained, due in part to violence against the native peoples on the western frontier.
[5] Josiah Priest's American Antiquities, released in 1833, crystallized the idea of a lost race—mentioned in the Book of Genesis—that created the monuments of North America before being exterminated by savages.[6][3][7]: ch.
[5] In literature, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow imagined The Skeleton in Armor (now accepted to be a native leader), as a lovesick Norse Viking eloping with his "fair" and "blue-eyed" lover.
[8] Sarah Josepha Hale accompanied her The Genius of Oblivion with end notes that claim "the ancient inhabitants [buried in the mounds] were of a different race from the Indians.
"[9] Preachers taught a biblical basis for the primordial race, including connections to the lost tribes or the Nephilim, giants from the Book of Genesis.
[10]: 164 As more information was discovered about Native American cultural complexity, the lost race became increasingly described as physically superior giants.
[7]: 243 The belief became so widespread, that Abraham Lincoln referenced the lost race of giants along with extinct Mastodons when describing the age of Niagara Falls.
[2] Hundreds of newspaper articles credulously described the purported discovery of giant skeletons, sometimes with anatomical irregularities attributed to the Nephilim.
[11] Preachers, doctors, and journalists confirmed it to "belong to the genus homo" despite a standing height estimated up to twenty feet tall.
[7]: 248 Many readers embraced the skeletons as evidence of biblical history, against unpopular experts whose discoveries undermined a literal interpretation of the bible.
[1]: 251 With a rise in white literacy rates and the emergence of the cheaper penny press newspapers, there was a strong market for these tales that gave them greater impact than university scholarship.
[7]: 243 Other newspapers reported the Moberly claims as factual[13] and republished the entire story including implausible details like the researcher who, upon drinking from the skeleton's fountain, described the water as "very sweet and nice".
[20] In 2020 The Columbus Dispatch reported that archeologist, Donald Ball collected articles about giant skeletons which were purportedly found in burial mounds dating as far back as 1845.
[24] "Giant of Castelnau" refers to three bone fragments (a humerus, tibia, and femoral mid-shaft) discovered by Georges Vacher de Lapouge in 1890 in the sediment used to cover a Bronze Age burial tumulus, and dating possibly back to the Neolithic.
[27] In 2019, the Travel Channel series Code of the Wild aired an episode in which a pre-Columbian skeleton was presented that was allegedly 7 feet tall and Salasaca storytellers were interviewed that related oral traditions of giants.
