The Genesis Giants -- Part 1

July  2019 David Read

“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.” Genesis 6:4. 

Based on this and other passages in the Old Testamant, Christians believe that the ancient human race was of much greater physical stature than the modern human race. Ellen White tells us that men before the Flood were more than twice as tall as men are today.[i] Soon after the Flood, she wrote, the race began to rapidly decrease in size, which is why some especially large animals were left off the ark.[ii] 

This series will examine the biblical basis for the belief that early humanity was of taller stature than present-day people, then we will discuss some of the archeological, scientific, and literary evidence supporting the idea that humans were much once larger than they are today.

 

The Antediluvian Nephilim—Were They Human-Alien Hybrids?

Some read Genesis 6:4 to mean that the only giants were the offspring of the sons of God and the daughters of men.[iii] A careful reading of a faithful translation, however, will show that giants lived on the earth even before the inter-marriage between the sons of God and the daughters of men.[iv]

The Hebrew word translated as “giant” in Genesis 6:4, is Nephilim, meaning “fallen ones,” or “violent ones.” One commentator has written, “In men’s eyes they were ‘the heroes of old, men of renown,’ but in God’s eyes they were sinners, fallen ones, ripe for judgment.” The word Nephilim is used only three times in Scripture—once in Genesis 6:4 and twice in Numbers 13. It is always used to describe people of great size and strength. Clearly, the Nephilim were giants.

But what are we to make of Genesis 6:4, which states that, “the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown”? Many people (mostly non-Christians) believe this text indicates that a race of space aliens bred with human woman. The notion that aliens mated with humans in the distant past has given rise to an extensive and imaginative literature. The “ancient aliens” theory has even given rise to a lengthy series of one-hour television shows on the History Channel, but it lacks biblical context. It is not sound exegesis.

Seventh-day Adventists, believe that the “sons of God” were the sons of those antediluvians (people who lived before the Genesis Flood) who were faithful followers of God. Romans 8:14 states that those who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.[v] By contrast, the “daughters of men” were daughters of antediluvians who were in open rebellion against God. Adventists, among many others, interpret Genesis 6:4 to mean that the godly line inter-married with the ungodly line, as a result of which the godly line eventually died out, with the exception of Noah and his family.[vi] A review of pertinent arguments is in order.

First, the rebellion of Cain and his descendants was an open rebellion against a known God. Adam and Eve had seen and conversed with God. Gen. 2:16, 17; 3:8-19. Adam lived to the age of 930 years, more than half of the history of the antediluvian world,[vii] and he witnessed to many of his descendants regarding how he was created, how he and Eve sinned, and how they were cast out of the Garden of Eden. The Garden of Eden was still on earth to verify Adam’s story, although people could not enter it because cherubim (angels) with flaming swords guarded the gate. Gen. 3:23, 24. Cain had also conversed with God and was specially marked by God as the first murderer. Gen. 4:6-16. Thus, in pre-Flood times, there was not as much room for atheism and agnosticism as there is today.[viii] The antediluvians had a clear choice to make regarding God: obedience or rebellion. This binary choice made for two distinct groups of people.

Second, the Bible is not a general-purpose history of the human race; Bible history is the story of redemption. It is primarily about the relationship between mankind and mankind’s Creator and Redeemer. Bible history is the history of the godly line – Adam, Seth, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, the Hebrew nation, Jesus Christ, the apostles, and the Christians. Other nations and people are discussed only insofar as they touch upon and intersect the godly line. Bearing this in mind, it is logical that a reference to “the sons of God” is a reference to the antediluvian godly line, those few people who were faithful to God.

Third, the Bible teaches that believers should not marry non-believers, because these unions lead to the apostasy of the believer far more often than they lead to the conversion of the non-believer. This theme runs throughout Scripture.[ix] It is therefore likely that Genesis 6 narrates the first example of the tragic results that ensue when believers are joined in marriage with those in rebellion against God.

Fourth, the context of the passage is the increasing sinfulness of the antediluvians, and God’s resulting judgment in the form of a deluge. Mankind would not, however, be answerable for the actions of higher beings over which the human race had no control. It would be unjust for God to punish mankind for the actions of non-human beings; we can therefore be certain that God was judging human wickedness. God judged the antediluvians for their rebellion against Him, which became nearly universal because the godly fell away through intermarriage with the ungodly.

Finally, Numbers 13:33 states that the Anakites were descended from the Nephilim. But if the antediluvian Nephilim of Gen. 6:4 had been the product of unions between spirit beings and human women, they would have been destroyed in the Flood. Gen. 7:21-23. Only Noah and his family survived the Flood. Obviously, the post-Flood Anakites could not have descended from a race that was destroyed in the Flood.

Moreover, Canaanite tribes of giants such as the Anakites were not some sort of super-race. The Israelites nearly destroyed them. Even before the Israelites arrived, the Moabites and the Ammonites—tribes not especially favored by God—had displaced some of the Canaanite tribes of giants. Thus, the scriptural witness, taken as a whole, indicates that the Nephilim, although strong and of large stature, were fully human. They were not a hybrid between humans and higher beings.

It could be argued that the “sons of God” were neither men nor angels, but “sons of the gods,” as the New English Bible renders them. But this notion is utterly devoid of biblical context. In the Bible, “gods” with a small g are mere idols, and idols are nothing, having no power whatsoever.[x] How can a non-entity have sons, and how can those sons mate with human women?

The Nephilim—were they Hybrids of Humans and Fallen Angels?

Among those who differ with our interpretation, the most popular interpretation of the identity of the “sons of God” is that they were angels. There is a plausible argument that the phrase “sons of God” refers to angels when it is used in Job 1:6, 2:1, and 38:7.[xi] Although unfallen angels—those still loyal to God—certainly would not mate with humans and thus incur God’s wrath, Scripture teaches that there are fallen angels, those that Satan took with him when he fell. These fallen angels are also called demons.[xii] Thus it could be argued that fallen angels—demons—bred with humans, thus producing the Nephilim. Again, however, there are sound reasons to reject this interpretation.

First, Scripture teaches that angels are much more powerful than mortal human beings.[xiii] If they bred with humans, we would expect the offspring to be a hybrid race of supermen. But as noted above, scriptural history regarding the post-Flood Nephilim of Numbers 13:33 indicates that they were not a race of supermen. They were human and quite conquerable. Since Numbers 13 contains the only other use of the term Nephilim, there is reason to believe that the pre-Flood Nephilim were not supermen, either.

Second, Christ taught that angels are not sexual beings. Luke 20:34-36; Mark 12:25 In Matthew 22:30, Christ says, “At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.” The Bible also indicates that angels are spirit beings. Heb. 1:14 Non-sexual spirit beings would not have been sexually attracted to human women.

Third, as noted above, angels are much more powerful than humans. If angels chose to mate with human women, humans could do nothing to stop it. Why, then, would God judge mankind for the misbehavior of fallen angels?

By a process of elimination, the best view—or the least objectionable view—is that Genesis 6:4 refers to the corruption of the godly line through intermarriage with the ungodly. This is the correct interpretation based purely upon scriptural considerations.[xiv]

Ellen White’s on the Stature of the Antediluvians

We also have the prophetic gift of Ellen White confirming that Genesis 6:4 indicates that the godly line of Seth inter-married with the ungodly line of Cain:

Notwithstanding the prevailing iniquity, there was a line of holy men who, elevated and ennobled by communion with God, lived as in the companionship of heaven. They were men of massive intellect, of wonderful attainments. They had a great and holy mission—to develop a character of righteousness, to teach a lesson of godliness, not only to the men of their time, but for future generations.

 * * *

For some time the two classes remained separate. The race of Cain, spreading from the place of their first settlement, dispersed over the plains and valleys where the children of Seth had dwelt; and the latter, in order to escape from their contaminating influence, withdrew to the mountains, and there made their home. So long as this separation continued, they maintained the worship of God in its purity. But in the lapse of time they ventured, little by little, to mingle with the inhabitants of the valleys. This association was productive of the worst results. “The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair.” The children of Seth, attracted by the beauty of the daughters of Cain’s descendants, displeased the Lord by intermarrying with them. Many of the worshipers of God were beguiled into sin by the allurements that were now constantly before them, and they lost their peculiar, holy character. Mingling with the depraved, they became like them in spirit and in deeds; the restrictions of the seventh commandment were disregarded, “and they took them wives of all which they chose.” . . . Sin spread abroad in the earth like a deadly leprosy.[xv]

But what about physical stature? How does the intermarriage of the godly with the ungodly explain the larger stature of the results of this forbidden union?

In order to understand this, we must first understand that Adam was created much larger than current men. Ellen White states:

“As man came forth from the hand of his Creator, he was of lofty stature and perfect symmetry. His countenance bore the ruddy tint of health and glowed with the light of life and joy. Adam's height was much greater than that of men who now inhabit the earth. Eve was somewhat less in stature; yet her form was noble, and full of beauty.” Patriarchs & Prophets, p. 45.

“As Adam came forth from the hand of his Creator, he was of noble height, and of beautiful symmetry. He was more than twice as tall as men now living upon the earth, and was well proportioned. . . . Eve was not quite as tall as Adam. Her head reached a little above his shoulders. She, too, was noble—perfect in symmetry, and very beautiful.” Spiritual Gifts, vol. III, p. 34, (1SP 25.)

In fact, the entire antediluvian race were of much greater stature than current human beings.

“The race of men then living were of very great stature, and possessed wonderful strength.” White, Spiritual Gifts, vol. III, p. 61.

In describing the resurrection of the unsaved, and their attempt to storm the New Jerusalem, which has descended to the earth after the expiration of the Millennium in Heaven, Ellen White states:

“In that vast throng are multitudes of the long-lived race that existed before the Flood; men of lofty stature and giant intellect, who, yielding to the control of fallen angels, devoted all their skill and knowledge to the exaltation of themselves; men whose wonderful works of art led the world to idolize their genius, but whose cruelty and evil inventions, defiling the earth and defacing the image of God, caused Him to blot them from the face of His creation.” Great Controversy, p. 664.

“At the first resurrection [of the saved—John 11:23, 24; 1 Cor. 15; 1 Thes. 4:13-18] all come forth in immortal bloom, but at the second [the resurrection of the unsaved—John 5:28, 29; Rev. 20], the marks of the curse are visible upon all. All come up as they went down into their graves. Those who lived before the flood come forth with their giant-like stature, more than twice as tall as men now living upon the earth, and well proportioned. The generations after the flood were less in stature.” Spiritual Gifts, vol. III, p. 84.

Everyone who lived before the Genesis Flood was of much greater stature than modern humans are. But even among the antediluvian giants, the godly line who dwelt separately in the hills and mountains were larger than the descendants of Cain, who lived on the plains. This is because the godly line were less sinful and felt the curse less heavily. Ellen White states that the physical size of the godly line diminished less than that of the ungodly line. This explains why the offspring of the godly line were giants even by the standards of those days:

“Those who honored and feared to offend God, at first felt the curse but lightly; while those who turned from God and trampled upon His authority, felt the effects of the curse more heavily, especially in stature and nobleness of form. The descendants of Seth were called the sons of God—the descendants of Cain, the sons of men. As the sons of God mingled with the sons of men, they became corrupt, and by intermarriage with them, lost, through the influence of their wives, their peculiar, holy character, and united with the sons of Cain in idolatry. Many cast aside the fear of God, and trampled upon his commandments. But there were a few who did righteousness, who feared and honored their Creator. Noah and his family were among the righteous few.” [xvi]

Conclusion

A way to read and understand Genesis 6:4 that is more faithful to the full biblical context and worldview is that there were giants in the earth in those days—the days after creation and the Fall—and also later in the pre-Flood era, when men from the godly line, who were of larger stature, intermarried with women who were of the ungodly line of Cain. The product of these unwise unions were men of legend, famous in their own day, but to God they were simply fallen, violent men.

After the Flood, the size of the human race diminished rapidly, due in part to widespread consumption of animal flesh, but probably also due to various other environmental conditions that made the post-Flood world less congenial to human thriving than the antediluvian world had been. Later, when the Israelites were invading the land of Canaan, they made a connection between the tribes of giants they encountered there and the giants who lived before the Flood.

NOTES:

[i]. See, e.g., Spiritual Gifts, vol. III, p. 84.

[ii]. White, Ellen, Spiritual Gifts, vol. 4A, p. 121. (“Soon after the flood the race began to rapidly decrease in size, and in length of years. There was a class of very large animals which perished at the flood. God knew that the strength of man would decrease, and these mammoth animals could not be controlled by feeble man.”).

[iii] Some paraphrasers write this incorrect interpretation into the text of the Bible. See, e.g., The Living Bible (“In those days, and even afterwards, when the evil beings from the spirit world were sexually involved with human women, their children became giants, of whom so many legends are told.”) and the Contemporary English Version (“The children of the supernatural beings who had married these women became famous heroes and warriors. They were called Nephilim and lived on the earth at that time and even later.”).

[iv] The passage is translated correctly in the King James Version (“There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when . . .”), the Revised Standard Version (“The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when . . .”), and the Modern Language Version (“There were giants on the earth in those days, and later, too, when . . .”).

[v] See, also, Deut. 14:1; 32:4-5; Psalm 73:15; Hosea 1:10; John 1:12; Philippians 2:15 1 John 3:1-2.

[vi] Other Christians who have espoused the theory of intermarriage of the godly line with the ungodly include Chrysostom, Augustine (in The City of God), Martin Luther, John Calvin, Matthew Henry, and Francis Schaeffer. See also C.F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament, vol. 1.

[vii] According to Masoretic numbers—see the discussion of biblical chronology in chapter 8.

[viii] Ellen White states, “Skepticism could not deny the existence of Eden while it stood just in sight, its entrance barred by watching angels. The order of creation, the object of the garden, the history of its two trees so closely connected with man’s destiny, were undisputed facts. And the existence and supreme authority of God, the obligation of His law, were truths which men were slow to question while Adam was alive.”—Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 84.

[ix] See, e.g., Gen. 24:3, 4; 28:1, 2; Ex. 34:15, 16; Num. 25; Deut. 7:1-4; 17:17; Judges 3:5-8; 1 Kings 11:1-13; Ezra 9, 10; Neh. 10:30; 13:23-27; Mal. 2:11; 1 Cor. 7:12-16; 2 Cor. 6:14-18.

[x] See, e.g., Psa. 96:5; 115:4-8; Isa. 44:15-20; Hab. 2:18-20; 1 Cor. 8:4-5; 10:19-20; Rev. 9:20.

[xi] “One day the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came with them.” Job 1:6. “On another day the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came with them to present himself before him.” Job 2:1. “On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone—while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for Joy?” Job 38:6, 7. The New International Version translates the phrase sons of God in these texts as “angels,” dropping a footnote that the Hebrew is literally “sons of God,”—thus admitting that they have paraphrased rather than translated. But is the paraphrase accurate? Ellen White taught that there are other created worlds, worlds whose inhabitants have not fallen into sin. It is possible that the “sons of God” in Job are the inhabitants of these unfallen worlds.

[xii] See, e.g., Rev. 12:7-9; Luke 10:18; Isaiah 14:12-20; Ezek. 28:11-17; Rev. 12:3-4; Matt. 25:41; 9:32-34; 12:24-28; Luke 11:14-20; Rom. 8:38; James 2:19; 2 Peter 2:4; Jude 6.

[xiii] 2 Sam. 24:16; Judges 6:20-22; 13:20, 21; Matt. 13:39, 41, 49; 24:31; Luke 1:19, 20; 2:9, 10; 20:36; Acts 5:19; 12:8-12; 1 Cor. 10:10; 2 Peter 2:11.

[xiv] Proponents of the theory of breeding between angels and humans draw support from the pseudepigraphal book of 1 Enoch and from an interpretation of verses in Peter (1 Peter 3:18-20, 2 Peter 2:4, 5) and Jude (verses 6 and 7) that is influenced by 1 Enoch. Although Jude quotes from 1 Enoch, Enoch contains a mixture of truth and error. Pseudepigrapha means “falsely superscribed,” meaning falsely titled or attributed. The book of Enoch was written between 200 B.C. and A.D. 50. Enoch, the seventh from Adam, had nothing to do with writing the book. Moreover, the Book of Enoch makes bizarre and incredible assertions. For example, it claims that the Nephilim were 300 cubits tall (450 feet tall), that the antediluvians exhausted themselves trying to feed these outsized giants, that the giants turned on the antediluvian men and started eating them, and that then they started eating each other and drinking blood. (1 Enoch, chapter 7.) The Book of Enoch was never included in the Hebrew canon, and although the book was well known to the early Christians, they did not include it in their canon, either—the Ethiopian church being a notable exception. After the Council of Laodicea in A.D. 364, the church banned 1 Enoch and suppressed it so vigorously that most copies were destroyed. It was thought to be a lost book until the Scottish explorer James Bruce found a copy in Ethiopia, written in Ethiopian, in the early 1770s. Copies were also found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. For the views of supporters of the theory of breeding between angels and humans, see, e.g., James Montgomery Boice, Genesis, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1998); Henry J. Morris, The Genesis Record, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1976); Chuck Missler, Textual Controversy: Mischievous Angels or Sethites?; Ray C. Stedman, Signs of Collapse; Merrill F. Unger, Biblical Demonology, (Chicago: Scripture Press, 1952); John Fleming, The Fallen Angels and the Heroes of Mythology, (Dublin: Hodges, Foster & Figgis, 1879).

[xv] White, Patriarchs and Prophets, pp. 84, 81, 82.

[xvi] White, Spiritual Gifts, vol. III, pp. 60, 61 (emphasis added).

The Genesis Giants -- Part 2

July  2019 David Read

The Nephilim of Canaan — Who were They?

When the Israelites were preparing to invade Canaan, they sent out spies to reconnoiter the land. The spies were awestruck by the size of the Canaanites. They called them Nephilim. “They said, ‘the land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.” Num. 13:31-33. “The people are taller and stronger than we are; the cities are large, with walls up to the sky. We even saw the Anakites there.” Deut. 1:28.

Please note that the Israelite spies were in no doubt about the humanity of these Nephilim. “The people are taller and stronger than we are.” They were very large people, but they were just people.

The Bible records that the Anakites were people of tremendous size and strength. “The people are strong and tall—Anakites! You know about them and have heard it said: ‘Who can stand up against the Anakites?’” Deut. 9:2. The Anakites came from Kiriath Arba, (“City of Arba”) later called Hebron. Josh. 21:11. There were three groups of Anakites—the Sheshai, the Ahiman, and the Talmai, all of whom descended from Anak, who was descended from Arba. Josh. 15:13, 14.

In addition to the Anakites, Canaan was also inhabited by the Emites, Zamzummites, and Rephaites, all of whom were giants. “The Emites used to live there—a people strong and numerous, and as tall as the Anakites. Like the Anakites, they too were considered Rephaites, but the Moabites called them Emites.” Deut. 2:10, 11. The Zamzummites were, “a people strong and numerous, and as tall as the Anakites.” Deut. 2:20, 21.

The Rephaites were a giant people that had lived in the area since before Abraham’s time. Gen. 14:5, 6. One of the Rephaites was Og, King of Bashan. Scripture records that his bed was made of iron and was more than thirteen feet long and six feet wide. Deut. 3:11.

Of course, the Anakites, and the other tall, strong Canaanites, were mortal and could be defeated in battle. The Moabites, descendants of Lot, defeated and displaced the Emites, and the Ammonites, descended from Lot by a different son, defeated and displaced the Zamzummites. Israel’s victory over King Og was celebrated in song and story, and is mentioned at seders to this day. Psalm 135:10, 11; 136:17-22; Neh. 9:22.

The land of the Anakites was given to Caleb, one of the spies who was undaunted by the great size and strength of the Canaanites. In fact, Caleb and Joshua almost wiped out the Anakites. They drove the survivors out of the Hebron area and into Philistine cities of Gaza, Gath, and Ashdod. Joshua 11:21, 22; 15:13, 14.

Later, we find the remnant of the Anakites joining the Philistines and waging war against Israel. Goliath, young David’s adversary, was from Gath and was apparently descended from the Anakites who fled to Philistia. Goliath was six cubits and a span tall. 1 Sam. 17:4. If a cubit was eighteen inches, Goliath was over nine feet tall; a twenty-one-inch cubit would make him over eleven feet tall.

David’s combat with Goliath was not Israel’s only encounter with the giants of Gath. Four other Philistine fighters are identified as “sons of Rapha,” indicating that they were giants:

“Once again there was a battle between the Philistines and Israel. David went down with his men to fight against the Philistines, and he became exhausted. And Ishbi-Benob, one of the descendants of Rapha, whose bronze spearhead weighed three hundred shekels and who was armed with a new sword, said he would kill David. But Abishai son of Zeruiah came to David’s rescue; he struck the Philistine down and killed him. . . . In the course of time, there was another battle with the Philistines, at Gob. At that time Sibbecai the Hushathite killed Saph, one of the descendants of Rapha. In another battle with the Philistines at Gob, Elhanan son of Jaare-Oregim the Bethlehemite killed Goliath the Gittite, who had a spear with a shaft like a weaver’s rod. In still another battle, which took place at Gath, there was a huge man with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot—twenty-four in all. He also was descended from Rapha. When he taunted Israel, Jonathan son of Shimeah, David’s brother, killed him. These four were descendants of Rapha in Gath, and they fell at the hands of David and his men.” 2 Sam. 21:16-21.

A parallel passage states that Sibbecai the Hushathite killed Sippai, “one of the descendants of the Rephaites,” indicating that the expression “sons of Rapha” does not mean the sons of a man named Rapha but rather the descendants of the Rephaites, meaning giants. 1 Chron. 20:4-8.

Summary

Moses wrote that giants lived before the Flood; he used the term Nephilim to describe them. When the Israelites found nine-foot-tall men living in Canaan, they associated them with the Nephilim that Moses had written about. But the Nephilim that the Israelites encountered in Canaan cannot have been the descendants of a discrete group that lived before the Flood, because everyone who lived before the Flood was destroyed in it, except for Noah and his family. And these Nephilim were not superhuman, because the Israelites defeated them and drove the survivors to the Philistine cities (and sometimes had to fight their descendants several generations later, as David fought Goliath).

A reasonable conclusion from the biblical witness is that people who lived before the Flood were of extremely large stature, and that very tall people persisted, in pockets and isolated areas, for more than a thousand years after the Flood. The tribes of giants that Israel encountered in Canaan were some of these people.

The Incredible Shrinking Pleistocene Fauna

In most young earth (or young life) creationist modeling of origins, the Pleistocene era—the time of glacial advances known as the Ice Age—corresponds to the early post-Flood period, probably within the first millennium after the Flood. For a general discussion of the creationist Ice Age model, please consult this article, excerpted from my book. Here, we will concentrate on one phenomenon of the Ice Age, the larger animal sizes.

Near the end of the Ice Age, more than half of the then-existing mammal species became extinct.[i] Most of the casualties were “megafauna”—species with an adult weight of more than 100 pounds. Famous examples of extinct megafauna include the giant ground sloth, which stood twenty feet tall and weighed several tons; the Irish elk (which was actually a giant deer); the saber-tooth cat; the Mastodon; and the Woolly Mammoth. Forty percent of the large mammals on the continent of Africa disappeared, including giant baboons and pigs, antlered giraffes, long-horned buffalo, scimitar-toothed cats and three-toed horses.[ii]

Of the large mammals that survived, modern representatives are generally smaller than their Ice Age ancestors. The Ice Age Llama was as large as a camel—a third larger than modern Llamas. There were two types of giant camel, both of which were much larger than a modern camel. The Dire Wolf was substantially larger than its modern counterpart, had a more massive skull, much larger teeth, and more robust bones. The surviving North American Bison is the smallest member of a large family of bison, and the Eurasian brown bear is less than half the size of its Ice Age ancestors.[iii]

North America was host to a giant beaver as large as a present-day black bear; South America was home to a giant armadillo almost seven feet long,[iv] and Australia had a ten-foot-tall kangaroo. The Ice Age cave lion was 25 percent larger than is its modern relative.[v] The Ice Age American Lion was larger than the modern African lion. There were vultures with a wingspan of twelve feet.[vi] The extinct stag-moose (Cervalces scotti) was larger than a modern moose and had more complex antlers. The Ice Age jaguar (Felis onca) was significantly larger than modern jaguars.

Dwarf variants also developed, typically on smaller islands. Miniature elephants and hippopotami populated islands in the Mediterranean, very small “mammoths” flourished on the Channel Islands off southern California, and giant ground sloths evolved into dwarf forms in the Greater Antilles.[vii] In at least one instance, on the Indonesian island of Flores, a race of dwarf humans developed.[viii]

Discussion

The Ice Age phenomenon of larger faunal types that are otherwise similar or identical to animals that are extant today is universally acknowledged. The most widely accepted explanation is that large body mass was a good defense against colder Ice Age temperatures; during the Ice Age, natural selection tended to favor larger varieties for survival and reproduction. When the Ice Age ended, this selective pressure reversed, allowing animals to shrink to smaller sizes.

This theory does not, however, completely explain the phenomenon. First, the Ice Age wasn’t that much colder overall than current temperatures. Rather, as discussed here, there was greater snowfall to build up the glaciers, and cooler summers to keep them from melting back to the starting point each year. Very cold air actually works against snowfall, because extremely cold air cannot hold as much water. So it is unlikely that much greater body mass was necessary to defend against the cold. Second, it seems strange that so many forms became extinct just as the Ice Age was ending, and the weather warming. Many scientists believe that humans hunted many species to extinction, the mammoth foremost among the victims.

As to creationist explanations, many creationists believe that the earth was a much more hospitable place before the Flood and that the ruined post-Flood earth was not able to support its fauna at their larger pre-Flood sizes.[ix] It may be that these large species of mammals either went extinct or evolved to smaller sizes for the same reasons that the large mammal of most interest to us—human beings—also become smaller during this time.

We will next explore several lines of evidence that the human race did in fact become smaller during their same period of time.

NOTES:

[i]. Ice Ages, ed. Windsor Chorlton (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1983), p. 76.

[ii]. Ice Ages, p. 69.

[iii]. Ice Ages, pp. 56, 57.

[iv]. Reminding one of a Texas bottling company’s 1980s television commercials featuring a “giant armadillo.”

[v]. Ice Ages, p. 62.

[vi]. Ibid.

[vii]. Ibid.

12. See, e.g., Wilford, John Noble, “Extinct and with tiny brain, but a clever little relative?” The New York Times March 4, 2005; Morwood, Mike, Thomas Sutikna, Richard Roberts, “The people time forgot,” National Geographic (April 2005); Michael D. Lemonick, “Hobbits of the South Pacific,” Time (November 8, 2004).  Homo Floresiensis, as the specimen was dubbed, is essentially a miniature Homo erectus, and performs the Darwin-crushing double duty of (1) exploding any remaining hope of correlating brain size with intelligence—H. Floresiensis had a smaller cranial capacity than a chimpanzee, yet made tools (“sophisticated points, blades, awls and tiny barbs that were probably attached to sticks to make spears”), hunted the dwarf Mastodons on the island, and apparently was able to build a watercraft to reach the island, and (2) showing that there is no reason Homo erectus should not be considered fully human—Homo erectus must have been able to build boats just like his miniature cousin.

[ix]. As to why the earth is now less hospitable to life, some creationists have suggested 1) that at the time of the Flood the earth’s axis assumed its present 23.5-degree inclination relative to the plane of its orbit around the sun, which is what causes the seasons, and/or 2) that the pre-Flood world was incased in a water or water vapor canopy that kept the temperatures warmer and more uniform from pole to pole. Both suggestions are very controversial within creationism, although most creationists would agree that the climate was milder before the Flood.

The Genesis Giants -- Part 3

July  2019 David Read

Reports of the Ancient Greeks and Romans

Classical historians and writers believed that the race was diminishing in stature. This is an independent verification of Scripture, because the Greeks and Romans would not have read the Hebrew Scriptures. Their belief that giants had preceded them was part of their own history and cultural heritage. They uncovered giant human skeletons so often that they developed a couple of theories to explain them. These were: 1) that when the world was young it was able to produce larger people, and 2) there was war between the giants and the gods—and the gods wiped out the giants.

Pliny the Elder (A.D. 23-79—he was killed during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79) wrote a thirty-seven-volume treatment of Natural History, completed in A.D. 77, in which he quoted many ancient sources that have since been lost. He wrote: “It is a matter of observation that the stature of the entire human race is becoming smaller.” He observed that giant skeletons had been dug up and also mentioned that the Greek poet Homer (ca. 800 B.C.) “nearly 1000 years ago never ceased to lament that mortals were of smaller stature than in the old days.”

Diodorus Siculus was a Greek historian who lived in Sicily during the first century before Christ. He traveled to Egypt and studied Egyptian history. In Bibliotheca (“Library”), he writes that “[t]he Egyptian myths say that in the time of Isis [a goddess] there were beings of enormous size whom the Greeks call Giants, but in Egypt they were called [name missing]. Their colossal forms are depicted on temple walls being defeated by the allies of Osiris. Some say the giants were born of the earth when the origin of life, still rising up from the earth, was still recent. . . . They started a war against the gods . . . and were completely exterminated.”[i]

Some giant remains were found in mounds and coffins, obvious artifacts of human burial. In Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Philostratus (A.D. 170-245) quotes Apollonius as saying, “I agree that giants once existed” because “gigantic bodies are revealed all over the earth when mounds are broken open,” but “it is mad to believe they fought the gods.”[ii]

One famous example of finding large bones in a coffin is described by Herodotus (484?-420? B.C.), one of the most reliable ancient historians. In The Histories, Herodotus describes an incident in which a blacksmith told of discovering a ten-foot-long coffin while digging a well in his back yard. “I couldn’t believe that men were bigger than they are today, so I opened it—and there was the skeleton as big as the coffin! I measured it and then shoveled the earth back.” The blacksmith told his tale to a retired soldier named Lichas. Lichas concluded that the giant bones must have been the body of Orestes, son of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae. According to Herodotus, Lichas rented the smith’s yard, dug up the grave, collected the bones, and took them to Sparta.[iii]

Pausanias (A.D. 143-176) was a writer of travel guides. His ten-volume work, Periegesis Hellados (roughly, Description of Greece), in which he described the important Greek cities of his time, has proven an invaluable help to modern archeologists. Sir James Frazer said of Pausanias, “without him the ruins of Greece would for the most part be a labyrinth without a clue, a riddle without an answer.” Pausanias wrote, “[o]ff the city of Miletus is the island of Lade, with some baby islands broken off from it. They call one of the islets Asterios, and they say Asterios is buried on it. Asterios is the son of Anax, the son of the Earth [a giant]. That corpse is not an inch less than fifteen feet tall. Another thing that surprised me was this: a mound broke open in a storm near a small city in upper Lydia called the Doors of Temenos, and some bones appeared. You would think they were human by their formation, but you would never have thought it from the huge size. At once the story got about that this was the body of Geryon. . . . When I opposed them and said that Geryon was in Cadiz, . . . then the Lydian religious officials revealed the true story. It was the body of Hyllos the son of Earth, and the river Hyllos was named after him.”[iv]

Later in the same work, Pausanias describes a site near the Alpheios River. “[T]he Arcadians say the legendary battle of gods and giants took place here . . . Giants were mortal and not a divine race. . . The story of giants having serpents instead of feet is ridiculous. . . . The Romans diverted . . . the Syrian river Orontes. . . . When the old riverbed drained they found a coffin more than 10 cubits [15 feet] long and the corpse was the size of the coffin, and human in every detail.”[v]

The Greeks interpreted the giant bones as being the remains of the heroes of their own myths. Philostratus, in a book entitled On Heroes, wrote that when a Phoenician merchant doubts that ancient heroes “were 15 feet tall,” the grape-farmer of the Gallipoli Peninsula replies, “My grandfather said that the grave of Ajax was destroyed by the sea [near Rhoeteum] and a skeleton came to light about 16 feet tall. He said that the Emperor Hadrian laid it out for burial, embraced and kissed some of the bones, and built a tomb for it in Troy.”[vi]

Plutarch (A.D. 46-119), in Theseus, writes that the distant era of heroes “produced a race of humans who for sheer strength . . . were indefatigable and far surpassed our human scale. . . . Some of these creatures were destroyed by Hercules.”[vii]

Giant bones were displayed in various places in the ancient world. Pausanias tells us, in Description of Greece, that, “[a]t the sanctuary of Asklepios . . . the bones they worship at the training ground are enormous but human.”[viii]

Clement, an early Christian bishop of Rome, tells us in his book Recognitions (ca. A.D. 96) that, “[t]he giants [were] men of immense bodies, whose bones of enormous size are still shown in certain places for confirmation of their existence.”[ix]

The emperor Augustus established a paleontological museum at his villa on Capri. At Sallust’s Gardens in Rome, he exhibited the bodies of male and female giants, which were named Pusio and Secundilla, and were each over ten feet tall.[x]

Augustine (A.D. 354-430) writes, in the City of God, that, “[s]ome people refuse to believe that [in previous ages] men’s bodies were of much larger size than they are now . . . In those days the earth used to produce larger bodies. . . . As for the size of the bodies, skeptics are generally persuaded by the evidence in graves uncovered by the ravages of time, the violence of streams, or various other occurrences. For incredibly large bones of the dead have been found in them or dislodged from them.” He also mentions that Homer and the Roman poet Virgil also believed that men were larger in former times.[xi]

Italian author Giambattista Vico, who wrote in the early eighteenth century, was well acquainted with the classical writings on giants. He wrote that:

After the flood, these giants were scattered throughout the earth. We have seen that such giants are found in Greek mythology; and Latin historians unwittingly confirm their existence in ancient Italy. For they write that the most ancient peoples of Italy, known as the Aborigines, called themselves ‘autochthonous,’ which is synonymous with ‘sons of Earth’, which to the Greeks and Romans meant nobles. Appropriately, the Greeks called the sons of Earth ‘giants,’ just as their myths called the Earth the mother of giants. 

* * *

And the Bible mentions entire peoples called the Emim and Zamzummim, names which Hebrew scholars interpret as meaning giants, one of whom was Nimrod. The Bible also describes the giants who lived before the flood as ‘mighty men which were of old, men of renown.’ This reduction of the giants’ stature must have continued until the civilized age of the nations. This is shown by the enormous weapons of the ancient heroes which, according to Suetonius, Augustus assembled in his museum, together with the bones and skulls of ancient giants.[xii]

Clearly, giant bones are well attested in classical antiquity. The ancients’ belief that the earth nourished larger humans and animals when it was young is not far from the truth. The myth that there was a war between the gods and the giants in which the gods destroyed the giants is likely a distorted version of the biblical truth that God was forced to destroy the giant antediluvian race.

The usual explanation for these ancient accounts is that the giant bones were not human but were from extinct Pleistocene mammals like the mammoth and mastodon and perhaps from extinct reptiles.[xiii] The ancients did sometimes confuse the remains of mammoths and other creatures for giant human bones, but not every account of giant human remains can be explained away as a case of misidentification. That would seem especially unlikely in cases where the bones were found in coffins or mounds—unmistakable artifacts of human burial—or were on display in urban areas for long periods, where they could have been examined by physicians and other learned men. Again, there is no reason to believe that the classical Greek and Roman sources—except perhaps for Clement and Augustine—would have wanted to support the biblical teaching of giants.

NOTES:

[i]. Mayor, Adrienne, The First Fossil Hunters, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) at 263, citing Diodorus of Sicily, Library, 1.26.

[ii]. Mayor, at 270, citing Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, 5.16.

[iii]. Mayor, at 264, 273, citing Herodotus, The Histories, 1.67-68, Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 7.73-75.

[iv]. Mayor, at 267, citing Pausanias, Guide to Greece, 1.35.5-6.

[v]. Mayor, at 268, citing Pausanius, Guide to Greece, 8.29.1-4.

[vi]. Mayor, at 270, citing Philostratus, On Heroes, 7.9.

[vii]. Mayor, at 276, citing Plutarch, Theseus, 6.

[viii]. Mayor, at 267, citing Pausanius, Guide to Greece, 3.22.9.

[ix]. Mayor, at 263, citing, Clement of Rome, Recognitions, 1.29.

[x]. Mayor, at 143, 144, 273.

[xi]. Mayor, at 261, citing Augustine, City of God, 15.9. The entire passage from City of God, book 15, chapter nine:

“Wherefore no one who considerately weighs facts will doubt that Cain might have built a city, and that a large one, when it is observed how prolonged were the lives of men, unless perhaps some skeptic take exception to this very length of years which our authors ascribe to the antediluvians and deny that this is credible. And so, too, they do not believe that the size of men’s bodies was larger then than now, though the most esteemed of their own poets, Virgil, asserts the same, when he speaks of that huge stone which had been fixed as a landmark, and which a strong man of those ancient times snatched up as he fought, and ran, and hurled, and cast it,- ‘Scarce twelve strong men of later mould That weight could on their necks uphold.’ thus declaring his opinion that the earth then produced mightier men. And if in the more recent times, how much more in the ages before the world-renowned deluge? But the large size of the primitive human body is often proved to the incredulous by the exposure of sepulchers, either through the wear of time or the violence of torrents or some accident, and in which bones of incredible size have been found or have rolled out. I myself, along with some others, saw on the shore at Utica a man’s molar tooth of such a size, that if it were cut down into teeth such as we have, a hundred, I fancy, could have been made out of it. But that, I believe, belonged to some giant. For though the bodies of ordinary men were then larger than ours, the giants surpassed all in stature. And neither in our own age nor any other have there been altogether wanting instances of gigantic stature, though they may be few. The younger Pliny, a most learned man, maintains that the older the world becomes, the smaller will be the bodies of men. And he mentions that Homer in his poems often lamented the same decline; and this he does not laugh at as a poetical figment, but in his character of a recorder of natural wonders accepts it as historically true. But, as I said, the bones which are from time to time discovered prove the size of the bodies of the ancients, and will do so to future ages, for they are slow to decay. But the length of an antediluvian's life cannot now be proved by any such monumental evidence. But we are not on this account to withhold our faith from the sacred history, whose statements of past fact we are the more inexcusable in discrediting, as we see the accuracy of its prediction of what was future. And even that same Pliny tells us that there is still a nation in which men live 200 years. If, then, in places unknown to us, men are believed to have a length of days which is quite beyond our own experience, why should we not believe the same of times distant from our own? Or are we to believe that in other places there is what is not here, while we do not believe that in other times there has been anything but what is now?”

[xii]. Giambattista Vico, New Science, translated by David Marsh (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 140-142.

[xiii]. See, e.g., Mayor, at 77-83, 255-259; Adams, Frank Dawson, The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences (Baltimore, MD: Williams & Wilkins, 1938), pp. 14, 255, 256.

The Genesis Giants -- Part 4

July, 2019 David Read

The Testimony of the Mounds

Throughout the eastern part of North America are found earthen mounds built centuries before settlers of European descent reached the area. There once were more than 10,000 of these mounds in the state of Ohio alone. Early settlers excavated these mounds, usually without the supervision of archaeologists or scientists of any sort. The human remains frequently turned to dust upon exposure, and the skeletons were not usually measured. Nevertheless, the most frequently noted characteristic of the mound builders was their enormous physical size. Later, in the 1880s and 1890s, the Smithsonian Institution began systematically excavating the mounds and making more measurements.

The reports of giant remains are so numerous and diverse that their general authenticity cannot be challenged. It would not have been possible to coordinate a hoax spanning several generations and multiple geographical locations in a time of limited communication and travel. Moreover, the people who first excavated the mounds, most of whom were farmers, had no motive to lie, no pet theories about pre-history, and no ideological axes to grind—something that cannot be said of the later Smithsonian-controlled excavations, or of twentieth-century Darwinian science.

“Convinced perhaps that the giant race was a well-established aspect of pre-history for the region, the post-Revolutionary War people took it for granted that the larger stature was commonplace enough to take the bones in stride. Only a few scholarly measures were taken toward the preservation of sites and contents, reflecting such an attitude.”[i]

The few who were educated among the pioneers would have been familiar with the classics—formal education in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was heavy on Latin and Greek—and might have been aware of the classical belief that the race was decreasing in size. For whatever reason, the mound excavators often commented on the large stature of those interred in the mounds, but not with as much surprise as we would expect.

These excavations were frequently noted in the records of the counties and townships, which were later incorporated into county and state histories. Here are typical reports:

Of the very early history of the region which now embraces Lake County but little can be written. The Mound Builders had occupied it and passed away, leaving no written language and but little even as tradition. . . . These mounds were quite numerous . . . Excavations . . . have revealed the crumbling bones of a mighty race. Samuel Miller, who has resided in the county since 1835, is authority for the statement that one skeleton which he assisted in unearthing was a trifle more than eight feet in length, the skull being correspondingly large, while many other skeletons measured at least seven feet . . .[ii]

In Seneca Township [Noble County, Ohio] was opened, in 1872, one of the numerous Indian mounds that abound in the neighborhood. This particular one was locally known as the “Bates” Mound. Upon being dug into it was found to contain a few broken pieces of earthenware, a lot of flint-heads and one or two stone implements and the remains of three skeletons, whose size would indicate they measured in life at least eight feet in height. The remarkable feature of these remains was they had double teeth in front as well as in the back of the mouth and in both upper and lower jaws. Upon exposure to the atmosphere the skeletons crumbled back to mother earth.[iii]

In the Brush Creek Township of Muskingum County, Ohio, a mound located on the farm of J.M. Baughman was excavated. The mound was 90 feet long by 60 ft. wide and 11 ft. tall, and located on the summit of a hill. A stone structure was found inside the mound, and in it were discovered the bones of men and women, buried in couples—the length of their skeletons exceeding eight and even nine feet. A document dated March 3, 1880, describing the mound, the excavations, and the contents of the mound was verified by six citizens, all of whom signed a sworn affidavit as to the truthfulness and correctness of the descriptions.[iv]

Where Proctorville now stands was one day part of a well paved city, but I think the greater part of it is now in the Ohio river [sic]. Only a few mounds, there; one of which was near the C. Wilgus mansion and contained a skeleton of a very large person, all double teeth, and sound, in a jaw bone that would go over the jaw with the flesh on, of a large man; the common burying ground was well filled with skeletons at a depth of about 6 feet. Part of the pavement was of boulder stone and part of well preserved brick.[v]

In 1829, when the hotel was built in Chesterville [Morrow County, Ohio], a mound near by was made to furnish the material for the brick. In digging it away, a large human skeleton was found, but no measurements were made. It is related that the jaw-bone was found to fit easily over that of a citizen of the village, who was remarkable for his large jaw. The local physicians examined the cranium and found it proportionately large, with more teeth than the white race of today. The skeleton was taken to Mansfield, and has been lost sight of entirely.[vi]

There are quite a number of mounds, in the township [Vermillion Township, Erie County, Ohio], where the bones, and sometimes the whole skeleton of the human race have been found. The bones and skeletons found are very large, and some of the inhabitants think they must have belonged to a race of beings much larger in size than the Indians found here by the first settlers.[vii]

Here is a batch of similar reports, compiled and posted on the Internet.[viii] In 1876, J.N. DeHart, M.D., found vertebrae “larger than those of the present type” in Wisconsin mounds. In 1877, W.H.R. Lykins uncovered skull bones “of great size and thickness” in mounds of Kansas City area. In 1879, a nine-foot, eight-inch skeleton was excavated from a mound near Brewersville, Sand Creek Township, Jennings County, Indiana.[ix] A mound near Toledo, Ohio, held twenty skeletons, seated and facing east with jaws and teeth “twice as large as those of present day people,” and beside each was a large bowl with “curiously wrought hieroglyphic figures.”[x]

In 1903, Professor S. Farr and a group of Princeton University students came across several burial mounds at Fish Creek, Montana. Upon excavating one, they unearthed the skeleton of a man about nine feet long. Next to him lay the bones of a woman who had been almost as tall.[xi]

The skeleton of a huge man was uncovered at the Beckley farm, Lake Koronis, Minnesota; other giant bones came to light at Moose Island and Pine City, Minnesota.[xii]

Ten skeletons “of both sexes and of gigantic size” were taken from a mound at Warren, Minnesota, in 1883.[xiii]

When two brothers living in Dresbach, Minnesota, decided to enlarge their brick business, they were forced to remove several large mounds. In one mound, they uncovered the bones of “men over eight feet tall.” These remains crumbled when exposed to the air. In La Crescent, Wisconsin, not far from Dresbach, mound excavators reportedly found “bones of men of huge stature.”[xiv]

In the 1880s and 1890s, the Smithsonian began systematically to excavate the North American mounds. Contemporaneous accounts in papers and journals, as well as the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology’s 1894 report on the excavations, indicate that the Smithsonian, too, found unusually large skeletons.

In 1885, the American Antiquarian reported that a large mound near the town of Gasterville (sic, probably Gastonville), Pennsylvania, was opened and examined by a committee of scientists sent out from the Smithsonian. A vault was found which, when opened, revealed a skeleton measuring seven feet two inches. The hair was coarse and jet black and hung to the waist, and the skeleton was wearing a copper crown. The skeleton was remarkably well preserved. Stones covered the floor of the vault, and on the stones were carved inscriptions in an unknown language or hieroglyph. The relics were carefully packed and forwarded to the Smithsonian Institute and were said to be the most interesting collection ever found in the United States. The explorers were going to excavate another mound in Barton County, Pennsylvania.[xv]

The Smithsonian’s official 1894 report states that a seven-foot-long skeleton was found in the Etowah mound, in Bartow County, Georgia:

Grave a, a stone sepulcher, 2½ feet wide, 8 feet long, and 2 feet deep, was formed by placing steatite slabs on edge at the sides and ends, and others across the top. The bottom consisted simply of earth hardened by fire. It contained the remains of a single skeleton, lying on its back, with the head east. The frame was heavy and about seven feet long. The head rested on a thin copper plate ornamented with impressed figures . . .[xvi]

The 1894 report also includes an account of the contents of a mound in Roane County, Tennessee:

Underneath the layer of shells the earth was very dark and appeared to be mixed with vegetable mold to the depth of 1 foot. At the bottom of this, resting on the original surface of the ground, was a very large skeleton lying horizontally at full length. Although very soft, the bones were sufficiently distinct to allow of careful measurement before attempting to remove them. The length from the base of the skull to the bones of the toes was found to be 7 feet 3 inches. It is probable, therefore, that this individual when living was fully 7½ feet high. At the head lay some small pieces of mica and a green substance, probably the oxide of copper, though no ornament or article of copper was discovered.[xvii]

And an account of a the excavation of a mound near Dunleith, Illinois:

No. 5, the largest of the group was carefully examined. Two feet below the surface [of the mound], near the apex, was a skeleton, doubtless an intrusive Indian burial . . . Near the original surface [of the ground], 10 or 12 feet from the center, on the lower side, lying at full length on its back, was one of the largest skeletons discovered by the Bureau agents, the length as proved by actual measurement being between 7 and 8 feet. It was clearly traceable, but crumbled to pieces immediately after removal from the hard earth in which it was encased. . . .[xviii]

And an account of the excavation of a mound in Kanawha County, West Virginia:

[Mound] No. 11 is now 35 by 40 feet at the base and 4 feet high. In the center, 3 feet below the surface, was a vault 8 feet long and 3 feet wide. In the bottom of this, among the decayed fragments of bark wrappings, lay a skeleton fully seven feet long, extended at full length on the back, head west. Lying in a circle above the hips were fifty-two perforated shell disks about an inch in diameter and one-eighth of an inch thick.[xix]

And an account of the excavation of the Great Smith Mound, also in Kanawha County, West Virginia:

At a depth of 14 feet, a rather large human skeleton was found, which was in a partially upright position with the back against a hard clay wall . . . All the bones were badly decayed, except those of the left wrist, which had been preserved by two heavy copper bracelets . . .

* * *

Nineteen feet from the top the bottom of this debris was reached, where, in the remains of a bark coffin, a skeleton measuring 7½ feet in length and 19 inches across the shoulders, was discovered. It lay on the bottom of the vault stretched horizontally on the back, head east, arms by the sides . . . Each wrist was encircled by six heavy copper bracelets . . . Upon the breast was a copper gorget . . . length, 3½ inches; greatest width 3¾ inches . . .[xx]

A number of giant skeletons, not in association with mounds, have also been reported. In some, such as the following account from Ohio, the proximity is so near the mounds that the remains were probably those of mound builders:

In cultivating the soil in the vicinity implements have been found, and in excavating the ground for graves it is said that bones have been exhumed which seemed to have belonged to a race of giants.

* * *

This land at one time belonged to a Mr. Peleg Sweet, who was a man of large size and full features; and it is narrated that at one time he, in digging, came upon a skull and jaw which were of such size that the skull would cover his head and the jaw could be easily slipped over his face, as though the head of a giant were enveloping his . . .[xxi]

Here is a report of a very unusual prehistoric graveyard in Ohio:

The graves were distinguished by slight depressions in the surface of the earth, disposed in straight rows, which, with intervening spaces or valleys, covered the entire area. The number of these graves has been estimated to be between two and three thousand. Aaron Wright, Esq., in 1800, made a careful examination of these depressions, and found them invariably to contain human bones blackened with time, which upon exposure to the air soon crumbled to dust. Some of these bones were of unusual size, and evidently belonged to a race allied to giants. Skulls were taken from these mounds, the cavities of which were of sufficient capacity to admit the head of an ordinary man, and jaw-bones [sic] that might be fitted over the face with equal facility. The bones of the upper and lower extremities were of corresponding size.[xxii]

Here is another report from Ohio of large skeletons accidentally excavated during the digging of a cellar:

In digging the cellar of the house, nine human skeletons were found, and, like such specimens from other ancient mounds of the country, they showed that the Mound Builders were men of large stature. The skeletons were not found lying in such a manner as would indicate any arrangement of the bodies on the part of the entombers. In describing the tomb, Mr. Albert Harris said: “It looked as if the bodies had been dumped into a ditch. Some of them were buried deeper than others, the lower one being about seven feet below the surface.” When the skeletons were found, Mr. Harris was twenty years of age, yet he states that he could put one of the skulls over his head, and let it rest upon his shoulders, while wearing a fur cap at the same time. The large size of all the bones was remarked, and the teeth were described as “double all the way round.”[xxiii]

From a History of Marion County, Ohio:

Evidence for the occupation of this region before the appearance of the red man and the white race is to be found in almost every part of the county, as well as through the northwest [midwest] generally. In removing the gravel bluffs, which are numerous and deep, for the construction and repair of roads, and in excavating cellars, hundreds of human skeletons, some of them of giant form, have been found. A citizen of Marion County estimates that there were about as many human skeletons in the knolls of Marion County as there are white inhabitants at present![xxiv]

From a history of the Marion County, West Virginia:

She said also that three skeletons were found at the mouth of the Paw Paw Creek many years later, while Nim (Nimrod) Satterfield was justice of the peace. Jim Dean and some men were digging for a bridge foundation and found these bones at the lower end of the old buffalo wallow. She thought it was Dr. Kidwell, of Fairmont, who examined them and said they were very old, perhaps thousands of years old. She said that when the skeletons were exposed to the weather for a few days, their bones turned black and began to crumble, that Squire Satterfield had them buried in the Joliffe graveyard (Rivesville). All these skeletons, she said, were measured, and found to be about eight feet long.[xxv]

From the Historical Collections of Virginia:

On the Wappatomaka have been found numerous Indian relics, among which was a highly finished pipe, representing a snake coiled around the bowl. There was also discovered the under jaw-bone of a human being (says Kercheval) of great size, which contained eight jaw-teeth in each side, of enormous size; and, what is more remarkable the teeth stood transversely in the jaw-bone. It would pass over any man’s face with entire ease.[xxvi]

In his book, The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee, author John Haywood describes “very large” bones in stone graves found in Williamson County, Tennessee, in 1821. In White County, Tennessee, an “ancient fortification” contained skeletons of gigantic stature averaging at least seven feet in length.[xxvii]

In the Toronto, Ontario, Daily Telegraph of August 23, 1871, appeared a story regarding an excavation on the farm of one Daniel Fredenburg in the Township of South Cayuga, Haldimand County, Ontario. Rev. Nathaniel Wardell, Orin Wardell, and Daniel Fredenburg were digging at Fredenburg’s farm on the banks of the Grand River:

When they got to five or six feet below the surface, a strange sight met them. Piled in layers, one upon top of the other, some two hundred skeletons of human beings nearly perfect—around the neck of each one being a string of beads. These skeletons are those of men of gigantic stature, some of them measuring nine feet, very few of them being less than seven feet. Some of the thigh bones were found to be at least a foot longer than those at present known, and one of the skulls being examined completely covered the head of an ordinary person. These skeletons are supposed to belong to those of a race of people anterior to the Indians.[xxviii]

Back to Ellen White

After reviewing this material, we can understand the context of Ellen White’s statement to the effect that bones are found in the earth showing that in ancient times men were much larger than now. While this statement seems odd to us today, White’s nineteenth-century readers would have found nothing odd about it. Giant bones were being found all over the United States during much of the nineteenth century. It was as current as the day’s newspaper headlines.

White does not seem to have been concerned that she would not be believed regarding the declining stature of mankind. Rather, her concern was that people would take the fact of ancient giants as evidence that the world is older than biblical chronology allows:

Because the bones of human beings and of animals found in the earth, are much larger than those of men and animals now living, or that have existed for many generations past, some conclude that the world is older than we have any scriptural record of . . .[xxix]

It was this type of misinterpretation that Mrs. White sought to forestall. But the idea that people would deny that giants had lived in the past seems not to have occurred to her.

The Darwinian Knowledge Filter

Reports of giant human bones seem odd to us today because the filter of Darwinian science has screened out the true facts. Scientists who specialize in human prehistory are not looking for evidence that today’s humans devolved from a much larger race. They are looking for evidence that the three-foot-tall Australopithecine evolved into the six-foot-tall man. The evolutionary paradigm is smaller to larger, so Darwinists (with one historical exception we will discuss later) are not interested in the evidence showing that the human species evolved from larger to smaller.

“To the evolutionist, there is but one primary fact in the universe: evolution. Everything else is just data. . . . Good data is that which supports evolution. Bad data is that which does not fit evolution, and it is to be discarded.”[xxx]

To Darwinian scientists, all evidence of giant prehistoric human beings is simply bad, irrelevant data, and they have discarded it—If they were ever even cognizant of it. Remember Thomas Kuhn’s observation that phenomena that do not fit the paradigm “are often not seen at all.”[xxxi]  

What Has the Smithsonian Hidden?

Intentional suppression may also have played a role. Many mound excavations were undertaken by the Smithsonian Institution, and the artifacts uncovered from many non-Smithsonian digs were ultimately sent to the Smithsonian. There have been allegations that the Smithsonian has been “losing” these artifacts. Recall the scene at the end of the motion picture “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” in which the Ark of the Covenant is crated up and anonymously “stored” in an incredibly vast government warehouse.[xxxii] Such a waylaying of artifacts is not unprecedented. The Vatican has long been accused of refusing access to controversial artifacts and documents that might damage the Roman church’s credibility or cast doubt on its official claims.

Footnote 32 (xxxii), below, contains an extensive discussion of how the Americans of the 18th and most of the 19th Centuries believed that the mounds were built by a race of giants far more advanced than the native Americans that were living here at the time, but that belief was gradually put aside, with the Smithsonian as the enforcer of the new theory that they were all built by Indians, the Adena culture of Ohio (circa 1,000 B.C. to A.D. 200) followed by the Hopewell culture (ca 200 B.C. to A.D.700) which gave way to the Mississippian culture starting ca A.D. 700.

Twentieth Century Reports

The twentieth century also saw many reports of discoveries of unusually large skeletal remains. A report of a 1916 mound excavation, in Sayre, Pennsylvania, appeared in The New York Times:

In the mound uncovered were found the bones of sixty-eight men . . . The average height of these men was seven feet, while many were much taller. Further evidence of their gigantic size was found in large celts or axes hewed from stone and buried in the grave. On some of the skulls, two inches above the perfectly formed forehead, were protuberances of bone.[xxxiii]

That the mound builders were a large people has not escaped the notice of more recent researchers. William S. Webb and Charles E. Snow described the Adena type of mound builders as having a large, round skull, a prominent forehead bordered below by sizable brow ridges, a jutting chin, and massive bones. “The Adena folk were unusually tall and powerfully built; women over six feet tall and men apparently approaching heights of seven feet have been discovered.”[xxxiv]

Some non-mound related remains have been reported in the western United States. In 1911, several red-haired mummies ranging from six and a half feet to eight feet tall were discovered in a cave in Lovelock, Nevada.[xxxv] In February and June of 1931, two large skeletons were found in the Humboldt lakebed near Lovelock, Nevada. The first of these measured eight and a half feet tall and appeared to have been wrapped in a gum-covered fabric in the Egyptian manner. The second skeleton was almost ten feet long.[xxxvi] A seven-foot, seven-inch skeleton was found on the Friedman ranch, near Lovelock, Nevada, in 1939.[xxxvii]

In 1965, a skeleton measuring eight feet, nine inches was found buried under a rock ledge along the Holly Creek in east-central Kentucky.[xxxviii]

Conclusion

It seems likely that the post-Flood dispersion included the Americas, that those advanced people of taller stature could easily have come here by watercraft, and not only by the hypothetical land bridge across the Bering Strait that may have emerged as a result of lower Ice Age sea levels. It is likely that these taller people originally explored and settled in the Western Hemisphere, but were cut off from the center of post-Flood civilization, which was in Sumer, and never developed large cities or large population centers in North America.

The conflict with mainstream archeology is not so great. The Adena culture, which even mainstream archeologists and anthropologists admit had many females of six feet and males of seven feet, is dated to 1,000 BC. The Hebrew conquest of Canaan is dated to about 1,500 BC and David’s later fight with Goliath at about 1,000 BC. I would conclude that humans of from seven to nine feet persisted for some 1,500 years after the Flood in various isolated areas, including North America.

NOTES:

[i]. Hamilton, Ross, “A Tradition of Giants.” On the Internet.

[ii]. Hamilton, Ross, “Holocaust of Giants: The Great Smithsonian Cover-up,” quoting Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois and History of Lake County, edited by Newton Bateman, LL.D. and Paul Selby, A.M. (1902).

[iii]. Hamilton, Ross, “A Tradition of Giants,” quoting, Historical Collections of Ohio in Two Volumes, (1888), pp. 350, 351.

[iv]. Hamilton, “A Tradition of Giants.” See also,Joe Taylor, Fossil Facts and Fantasies (Crosbyton, TX: Mt. Blanco Publishing, 1999), p. 67, citing Scientific American, August 14, 1880. This may be the same dig reportedly presided over by a Dr. Everhart near Zanesville, Ohio, as reported in American Antiquarian, 3:61 (1880).

[v]. Hamilton, “A Tradition of Giants,” quoting Ironton Register—a small Ohio River town newspaper, dated May 5th, 1892.

[vi]. Hamilton, “A Tradition of Giants,” quoting History of Morrow County and Ohio (1880).

[vii]. Hamilton, “A Tradition of Giants,” quoting Firelands Pioneer (1858).

[viii]. See, e.g., http://www.biblefacts.org/myth/giant2.html.

[ix]. Indianapolis News, Nov. 10, 1975.

[x]. Dobbins, Ron G., NEARA (New England Antiquities Research Association) Journal, v. 13, Fall 1978, citing Chicago Record, Oct. 24, 1895.

[xi] Quayle, Steve, Genesis 6 Giants, citing Norvill, Roy, Giants: The Vanished Race of Mighty Men, (Aquarian Press, 1979) pp. 82-83.

[xii]. St. Paul Globe, Aug. 12, 1896. See also Steiger, Brad, Worlds Before Our Own (New York: Berkeley Books, 1978), p. 54.

[xiii]. St. Paul Pioneer Press, May 23, 1883.

[xiv]. Steiger, Brad, Worlds Before Our Own (New York: Berkeley Books, 1978), p. 54.

[xv]. American Antiquarian, 7:52 (1885). See also Corliss, William R., Ancient Man: A Handbook of Puzzling Artifacts (Glen Arm, MD: The Sourcebook Project, 1978).

[xvi]. Hamilton, “Holocaust of Giants,” quoting Cyrus Thomas, 12th Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1890-1891 (1894).

[xvii]. Ibid.

[xviii]. Ibid.

[xix]. Ibid.

[xx]. Ibid. Another account of this excavation appears in the journal American Antiquarian, 6:133 (1884) (“A skeleton 7 feet 6 inches long was found in a massive stone structure that was likened to a temple chamber within a mound in Kanawha County, West Virginia, in 1884.”).

[xxi]. Hamilton, “A Tradition of Giants,” quoting A History of Ashtabula County, (Ohio, 1878).

[xxii]. Ibid.

[xxiii]. Hamilton, “A Tradition of Giants,” quoting The History of Medina County, (Ohio, 1881).

[xxiv]. Hamilton, “Holocaust of Giants: The Great Smithsonian Cover-up,” quoting The History of Marion County, Ohio (1883).

[xxv]. Hamilton, “Holocaust of Giants,” quoting Lough, Glenn D., Now and Long Ago: A History of the Marion County [West Virginia] Area (1967[reprint, McClain Printing Company, 1991]).

[xxvi]. Hamilton, “A Tradition of Giants,” quoting Historical Collections of Virginia, 1845.

[xxvii]. Haywood, John, “The Natural and Aboriginal History of Tennessee.”

[xxviii] Ancient American, Volume 6, Issue 41, p. 9. Originally published in The Daily Telegraph (Toronto, Ontario), Wednesday, August 23, 1871, page 1., as reported by Steve Quayle in “Niagara’s Ancient Cemetery of Giants” http://stevequayle.com/Giants/N.Am/Niagara.html. Other researchers have tracked down, through McGill University, a 19th century plat of Cayuga Township, showing several tracts owned by members of the “Fradenburgh” family, including Daniel A. Fradenburgh, at exactly the location indicated in the story. See, e.g., http://s8int.com/giants12.html. 

[xxix]. Ellen G. White, Spiritual Gifts (Battle Creek, Mich.: Steam Press of the Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association, 1864), vol. 3, pp. 90-96. Reprinted in Signs of the Times, 5:90, March 20, 1879, and in Spirit of Prophecy (Battle Creek, Mich.: Review and Herald, 1884), vol. 4, pp. 85-89.

[xxx]. Lubenow, Marvin L., Bones of Contention (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1992), p. 57.

[xxxi]. Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2d edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962, 1970), p. 24.

[xxxii]. Native American author and professor of law emeritus, Vine Deloria, writes:

“It’s probably better that so few of the ruins and remains were tied in with the Smithsonian because they give good reason to believe the ending of the Indiana Jones movie—a great warehouse where the real secrets of earth history are buried.”

“Modern-day archaeology and anthropology have nearly sealed the door on our imaginations, broadly interpreting the North American past as devoid of anything unusual in the way of great cultures characterized by a people of unusual demeanor. The great interloper of ancient burial grounds, the nineteenth century Smithsonian Institution, created a one-way portal, through which uncounted bones have been spirited. This door and the contents of its vault are virtually sealed off to any but government officials. Among these bones may lie answers not even sought by these officials concerning the deep past.” Ross Hamilton, “Holocaust of Giants: The Great Smithsonian Cover-up.” See also David Hatcher Childress, “Archaeological Cover-ups?” NEXUS New Times magazine, vol. 2 no. 13 (April-May 1993).

The first controversy the Smithsonian became embroiled in was the Mound-builder controversy. Modern authorities attribute the mounds to the ancestors of the Native Americans who were occupying North America when European settlers arrived. Archeologists currently believe that the first mound building culture was the Adena people of Ohio (circa 1,000 B.C. to A.D. 200), which was followed by the Hopewell culture (ca 200 B.C. to A.D.700), which gave way to the Mississippian (ca A.D. 700). This view is in marked contrast to the views of the early white settlers, who, when they broke open the mounds, found evidence of physical and cultural characteristics entirely different from those possessed by the native tribes. The Indians of the mound area were semi-nomadic peoples, few in number and limited in ambition. They seemed incapable of the sustained effort needed to quarry tons of earth and shape it into symmetrical mounds, and they did not have oral traditions about the construction of the mounds.

Accordingly, the European settlers attributed the mounds to a different race of people, one that had come before the “Indians.” Thomas Jefferson, for example, who excavated mounds in a careful, scientific manner that was far ahead of its time, concluded that Native Americans were wholly incapable of constructing these monuments. Almost everyone else agreed. The following are typical quotes:

“It is sometimes difficult to distinguish the places of sepulture raised by the Mound-Builders from the more modern graves of the Indians. The tombs of the former were in general larger than those of the latter, and were used as receptacles for a greater number of bodies, and contained relics of art, evincing a higher degree of civilization than that attained by the Indians. The ancient earth-works of the Mound-Builders have occasionally been appropriated as burial places by the Indians, but the skeletons of the latter may be distinguished from the osteological remains of the former by their greater stature.”—Ross Hamilton, “A Tradition of Giants,” quoting History of Logan County, Illinois (1886).

“Over the face of the country, throughout Ohio and the adjoining States, the extinct race of giant men who disputed their daily food with a race of monster animals, extinct like themselves, have written a mystic record of their existence in hieroglyphics perhaps uninterpretable, yet everlasting and indestructible save by some vast cataclysm. . . . And this dead race of giants who fought with hairy mammoths and enormous cave bears, and perhaps that mastodon whose colossal bones to-day dwarf into comparative delicacy the elephant's rugged skeleton . . . who were they? It is at least generally recognized that they were not Indians.”—Lefcadio Hearn, “The Mound Builders,” The [Cincinnati, Ohio] Commercial, April 24, 1876. On the web at http://www.trussel.com/prehist/mound.htm.

In 1848, Ephraim Squier and Edwin Davis published a book, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, in which they described, mapped, and surveyed many of the mounds in Ohio. This treatise was well researched, and Squier and Davis also concluded that a lost race had erected the mounds.

In 1881, John Wesley Powell, the geologist famous for exploring the Grand Canyon, appointed Cyrus Thomas director of the Eastern Mound Division of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology. When Thomas, who had a background in entomology and botany, came to the Bureau of Ethnology he was a “pronounced believer in the existence of a race of Mound Builders distinct from the American Indians.” Powell was Thomas’ boss, however, and Powell was very sympathetic toward the American Indians, who at that time were being defeated in the last of the Indian Wars of the American frontier. Powell had lived with the peaceful Winnebago Indians of Wisconsin for many years as a youth and felt that American Indians were unfairly thought of as primitive and savage. Under Powell’s leadership, the Smithsonian began to promote the idea that Americans Indians were descended from advanced civilizations and were worthy of respect and protection. The changing of opinion on who built the mounds began in 1894, when Cyrus Thomas announced his conclusion that the mounds had been built by the American Indians. Thomas, C., Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology (1894, repr. 1985).

In support of the Smithsonian’s view, there is eyewitness testimony that Indians built some of the mounds. In 1540-1542, Hernando de Soto, traveling through the territory that would become the Southeastern U.S., observed Creek Indians living in fortified towns with lofty mounds and plazas. In the 1560s, French colonists in what is now northeastern Florida observed Indians building mounds. In the 1600s and 1700s, French explorers observed heavily populated Natchez Indian villages in Mississippi, complete with mounds. By the time the white settlers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century reached these areas, however, the native populations had been decimated by disease. See, e.g., Charles C. Mann, “1491,” The Atlantic Monthly, 289(3) (March, 2002). Their civilization had declined considerably from their highest levels, and they probably could not have duplicated the efforts of their ancestors in building the mounds.

The mounds are evidence of the decline of Native American culture, which is a pattern of civilization predicted by the Adventist model of history but contrary to Darwinism. For example, many mounds contained copper artifacts, and there are prehistoric copper mines in Michigan. See, e.g., Noorbergen, Secrets of the Lost Races, pp. 55-156. But the Indians of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were not engaged in mining and working metals. Their technology had gone backward.

Another controversy on which the Smithsonian has weighed in is the Diffusionist/Isolationist controversy. There are two schools of thought regarding the pre-history of North America. One school is known as “Diffusionism,” which believes that throughout history there has been widespread dispersion of culture, including contact between the Old World and the New. The Smithsonian placed the weight of its authority behind the opposite school, “Isolationism,” which holds that the various civilizations have been isolated from each other, especially those that are separated by oceans. The isolationists held that even contact between the civilizations of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys were rare, and certainly these civilizations did not have any contact with such advanced cultures as the Mayas or Aztecs in Mexico and Central America. Clarence Moore, who excavated numerous mound sites in the South between 1892-1916, rejected isolationism and believed the southern Mound Builders were heavily influenced by the Central American civilizations.

The current isolationist viewpoint is the “Clovis” model, in which wanderers from Northeast Asia traversed the Bering straits from Siberia to Alaska across a land bridge that existed during the Ice Age, fanned out across the Great Plains, into the Southwest and eventually the East, diversifying into the numerous Native American tribes that greeted the white settlers. Stone spear points found in association with Ice Age fauna in Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1930s were dated at 11,000 years ago and hailed as evidence of the oldest human settlement in the New World.

Some have suggested that after the Smithsonian committed to the isolationist viewpoint, it began to suppress archaeological evidence that lent credence to diffusionism, as well as evidence that pointed away from the view that the mounds were of Indian origin:

“Concealing evidence that conflicts with accepted theory is common scientific skullduggery. For years the Smithsonian Institution has been accused of hiding in storage vaults things it doesn't like. In 1968 two Neanderthal-like skulls with low foreheads and large brows were found in Minnesota. As for dating, University of Minnesota scientists said they were reluctant to destroy any of the material, although carbon-14 testing only requires the burning of one gram of bone. They were sent to the Smithsonian. Later Dr. Lawrence Angel, curator of physical anthropology at the institution, said he had no record of the skulls there, although he was sure they were not lost. We have a right to wonder whether some professional scientists mightn't find a really early date for the bones distressing.”—Vincent H. Gaddis, American Indian Myths and Mysteries (Radnor PA: Chilton Book Co., 1977), pp. 11, 12, citing “Skullduggery, Scientific Style,” Pursuit 5(4):89 (October 1972).

Mainstream science denies that any Neanderthal remains have been found in North or South America, yet we have this report from Lefcadio Hearn, cited above:

“Perhaps the best preserved skull yet found in an American mound was discovered at Kenton, Illinois. . . . The frontal bones are strangely abnormal, the superciliary arches stand out in enormous ridges, . . . All the frontal bones are prodigiously thick and strong.”

The thick brow ridges are, of course, the most prominent feature that separates the Neanderthals from modern humans, and the Neanderthals were also very “robust,” which means thick boned and strong. David Hatcher Childress reports a third-hand story that a former employee of the Smithsonian, who was dismissed for defending diffusionism, alleged that the Smithsonian had once taken a barge full of unusual artifacts out into the Atlantic and dumped them into the ocean.

Another possible cover-up concerns an April 5, 1909 story in the Arizona Gazette, the evening edition of the Phoenix Gazette, describing a Smithsonian-led expedition to a cave in the Grand Canyon that contained several mummies and oriental artifacts. http://www.spiritofmaat.com/archive/nov2/prns/gazette.htm. http://www.crystalinks.com/gc_egyptconnection.html. http://www.think-aboutit.com/Misc/Grandcanyon.html. Unless the story was a belated April fool’s joke, a spectacular archaeological site has simply disappeared down the “memory hole.” “I believe that the discerning reader will see” writes Childress, “that if only a small part of the ‘Smithsoniangate’ evidence is true, then our most hallowed archaeological institution has been actively involved in suppressing evidence for advanced American cultures, evidence for ancient voyages of various cultures to North America, evidence for anomalistic giants and other oddball artifacts, and evidence that tends to disprove the official dogma that is now the history of North America.”

It is worth noting that the Smithsonian is a quasi-governmental institution that receives 90 percent of its funding from the United States federal government. And it is, like most major modern museums of natural history, devoted to promoting Darwinism. In 1976, the Smithsonian completed a $463,000 Hall of Evolution. See, e.g., Ching, Katherine, “Suing the Smithsonian, Origins 5(2):99, 100 (1978).

The Internet abounds with stories of official suppression of archeological sites and artifacts. These sites include stories that the Smithsonian has suppressed discoveries of giant human remains. American-New Zealander Martin Doutré tells the following story:

A friend of mine, in recent years, had a long talk with a New Zealand girl called Lisa Kerr. She’d done extensive traveling, like many young New Zealanders, who head out on their traditional OE (overseas excursion).

Lisa, amongst several jobs she got around the world, worked for a while with the New Mexico Park’s Department. During her term of employment there was a big “washout” in one of the Park regions and I’m assuming it was up in Pueblo country around Taos. The flash flood scoured out embankments and in doing so a large number of anomalous skeletons were exposed. Lisa and her colleagues were assigned the task of gathering up the remains and placing them into crates. Also in attendance at the site were Smithsonian Institute officials and FBI agents.

Each day as Lisa and the other Park’s Department employees went onto the site, they were searched for cameras. Similarly they were searched as they left the site each day to make sure they weren’t removing artifacts. They were also obliged to sign “secrecy documents” ensuring that they would never divulge details of their participation in this undertaking.

The reason for this degree of secrecy stems from the fact that the skeletons were of people who were about 8 feet tall. They had six fingers on each hand and six toes per foot. They also had a strange, double row arrangement of teeth.

The crates containing the recovered remains, at the termination of work, were taken away by the Smithsonian officials and, undoubtedly, will never be seen again. Strangely enough, there is a report of two similar skulls having been found in New Zealand's far north around the beginning of the 20th century. Lisa later had official "hassles" when trying to come home to New Zealand and was severely grilled by US government functionaries as she attempted to depart from the US. http://www.viewzone.com/oklahoma.southend.html.

The same site tells of an ancient wall made of very peculiar cell-like stones. This site was subsequently covered with a bulldozer. http://www.viewzone.com/sender.html.

[xxxiii]. Hamilton, Ross, personal communication with the author, citing The New York Times, July 14, 1916.

[xxxiv]. Silverberg, Robert, Mound Builders of Ancient America (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1968), citing William S. Webb and Charles E. Snow, The Dover Mound (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1959).

[xxxv]. Shuker, Karl P.N., Unexplained: An Illustrated Guide to the World’s Natural and Paranormal Mysteries (Collingdale, PA: DIANE Publishing Co., 1998). (“In 1911, several mummified remains of mysterious red-haired humans ranging from 2-2.5 meters [6 ½ to over 8 feet] tall were disinterred in Lovelock Cave, 112 Kilometers [70 miles] northeast of Reno, Nevada, by a guano mining operation. These substantiated the local Paiute Indians’ legends of such people, which they called the Si-Te-Cahs. Yet scientists proved oddly reluctant to investigate these remains and eventually most of the bones were simply discarded by the miners. Various locals salvaged what was left, only to have most of it be destroyed when the shed the bones were kept in caught fire and burned to the ground. However, one of the Lovelock skulls, almost 1 foot tall, is preserved with some related bones and artifacts at the Humboldt County Museum in Winnemucca, Nevada, and various Lovelock artifacts are also held at the Nevada State Historical Society’s museum in Reno.”)

[xxxvi]. Lovelock Review-Miner, June 19, 1931.

[xxxvii]. Lovelock Review-Miner, Sept. 29, 1939. Interestingly, there is a recent report of a giant from the Lovelock cave area. In her recent book Bones: Discovering the First Americans (New York: Carroll & Graff, 2001), Elaine Dewar writes of the Paiute oral tradition that they struggled for generations against a people they called the “Red-Haired Giants.” But anthropologists who have been studying remains from the area had not found any giant remains. Then one day Sheila Brooks walked in and told Amy Dansie, “Amy, call your mother, we’ve got a giant.” That is all that Dewar wrote; the dimensions of the skeleton Brooks described as a giant are not mentioned. Bones, supra, at pp. 200, 201.

[xxxviii]. Henson, Michael Paul, Tragedy at Devil’s Hollow and other Haunting Tales from Kentucky (Bowling Green, KY: Cockerel Corp, 1984). See Chad Armint, “Giant Amerinds.” (Armint writes, “There is, however, one intriguing tale from a Kentucky folklore book written by Michael Paul Henson [1984]. Henson relates how he actually examined a body dug out from under a large rock ledge along Holly Creek in east-central Kentucky. In 1965, a landowner, Kenneth White, was building cattle stalls under the ledge when he found a ‘perfectly preserved skeleton’ which measured 8 feet, 9 inches in length when reassembled. He states ‘the arms were extremely long and the hands were large. By comparison, the feet were very small.’ The skull was ‘30 inches in circumference. The eye and nose sockets were slits rather than cavities, and the area where the jaw bone hinges to the skull was solid bone. It would seem that the person could not have opened his mouth.’ A powdery white substance covered the skeleton, but no tools, weapons, or other human implements were found with the bones. The body was buried approximately five feet underground. Henson and the farmer assumed the skeleton to be a large, deformed Indian. Unfortunately, White reburied the bones rather than taking them to a university for examination. Henson died in 1995, and any further notes he may have had on this fascinating story are unavailable. We do not have exact locality for this report, but Holly Creek appears to be run through both Wolfe and Breathitt Counties in Kentucky.”)

The Genesis Giants -- Part 5

July, 2019 David Read

Reports From Around the World

a. Germany

Accounts of the discovery of giant remains are not limited to North America. On the contrary, they are universal. The Germans referred to the giants that once inhabited their land as “Huns.” There is an old story that there were two large Hun graves on the Buggenhagen estate at Züssow in northeast Germany. In 1594, the people of Greifswald needed stones for a building, and, upon their request, the Buggenhagens gave permission to take the stones from the two Hun graves. After the Greifswald stonemasons had cut up the large stones, they became curious about what was buried beneath them. They began to dig into one of the graves, where they found many human corpses, all in a row. They were completely preserved, and measured between eleven and sixteen feet in length.[i]

b. Mexico

The pyramid of Cuicuilco is the oldest structure in the valley of Mexico. It is a conical earthen mound, with an outer facade of basalt slabs; smooth ramps or causeways lead to the top. The eruption of a nearby volcano caused the site to be abandoned around A.D. 200, but the pyramid was built much earlier. American archaeologist Byron S. Cummings excavated the site for the Mexican government in 1920. Based upon sedimentation rates, Cummings estimated that the pyramid had been built around 6,000 B.C., but later radiocarbon tests done on charcoal indicated a date closer to 2,000 B.C.[ii]

Cummings was not the first to dig at Cuicuilco. A Spanish physician named Hernendez, sent to Mexico by Philip II, visited Cuicuilco and wrote about having found the bones of large beasts along with those of men in excess of five meters (sixteen feet) tall. Natives believed that giants had built Cuicuilco.[iii]

The historian Don Ferdinand d’Alva Ixtilxochitl (1568-1648) reports that, “there were giants in New Spain (Mexico). Furthermore, their bones may be found everywhere, and ancient Toltec historians have dubbed them Quinametzin, against whom they fought many wars and had much strife in this land called New Spain. . .”[iv]

Some of the giants of New Spain were discovered early in the last century by Charles C. Clapp, who had been in Mexico supervising a mine owned by Thomas W. Lawson. According to The New York Times:

He found in Mexico a cave containing some 200 skeletons of men each above eight feet in height. The cave was evidently the burial place of a race of giants who antedated the Aztecs. Mr. Clapp arranged the bones of one of these skeletons and found the total length to be 8 feet 11 inches. The femur reached up to his thigh, and the molars were big enough to crack a coconut. The head measured eighteen inches from front to back.[v]

A similar report of Mexican giant remains appeared in The New York Times on December 2, 1930. A mining engineer named J.E. Coker said that laborers working near Sayopa, Sonora, had uncovered an old cemetery where bodies of men averaging eight feet in height were found buried tier by tier.[vi]

c. Egypt

There are reports of larger, heavier people in ancient Egypt. Egyptologist Walter B. Emery (1903-1971), while excavating at Saqqara in the 1930s, discovered the remains of individuals who lived in pre-dynastic Egypt. These people had large, dolichocephalous skulls (a dolichocephalous skull is significantly longer than it is wide). This race had fair hair and a taller, heavier build than other ancient Egyptians. Emery believed that this race was not native to Egypt but had performed important religious and governmental roles in the country.

“Towards the end of the IV millennium BC,” Emery wrote, “the people known as the Disciples of Horus appear as a highly dominant aristocracy that governed entire Egypt. The theory of the existence of this race is supported by the discovery in the pre-dynastic tombs, in the northern part of Higher Egypt, of the anatomical remains of individuals with bigger skulls and builds than the native population, with so much difference as to exclude any hypothetical common racial strain.”[vii] These remains date from the period before the first dynasty, around 3,100 B.C., as reckoned by Egyptologists.

d. Iraq 

We would expect that the post-Flood reduction in the physical size of humanity would roughly correspond to the reduction in lifespans, as indicated in Genesis 11:10-32. We would also expect that the largest post-Flood human remains would be found in relatively close proximity to the mountains of Ararat, where Noah and his family disembarked. Thus, it is not surprising that we come across the following evidence:

Dear Christian Friends, I was born and lived in the Middle East from 1938 to 1968. I was Ain-Tell and Euphrates water works Engineer and was very interested in archaeology and history and had some very interesting finds, some of which may sound unbelievable. I have brought with me a few silex arrowheads, etc. from the very battlefield where King Nebuchadnezar and Pharo Necho’s armies fought. And what about the giants mentioned in Genesis? In southeast Turkey, in the Euphrates Valley, and in Homs, and at Uran-Zohra, tombs of about four meters long [13 feet] once existed, but now roads and other construction work has destroyed the spots. At two places, when unearthed because of construction work, the leg bones [femurs] were measured about 120 cms [about 4 feet]. It sounds unbelievable.[viii]

A person with a four-foot-long femur would stand about twelve feet tall.

Myths and Legends

In discussing the oral traditions of the Tezcucans, a tribe of Mexico, Hubert Howe Bancroft states:

Of the creation which ushered in the first age we know nothing; we are only told by Boturini that giants then began to appear on the earth. This First Age, or ‘sun,’ was called the Sun of the Water, and it was ended by a tremendous flood, in which every living thing perished, or was transformed, except, following some accounts, one man and one woman of the giant race of whose escape more hereafter. The Second Age, called the Sun of the Earth, was closed with earthquakes, yawnings of the earth, and the overthrow of the highest mountains. Giants, or quinames, a powerful and haughty race, still appear to be the only inhabitants of the world.”[ix]

This Mexican legend corresponds with biblical history. During the first age, before the flood, giants inhabited the earth. Immediately after the flood, because of catastrophic plate tectonics, there were many earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in the early centuries after the Flood, and the people were still larger than they are today.

Asian mythology told of a class of people that inhabited the “realms of delight” who were twice as tall as normal men but paid no attention to the laws of virtue.[x]

The Shawnee Indians of North America supposed their ancestors to have been much more perfect, both in intellect and physical stature, than the present race:

“They were of very large stature, both men and women, which they attributed in part to their abstinence from sexual intercourse during the early years of life. In those days the men at a hundred years were equal to those of the present race at seventy. A gradual degeneration has at last brought them to their present state and is now working imperceptibly among all the Indian tribes.”[xi]

The Pawnee Indians also believed that a race of giants pre-existed them and that the Great Spirit destroyed this race with a flood. William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody relates the following story:

While we were in the sand-hills, scouting the Niobrara country, the Pawnee Indians brought into camp, one night, some very large bones, one of which a surgeon of the expedition pronounced to be the thigh-bone of a human being. The Indians claimed that the bones they had found were those of a person belonging to a race of people who a long time ago lived in this country. That there was once a race of men on the earth whose size was about three times that of an ordinary man, and they were so swift and powerful that they could run along-side of a buffalo, and taking the animal in one arm could tear off a leg and eat the meat as they walked.

These giants denied the existence of a Great Spirit, and when they heard the thunder or saw the lightning they laughed at it and said that they were greater than either. This so displeased the Great Spirit that he caused a great rain-storm to come, and the water kept rising higher and higher so that it drove those proud and conceited giants from the low grounds to the hills, and thence to the mountains, but at last even the mountain tops were submerged, and then those mammoth men were all drowned.

After the flood had subsided, the Great Spirit came to the conclusion that he had made man too large and powerful, and that he would therefore correct the mistake by creating a race of men of smaller size and less strength. This is the reason, say the Indians, that modern men are small and not like the giants of old, and they claim that this story is a matter of Indian history, which has been handed down among them from time immemorial. As we had no wagons with us at the time this large and heavy bone was found, we were obliged to leave it.[xii]

The Iroquois, Osage, Tuscaroras, Hurons, Omahas, and many other North American tribes also have legends to the effect that giant men once lived and roamed the land.[xiii] 

The Toltec Flood Legend

We noted above that the Mexican historian Don Ferdinand d’Alva Ixtilxochitl stated that there were once giants in Mexico, and that their bones are found everywhere. Don Ferdinand also relates this remarkable Flood legend that places these Mexican giants in a story that clearly corresponds with Bible history:

“It is found in the histories of the Toltecs that this age and the first world, as they call it, lasted 1716 years; that men were destroyed by tremendous rains and lightning from the sky, and even all the land, without the exception of anything, and the highest mountains, were covered up and submerged in water fifteen cubits (caxtolmolatli); and here they added other fables of how men came to multiply from the few who escaped from this destruction in a “toptlipetlocali”; that this word nearly signifies a close chest; and how, after men had multiplied, they erected a very high “zacuali,” which is today a tower of great height, in order to take refuge in it should the second world (age) be destroyed. Presently their languages were confused, and, not being able to understand each other, they went to different parts of the earth.

“The Toltecs, consisting of seven friends, with their wives, who understood the same language, came to these parts, having first passed great land and seas, having lived in caves, and having endured great hardships in order to reach this land; . . . they wandered 104 years through different parts of the world before they reached Hue Hue Tlapalan, which was in Ce Tecpat, 520 years after the flood.[xiv]

The duration of the first age, 1716 years, differs by only 60 years from Ussher’s calculation of 1656 years for the pre-Flood period using the Masoretic chrono-genealogical data. The 15-cubit height of the water above the mountaintops, the tower, the confounding of the languages, and the dispersal of the people are all identical to the Genesis narrative.

The uncanny similarity between the Toltec flood legend and the Genesis narrative raises the suspicion that the legend was influenced by the teachings of Spanish priests after Cortes conquered Mexico in 1519. But on closer scrutiny, the legend appears to be genuine.[xv]

The Toltecs taught that one God, omnipotent and invisible, had made all things, a religion very different from that of the cruel Aztecs. (Bancroft, at 55, 56.) This raises the question: Who were the “Toltecs?” The encyclopedias say they were a warrior nation that controlled central Mexico between A.D. 900 and A.D. 1,200 and were similar to and conquered by, the Aztecs, or Mexica.

But until recently, the Toltecs were considered a legendary race of superhuman beings. “Toltec” was more of a claim of cultural affiliation (someone who comes from Tollan “place of reeds” i.e., large city) rather than an actual nation of peoples. (Code of Kings, p. 200). The word Toltec or “Nahuatl” means “master builders” or “artificers.” They were an ancient race of warrior kings from whom the Aztecs claimed descent.

“Much of what the Aztecs aspired to can find its roots in the still mysterious epoch of the Toltecs. The Toltec influence over almost all subsequent cultures of Mesoamerica cannot be overestimated. The Mixtecs, the Itza Maya, the Huaxteca, and most importantly the Mexica (Aztecs) claimed descent from the Toltecs, and Toltec blood was considered to be the legitimizing stamp of any ruler. Yet very little is known about these people. There are no contemporary written accounts.”

I believe the term Toltec refers not—or at least not only—to the nation that immediately preceded the Aztecs in Mexico but also to a much more ancient Central American people: the early post-Flood settlers. This would explain why they left no written records: they had not yet developed a written language (recall that Ellen White wrote that the antediluvians did not have or need written records). It would explain the eerily accurate flood legend. It would explain why they were called “master builders”: they came from the same stock that built the cyclopean and megalithic structures found all around the world. It would also explain why they were considered a race of superhuman beings: they were taller, longer-lived, and more intelligent than their descendants, who often aspired to recapture their lost glory.

NOTES:

[i]. Hamilton, Ross, personal communication with David Read, citing J. D. H. Temme, Die Volkssagen von Pommern und Rügen (Berlin: In der Nicolaischen Buchhandlung, 1840), no. 173, p. 213.

[ii]. The Xitli lava flow that ended the occupation of the site is known as the “Pedrigal.” Cummings found three cultural levels, separated by two layers of volcanic ash and sediment, below the Pedrigal but above the paved floor of the pyramid. The pavement was eighteen and a half feet below the bottom of the Pedrigal lava. Cummings estimated that it would have taken about 6,500 years for this sediment to accumulate. After Willard Libby invented radiocarbon testing, C-14 tests were done on samples of charcoal taken from below the Pedigral (but about 1,000 feet from the pyramid). There was an orderly correlation of older dates with deeper samples. At about the level of the base of the pyramid, the charcoal samples were testing to about 2000 B.C. See Hapgood, Charles H., Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited, 1966), pp. 199-204, citing “Radiocarbon” Supplement of the American Journal of Science, vol. 5, pp. 12, 13, and vol. 6, pp. 332-334; Cummings, Byron S., “Cuicuilco and the Archaic Culture of Mexico,” Bulletin, University of Arizona, IV, no. 8, (Nov. 15, 1933). See also Cummings, Byron, “Ruins of Cuicuilco may Revolutionize our History of Ancient America,” National Geographic, vol. 44, pp. 203-220 (1923).

[iii]. Corrales, Scott, “Mexico: Forgotten Ruins and Ancient Astronauts.” 

[iv]. Ibid.

[v]. Hamilton, Ross, personal communication with the author, citing The New York Times, May 4, 1908.

[vi]. Steiger, Brad, Worlds Before Our Own (New York: Berkeley Books, 1978), pp. 54, 55, citing The New York Times, December 2, 1930.

[vii]. Emery, Walter B., as quoted by Vittorio Di Cesare and Adriano Forgione, “Malta: The Skulls of the Mother Goddess” HERA magazine, (Rome, Italy).

[viii]. Taylor, Joe, Fossil Facts and Fantasies (Crosbyton, TX: Mt. Blanco Publishing, 1999), p. 66.

[ix]. Bancroft, Hubert Howe, The Native Races of the Pacific States (San Francisco: The History Company, Pub., 1886), vol. III. “Myths and Languages,” p. 64.

[x]. Campbell, Joseph, The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology (New York: Penguin Books, 1962), pp. 227, 228.

[xi]. Shawnese Traditions: C. C. Trowbridge’s Account, Vernon Kinietz and Erminie W. Voegelin, eds, (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1939).

[xii]. Hamilton, Ross, personal communication with the author, quoting The Life of Hon. William F. Cody, Known as Buffalo Bill, The Famous Hunter, Scout, and Guide: An Autobiography, Foreword by Don Russell (Paperback reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980).

[xiii]. Wilkins, Harold T., “The Giants in the Earth,” Fate Magazine, January, 1952, in Out of Time and Place: From the Files of Fate Magazine, Terry O’Neill, ed. (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1999), p. 60.

[xiv] Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, at 87, citing Edward King, Viscount Kingsborough’s Antiquities of Mexico (London: 1830-1848), vol. 9, pp. 331, 332, in turn citing Ixtilxochitl’s Historia Chichimeca.

[xv] “It will of course be said that this account, in those particulars where it agrees with the Bible, was derived from the teachings of the Spanish priests” notes Donnelly, “but it must be remembered that Ixtilxochitl was an Indian, a native of Tezcuco, a son of the queen, and that his ‘Relaciones’ were drawn from archives of his family and the ancient writing of his nation; he had no motive to falsify documents that were probably in the hands of hundreds at that time.” Donnelly, p. 88. The text itself indicates that Ixtilxochitl was skeptical of the legend, as when he states, “and here they added other fables . . .”

But even if Ixtilxochitl was not trying to propagate Biblical teachings (and he clearly was not), there are still two ways that the legend might reflect them: 1) Christian or Hebrew teachings had reached the New World prior to the Spanish conquest. There is evidence, compiled by researchers known as “Diffusionists,” of pre-Columbian exploration of the Western hemisphere by Old World explorers; and 2) the teachings of Spanish priests in the sixteenth century had already become transmogrified into native myths by the time Ixtilxochitl wrote his history in the early seventeenth century.

That the legend reflects Christian teachings cannot be ruled out, but experience with Catholic evangelism makes the priestly teaching theory very unlikely. Usually the Catholic priests were merely trying to secure the natives’ loyalty to the church, not impart Bible history to them. In fact, to secure the natives’ loyalty, the Catholics were often willing to “baptize” quite a bit of native religion and folklore into Catholicism (see, e.g., the mother goddess of Tonantzin transmogrifies into Our Lady of Guadalupe). This was their pattern throughout the world, and reflected the fact that Catholic theology itself is a blend of Biblical and pagan Greek ideas. Teaching the chrono-genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 to the Mexicans right after Cortes’ conquest of Mexico was the last thing they would ever have been concerned with. It seems very probable that the Toltec Flood legend is genuinely indigenous, and was handed down through the generations from the early post-Flood settlers.

It is intriguing that the Toltecs claim to have arrived in Mexico 520 years after the flood. If they wandered for 104 years after Babel before finding Mexico, that places Babel about 416 years after the flood. Many commentators believe the Babel dispersion was around the time of the birth of Peleg, because Genesis 10:25 states that one of Eber’s sons “was named Peleg, because in his time the earth was divided.” (Some argue that the division of the earth refers to catastrophic plate tectonics dividing the continents, but that had to have happened during the Flood itself; the better view is that the “dividing of the earth referred to in Genesis 10:25 was the confounding of languages at Babel, which resulted in the people moving away from each other.)

According to Genesis 11 (in the Masoretic text), Shem fathered Arphaxad two years after the flood, who fathered Shelah thirty-five years later, who fathered Eber thirty years later, who fathered Peleg thirty-four years later. This would place the birth of Peleg only 101 years after the Flood. But the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) adds a century to the last three ages in the sequence. If Septuagint ages are substituted for Masoretic ages, the data is 2+135+130+134=401, astonishingly close to the 416 years indicated by the Toltec legend. But it seems odd that the Toltec legend would track the Masoretic numbers for the pre-Flood chrono-genealogy of Genesis 5—with an age of the Antediluvian world only sixty years different from Ussher—then follow Septuagint numbers in Genesis 11. Also, the Masoretic omits Cainan between Arphaxad and Shelah, whereas some Septuagint manuscripts include Cainan, adding an extra 130 years to the calculation, placing Babel 531 years after the flood, not so uncannily close to the Toltec legend of 416 years. But the fact that the Toltec flood legend does not consistently track one version of the Bible is very strong evidence that the legend is genuinely pre-Columbian and pre-Christian. If it merely reflected Catholic teaching, the numerical data should reflect only one version of Scripture, not a combination of versions.

The Genesis Giants -- Part 6

July, 2019 David Read

The Findings of Science

There is much scientifically accepted evidence that modern man is smaller, shorter, and weaker than the men who preceded us. Although the currently accepted Darwinian paradigm is that modern humans evolved from Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy), a bipedal primate less than four feet tall, scientists are nevertheless finding a clear trend from larger, more robust Ice Age human remains to today’s smaller, weaker men. Scientists have given many names to the various types they’ve found—Cro-Magnon man, Neaderthal man, Kinnewick Man, Heidelberg Man, Meganthropus, Homo Erectus, Denisovan, etc.—but the common thread uniting these types is that they were incredibly robust, big-boned, big-jawed, and big toothed, and many of them were taller than modern man.

A.      Cro-Magnon Man

Darwinists do not claim “missing-link” status for this Ice Age man, discovered in 1868 in a rock shelter at Cro-Magnon, in the Dordogne region of France. Everyone acknowledges the humanity of this people, who are believed to have produced the amazing cave art of France and Spain. In fact, the typical two-paragraph article on Cro-Magnon man will assert that he “was anatomically identical to modern humans.” Not quite. The average Cro-Magnon man was about five inches taller than the average modern European man (6’1” versus 5’8”) and weighed more, as well.[i]

Early commentators were astonished at his size. Sir Arthur Keith stated that the Cro-Magnon race “was the finest the world has ever seen.”[ii] Another commentator noted that the tradition of a “race of giants in far-distant times was no myth.”

The teeth and jaws of the Cro-Magnons were larger than those of modern Europeans.[iii] Their faces were flatter, with more prominent cheekbones, and their skulls were larger, longer, and relatively lower than modern Europeans. Cro-Magnons also had a larger average brain size than modern humans. The modern human brain case typically falls between 1300-1500 cc, averaging around 1400 cc. Cro-Magnon specimens, by contrast, averaged over 1600 cc.[iv]

B.    Kennewick Man

On July 28, 1996, near Kennewick, Washington, two boys stumbled across a human skull while wading at the edge of the Columbia River, watching a boat race. They notified the local constabulary, which asked James C. Chatters, a forensic anthropologist, to investigate. Chatters determined that the bones were not from a recently deceased person. But the skeleton appeared to be that of a Caucasian, not a Native American, and there was a stone projectile point embedded in the man’s pelvis. Chatters thought the remains were those of a white pioneer who had perhaps been wounded by an Indian arrow.

Kennewick Man turned out to be much more ancient than Chatters had imagined. Chatters asked an anthropologist to examine the projectile point, and she determined that it was from an archeological period known as the Cascade phase, which archeologists have dated between 7,000 and 2,500 B.C. Chatters then sent a bone sample to Ervin Taylor, at the University of California at Riverside, for radiocarbon testing. Taylor reported a date of 8,410 years before the present, which matched the dating of the arrowhead or spear tip.[v]

Osteological research indicated that Kennewick Man was not of European origin. Rather, the race to which he had the closest affinity was the Ainu, a native people of Japan who look more Western than Asian. He also closely resembled a Polynesian race called the Moriori.[vi]

In 1940, partially mummified remains that came to be known as “Spirit Cave” Man were found in a cave in Nevada. This skeleton also turned out to be closely related to the Ainu, and had a Carbon-14 age similar to Kennewick man. Another specimen of the same racial type was found in 1978 about 100 miles from Spirit Cave and is known as “Wizard’s Beach” Man. Taken together, the three finds establish that a Caucasoid people similar to the Ainu explored North America in prehistoric times. In a creationist model, this period would probably correspond to within a few centuries of the post-Babel radiation.

Kennewick Man stood between 5’8” and 5’10” tall and was robust and muscular. He was “well-muscled and engaged in rigorous activity employing his arms.”[vii] Likewise, the Wizard’s Beach man impressed the physical anthropologists who analyzed his bones. “He was a big guy,” said one. “Obviously lots of protein in his diet.” His height was estimated to have been five feet, six inches. Another anthropologist described the bones as “large and dense,” and forensic scientists believe that he had been a vigorous, well-muscled man. Spirit Cave man was only five feet, two inches tall.[viii]

The robust and extraordinarily strong, but not particularly tall, physique of the Kennewick Man type is similar to Neanderthal Man, and, indeed, Kennewick Man has been compared to Neanderthal Man.[ix]

C.    Neanderthal Man

Neanderthal man was physically superior to modern man. Without question, he was stronger:

“One of the most characteristic features of the Neanderthals is the exaggerated massiveness of their trunk and limb bones. All of the preserved bones suggest a strength seldom attained by modern humans. Furthermore, not only is this robustness present among the adult males, as one might expect, but it is also evident in the adult females, adolescents, and even children.”[x]

It is not just the extreme robustness of their limb bones that indicates strength; their muscles left unusually deep and wide attachment scars on their bones.[xi] “Thick-boned, barrel-chested, a healthy Neandertal male could lift an average NFL linebacker over his head and throw him through the goalposts.”[xii] Valerius Geist of the University of Chicago, reports:

Neanderthal was far more powerful than modern humans. Whereas archeologists can experimentally duplicate the wear patterns on tools such as were used by people from the Upper Paleolithic [e.g., Cro-Magnon man, later than Neanderthal], the wear patterns on Neanderthal’s tools cannot be duplicated. We do not have the strength to do it. Neanderthal’s skeleton reflects a supremely powerful musculature.[xiii]

Neanderthal man had significantly larger teeth than modern man.[xiv]

Neanderthal man also had a larger cranial capacity than do modern humans—about 10 percent larger on average—hence there is no anatomical reason to believe that Neanderthal was not at least as intelligent as modern man.[xv] One specimen, Amud 1, found at Wadi Amud, Israel, had a brain case of 1,740 cc, substantially larger than the average modern human.[xvi] Although they were extraordinarily strong, the Neanderthals were not tall. The average height was five feet, six and a half inches—about two inches shorter than the average modern European man.[xvii]

D.      Heidelberg Man

Also known as Homo heidelbergensis, the type specimen was a lower jawbone, bearing most of its teeth, which was found in a gravel pit near Mauer, Germany, in 1907. Many authorities have classified it as either Homo erectus or archaic Homo sapiens, but the current trend is to return to the taxon Homo heidelbergensis. The jaw is extremely robust, much larger than a modern human jawbone, but it lacks a protruding chin.

One recent textbook states that the Mauer mandible “is quite large and robust, but in comparison with many other Homo erectus mandibles, it is small.”[xviii]

The teeth are larger than modern human teeth but overlap with ancient human teeth and are smaller than robust Homo erectus teeth, illustrating a trend of declining tooth size as we move from more ancient to more modern humans.

E.      Homo Erectus

Homo erectus “man walking upright” differs from modern humans primarily in having a very pronounced brow ridge (as with Neanderthal man) with some specimens having a slightly smaller cranial capacity (the opposite of Neanderthal man).[xix] Homo erectus remains have been found in association with tools—stone hand-axes of the Acheulian type—with oval huts, and with evidence of the controlled use of fire, indicates that Homo erectus was fully human. His smaller cranial capacity certainly does not rule out humanity.[xx]

It was once believed that Homo erectus was short, like Neanderthal Man, but this notion was conclusively falsified when a relatively complete skeleton was found near Lake Turkana in Kenya in 1984. The only missing parts were the hands and feet. “Turkana Boy,”—also known as “KNM-WT 15000,” “15K”, and “the Nariokotome skeleton”—was five feet, three inches tall, but forensic scientists estimated that he was only 11 or 12 years old. Had he lived, he would have grown significantly. The research team estimated that as an adult he would have stood about six feet, one inch tall, “with a possible height of up to six feet ten inches if he had yet to go into an adolescent growth spurt.”[xxi]

The surprising stature of Turkana Boy prompted Alan Walker and Richard Leakey to re-measure the other Homo erectus fossils. In doing so, they discovered that Turkana Boy was not unusually tall for Homo erectus. He was average.[xxii]

“I calculated that, if these individuals were alive today and if by some bizarre chance they were all males, this erectus ‘population’ would rank among the tallest 17 percent of human populations worldwide. But it is far more likely that some these individuals were females (for that is what their anatomy indicates to me). In that case, the erectus population would rank among an even smaller percentage of the world’s populations in terms of height. Their size is truly astounding.”[xxiii]

Homo erectus was also incredibly strong, if Turkana Boy is any indication. Turkana Boy had “exceptional strength relative to modern humans, . . . literally inhuman strength.”[xxiv] He was “long-legged and immensely strong,” . . . “stronger than any living human.”[xxv]

Robust bones were the norm for our ancestors, including the recognized hominid categories. “In fact, it is our own rather puny bones which seem to be the exception.”[xxvi]

A group of distinguished paleoanthropologists surveyed the mechanical strength of the femurs of a sequence of fossil hominid categories presumed to represent an evolutionary progression—from Homo habilis,[xxvii] to Homo erectus, to archaic Homo sapiens (Neanderthals), to modern humans. They found that the older the specimen, the more robust the bones. Modern human bones are by far the weakest.

The earlier members of genus Homo, had incredibly robust bones compared to ours. “In fact, we could document a steady decline in robustness of the femur at midshaft (measured as the area of cortical bone in a cross section) through our sequence. This change is not just a downward trend; it is an exponential decline in cortical area . . .”[xxviii]

Clearly, the skeletons of the recognized hominid taxonomic categories show a marked trend from taller, stronger, and more robust to shorter, weaker, and more “gracile” (smaller), as one goes from the oldest categories to the most recent.

F.    Meganthropus

The Chinese have for centuries sold “dragon’s teeth” and bones to be ground up and sold as medicines. In 1935, a Dutch anthropologist named Gustav H.R. von Koenigswald came across a very interesting fossil tooth in an apothecary shop in Hong Kong.[xxix] It was the molar of a human or an ape, but the crown was six times larger than the tooth of a modern man, and twice as large as the largest ape tooth.[xxx] Von Koenigswald realized that he had stumbled upon a new species of primate, which he christened, Gigantopithecus blacki. The genus name means “gigantic ape,” and the species name was in honor of Davidson Black, a professor at Peking Union Medical College who led the famous “Peking Man” excavation.[xxxi]

Since von Koenigswald’s discovery, Chinese researchers have found three jaw bones and over a thousand teeth, not only in apothecary shops but also in caves.[xxxii] Gigantopithecus blacki remains have been found in Vietnam and in the Hubei and Sichuan provinces of China. If bipedal, Gigantopithecus would have stood some nine or ten feet tall and weighed over 1,000 pounds.

A few years later, in 1941, one of von Koenigswald’s native collectors in Java found part of a lower jaw that was unmistakably human, but twice the size of a typical human jaw. Von Koenigswald named this specimen Meganthropus paleojavanicus— “giant man of ancient Java.” The specimen is believed to have been found in the lower Pleistocene, or Ice Age strata.[xxxiii] Von Koenigswald concluded that Meganthropus was a giant offshoot of the main line of human evolution. This was not the conclusion, however, of another scientist who examined the fossils.

In 1934, when Davidson Black died of a heart attack, Franz Weidenreich was invited to Peking to take over the supervision of the “Peking Man” excavations. Weidenreich was German and Jewish, and at 61 was forced to flee Nazi Germany for the United States, where he briefly taught at the University of Chicago before being invited to Peking Union Medical College. World War II eventually forced Weidenreich back to the U.S., where he became a visiting scholar at the American Museum of Natural History. Weidenreich had the foresight to make plaster casts of all the “Peking Man” fossils before returning to the United States, which is fortunate because the original fossils were lost during the war.

Weidenreich was a careful scientist whose qualifications on human anatomy were impeccable.  Stephen Jay Gould referred to Weidenreich as “perhaps the world’s greatest human anatomist.”[xxxiv] Paleoanthropologist Alan Walker describes Weidenreich as “a superb anatomist and analyst” and states that, “I have noticed that his descriptions are so thorough that he defined new terms for previously unremarked anatomical structures. His meticulous scholarship earned the respect of his Chinese colleagues, as it earned mine, years later, when I had to consult his works closely.”[xxxv] Weidenreich correctly surmised, before Piltdown Man was finally exposed as a hoax, that the Piltdown jaw and skull did not belong to the same individual.[xxxvi]

After examining the Meganthropus jaw and the Gigantopithecus teeth, Weidenreich concluded that both were direct ancestors of modern humans. He believed that Homo sapiens evolved from Gigantopithecus by way of Meganthropus.[xxxvii] “I believe that all these forms have to be ranged in the human line and that the human line leads to giants, the farther back it is traced. In other words, the giants may be directly ancestral to man.”[xxxviii]

In fact, Weidenreich believed that Gigantopithecus was not an ape but a human:

Meganthropus vs. modern man

“Von Koenigswald did not seize the opportunity to complete his first diagnosis or to correct it on the basis of the evidence provided by the much better-preserved teeth. So I took up the question again, suspecting that there might be some relation between these gigantic ape teeth from China and the giant human jaw from Java. My suspicion proved justified.

“A thorough comparative study revealed that the teeth are those of a member of the undoubtedly most advanced primate group, as rightly stated by von Koenigswald (1935). However, this primate was not a giant ape but a giant man and should, therefore, be called Gigantanthropus and not Gigantopithecus. If the size of the crown is disregarded, the relative size of the individual cusps, their arrangement, and their special form agree with none of the anthropoids, either living or fossil, but with man; also the teeth are more like those of Pithecanthropus [Java Man], Sinanthropus [Peking Man] and modern man than those of other types.”[xxxix]

Weidenreich’s conclusion was not hasty or ill considered, and was stated in a series of lectures at the University of California, as well as in his 1946 book, Apes, Giants, and Man.

Weidenreich believed that tremendous size was a general characteristic of early man:

Are gigantism and massiveness indispensable features of the earliest mankind, and, consequently, characteristic of all human forms; or have they to be regarded as accidental, regional or individual variations as they occur in other mammalian groups? The occurrence of large fossil human skulls with very thick individual bones in early or late stages, for instance in Homo soloensis, Homo rhodesiensis and in the Heidelberg jaw, seem to indicate that gigantism and massiveness may have been a general or at least a wide-spread character of early mankind.[xl]

When Weidenreich wrote Apes, Giants, and Man, Gigantopithecus was generally regarded as a human ancestor of gigantic proportions.[xli] In the 1950s and 60s, however, Chinese scientists found more Gigantopithecus jaws, and these showed a closer affinity with the apes than with humans. Consequently, most anthropologists rejected Weidenreich’s conclusion that Gigantopithecus was an ancestor of mankind and have reverted to Von Koenigswald’s conclusion that Gigantopithecus was an extinct giant ape.[xlii]

Weidenreich’s generalization regarding the massiveness of human ancestry was not, however, based solely on his diagnosis of Gigantopithecus as a human ancestor, but upon the trend of the entire fossil record.

As to Meganthropus, various attempts have been made to fit him into an evolutionary framework that leads from “Lucy” to modern humanity. Although the jaw was larger than other specimens of Homo erectus, it has been suggested that Meganthropus was a specimen of erectus, the size difference being attributed to sexual dimorphism (meaning that the males were much larger than females).[xliii] It has been suggested that Meganthropus was a “robust” or “hyper-robust” australopithecine, a type very different from the gracile “Lucy” type of australopithecine.[xliv]

A study published only three months ago states that Meganthropus remains sui generis, and should not be sunk into Gigantopithecus or Homo Erectus. Interestingly, the study also concludes that Pithecanthropus (better known as “Java Man”), a type found in 1891 by Eugene DuBois that many believe should be sunk into Homo Erectus, belongs with Meganthropus:

Since the first discovery of Pithecanthropus (Homo) erectus by E. Dubois at Trinil in 1891, over 200 hominid dentognathic remains have been collected from the Early to Middle Pleistocene deposits of Java, Indonesia, forming the largest palaeoanthropological collection in South East Asia. Most of these fossils are currently attributed to H. erectus. . . . To resolve the taxonomic uncertainty surrounding these and other contentious Indonesian hominid specimens, we used occlusal fingerprint analysis (OFA) to reconstruct their chewing kinematics; we also used various morphometric approaches based on microtomography to examine the internal dental structures. Our results confirm the presence of Meganthropus as a Pleistocene Indonesian hominid distinct from Pongo, Gigantopithecus and Homo, and further reveal that Dubois’s Homo erectus paratype molars from 1891 . . . are more likely to belong to Meganthropus..[xlv]

G. The Denisovans

The Denisova Cave, named after a Russian hermit who lived there in the 18th Century, is in south-central Siberia, near the borders of Kazakhstan, China, and Mongolia. In 2008, Michael Shunkov from the Russian Academy of Sciences and archaeologists from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of Novosibirsk investigated the cave. They found the finger bone of a girl, two teeth, a toe bone, and a partial jawbone.

The single finger bone was unusually broad and robust, much larger than is seen in modern people. And it belonged to a female, which, given typical sexual dimorphism, indicates that the Denisovan men must have been extremely robust. The tooth, which is twice the size of a modern human molar, does not share the derived morphological features seen in Neanderthal or modern human teeth.

Based upon a protein analysis study published earlier this year, a partial jaw bone with attached molars found in 1980, called the Xiahe mandible, has been assigned to the Denisovans. The fossil has a morphology “typical of Middle Pleistocene hominin fossils”: It is very robust and has very large teeth.[xlvi]

Various items of jewelry were found in the Denisova Cave, including an ivory ring and a bracelet. The bracelet was made of dark green chlorite, highly polished, with a 0.8 centimeter hole drilled through it. This surprised the researchers, who did not expect to find such advanced artifacts with such ancient human remains. Mikhail Shunkov says the Denisovans were very advanced, much more so than their cousins the Neanderthals:

“'These [artifacts] were made using technological methods — boring stone, drilling with an implement, grinding — that are traditionally considered typical for a later time, and nowhere in the world they were used so early, in the Paleolithic era. At first, we connected the finds with a progressive form of modern human, and now it turned out that this was fundamentally wrong. Obviously it was  Denisovans who left these things.'

This indicated that “the most progressive of the triad' (Homo sapiens, Homo Neanderthals and Denisovans) were Denisovans, who according to their genetic and morphological characters were much more archaic than Neanderthals and modern human.”[xlvii]

Conclusion

Even though it does not fit with their model, Darwinian scientists cannot avoid the evidence that the earliest human beings were larger than later types, and that there has been a decline in human size and stature as we move from Pleistocene to the present. This might be surprising to mainstream scientists, but it is exactly what the Creationist/Seventh-day Adventist model of earth history predicts. The antediluvians and early post-Flood humans were much larger, and we have gradually devolved to where we are today.

NOTES:

[i]. Stringer, Christopher, and Clive Gamble, In Search of the Neanderthals (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), p. 183.

[ii]. Sir Arthur Keith, as quoted by George McCready Price, Evolutionary Geology and the New Catastrophism (Pacific Press Pub. Assn., 1926), p. 302.

[iii]. Macnamara, N.C., Nature, March 7, 1901, as quoted by Price, supra, pp. 302-310. “These people of Cro Magnon and Menton were evidently almost a race of giants,” reports Price, “some of them being seven feet tall, with a very extraordinary muscular development, as proved by their bones . . .” See also Wilford, John Noble, “Big teeth in ancient jaw offer clues about our ancestors,” The New York Times, September 30, 2003. (The teeth and jaw were found in a cave in Romania, and given to a scientist in Cluj, who then gave them to Dr. Erik Trinkaus. “Dr. Trinkaus said the teeth were enormous by modern standards, an archaic characteristic closer to Neanderthals than modern humans. Yet in nearly every other respect examined, the early Europeans had thoroughly modern anatomies.”)

[iv]. Stringer, et al., at 82, 183.

[v]. Slayman, Andrew, “A Battle Over Bones,” Archeology, 50:1, Jan./Feb. 1997. http://www.archaeology.org/9701/etc/specialreport.html. Subsequent Carbon-14 tests dated the specimen even older, around 9300 year before the present.

[vi]. Joseph F. Powell and Jerome C. Rose, “Report on the Osteological Assessment of the ‘Kennewick Man’ Skeleton,” at http://www.cr.nps.gov/aad/kennewick/powell_rose.htm. See especially Table 7, http://www.cr.nps.gov/aad/kennewick/p_rtable7.htm. See also Dewar, Elaine, Bones: Discovering the First Americans (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001), pp. 509-511.

[vii]. Hill, Richard L., “Unforgiving Landscape Meant Rough Life for Kennewick Man,” The Oregonian, Dec. 22, 1999. Regarding the right humerus bone, the forensic scientists note, “The muscle markings are clear and well developed. The midshaft is bowed medially and suggests hyper development from extensive usage. The radiographs clearly show the build up of cortex along the lateral surface of the shaft especially within the region of the deltoid muscle insertion. This shape is not uncommon on individuals who engage in rigorous use of the arm such as modern weight lifters or construction laborers. The angle of the distal half of the shaft with the proximal half is at or just past the extreme end of the normal range.” Joseph F. Powell and Jerome C. Rose, “Report on the Osteological Assessment of the Kennewick Man.”

[viii]. “The Men from Spirit Cave and Wizard’s Beach,” Mammoth Trumpet, 12(2) 1997.

[ix]. “American Neanderthal? Unearthed Native American Could Help Solve Mystery,” Reuters/ABC News.com, Feb. 18, 2000. (“[Kennewick Man] has intrigued researchers because the features seem to suggest a more Caucasian than Asian origin. Others say he looks like an Ainu—the aboriginal people of Japan who are often said to be physically closer to Europeans than Japanese. Loring Brace, a specialist in bone measurements at the University of Michigan, says he has a simple explanation for this—both Kennewick Man and the Ainu, along with the people of Europe, descended from Neanderthals. ‘I have long maintained that Neanderthals are obviously the ancestors of living Europeans,’ Brace told a news conference held at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.”)

[x]. Lubenow, Marvin, Bones of Contention: A Creationist Assessment of Human Fossils, at 62, citing Eric Trinkaus, “Hard Times Among the Neanderthals,” Natural History, 87:10 (December 1978), p. 58.

[xi]. Stringer, et al., at 93.

[xii]. Shreeve, James, The Neandertal Enigma (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1995), p. 5.

[xiii]. Lubenow, at 62, citing Valerius Geist, “Neanderthal the Hunter,” Natural History, 90:1 (January 1981), p. 80.

[xiv]. Cuozzo, Jack, Buried Alive: the Startling Truth about Neanderthal Man (Green Forest, AK: Master Books, 1998), pp. 236, 237.

[xv]. Lubenow, at pp. 37, 38, 61; Shreeve, at 6; Stringer, et al., at 81-83.

[xvi]. Stringer, et al., at 82.

[xvii]. Stringer, et al., at 91, 92.

[xviii]. Larsen, Clark Spencer, Robert M. Matter, and Daniel L. Gebo, Human Origins: The Fossil Record (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998), p. 102.

[xix]. Homo erectus’ cranial capacity typically falls in the range of 850 to 1200 cc. (as opposed to 1300 to 1500 cc for modern humans).

[xx]. Skoyles, John R., “Human evolution expanded brains to increase expertise capacity not IQ: A resolution of the normal IQ but small brain anomaly.” On the net at http: http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000637/. (“Individuals exist with psychometrically normal IQ but Homo erectus sized brains.”) Among the examples Skoyles cites is Daniel Lyon, who worked for a railroad company in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was not retarded and could read and write, and had brain weighing 680 grams (with an estimated volume of 624 cc). Another famous example is Anatole France (1844-1924) a Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose brain weighed 1017 grams (933 cc) when he died. Allowing for brain shrinkage caused by old age, his brain volume when young would have been around 1013 cc., which is well within the range of Homo erectus. Among normal, modern human populations, there is no correlation between brain size and intelligence.

[xxi]. Walker, Alan, and Pat Shipman, The Wisdom of the Bones (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996), p. 191 (emphasis added).

[xxii]. Walker, et al., at 191-195.

[xxiii]. Walker, et al., at 194, 195.

[xxiv]. Walker, et al., at 199, 200.

[xxv]. Walker, et al., at 293 and at caption to figure 7.

[xxvi]. Stringer, et al., at 93.

[xxvii]. Homo habilis might not be a valid fossil category. See, e.g., Lubenow at 157-168; Michael A. Cremo and Richard L. Thompson, Forbidden Archeology (Los Angeles: Bahktivedanta Book Pub., 1993), pp. 709, 710; Ariel Roth, Origins (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald, 1998), p. 121. Fossils classified as Homo habilis must therefore be evaluated on a case by case basis, and I offer no opinion regarding the human or non-human status of any such fossil.

[xxviii]. Walker, et al., at 199, 200.

[xxix]. Von Koenigswald, G.H.R., “Gigantopithecus blacki, Von Koenigswald, a giant fossil hominoid from the Pleistocene of southern China,” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 43:295-325 (1952).

[xxx]. Weidenreich, Franz, Apes, Giants, and Man (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1946), p. 61.

[xxxi]. Ciochon, Russel L., John Olsen, and Jamie James, Other Origins: The Search for the Giant Ape in Human Prehistory (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), p. 90.

[xxxii]. Ciochon, et al., at 97, 93-100.

[xxxiii]. Cremo, et al., at 487, 498.

[xxxiv]. Gould, Stephen Jay, The Panda’s Thumb (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1980), p. 115.

[xxxv]. Walker, et al., at 66.

[xxxvi]. Weidenreich, at 23 (“Form and individual features of the brain case are generally acknowledged as those of modern man; those of the lower jaw, as anthropoid characteristics. Therefore, both skeletal elements cannot belong to the same skull. . . . In all finds in which subsequent accidental mixing-up of fragments could be excluded, disharmonies like those of the Piltdown case have never been noted.”) See also, Gould, Stephen Jay, The Panda’s Thumb (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1980), p. 115.

Weidenreich may have known Teilhard, who was in China in the 1930s and helped with the “Peking Man” dig.  It is remarkable that the Darwinist Jesuit mystic Teilhard de Chardin worked on both the Piltdown Man and the Peking Man sites; almost enough to make one a believer in conspiracy theories.

[xxxvii]. Cremo, et al., at 487, citing Simons, Elwyn L., and Peter C. Ettel, “Gigantopithecus,” Scientific American, January, 1970: 77-85

[xxxviii]. Weidenreich, at 61.

[xxxix]. Weidenreich, at 58, 59.

[xl]. Weidenreich, as quoted in “Science and the Secret Doctrine,” Theosophy, vol. 32, no. 11, September, 1944.

[xli]. Ciochon, et al., at 92.

[xlii]. Ciochon, et al., at 92, 93.

[xliii]. Ciochon, et a.l, at 48.

[xliv]. Cremo, et al., at 488, citing T. Jacob, “Paleoanthropological discoveries in Indonesia with special reference to finds of the last two decades,” Journal of Human Evolution, 2:473-485 (1973), at p. 475.

[xlv] Zanolli, et al, “Evidence for increased hominid diversity in the Early to Middle Pleistocene of Indonesia,” Nature Ecology & Evolution, volume 3, pages 755–764 (2019).

[xlvi] Fahu Chen, "A late Middle Pleistocene Denisovan mandible from the Tibetan Plateau" Nature, 569, pp. 409–412 (May 1, 2019)

[xlvii] Anna Liesowska, “Stone Bracelet is Oldest Ever Found in the World,” The Siberian Times, May, 7, 2015: http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/f0100-stone-bracelet-is-oldest-ever-found-in-the-world/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_acvNaIYG0.

The Genesis Giants -- Part 7

July, 2019 David Read

The Scarcity of Antediluvian Human Remains

In contrast to the copious reports of post-Flood giants, it is much more difficult to find evidence of human remains, giant or otherwise, in Flood-laid strata. The absence of such remains is a thorny problem for biblical creationists of all denominations. Although there are reports of human remains or human artifacts in Flood-laid strata, most such reports date from the Nineteenth Century, and all are highly controversial.

Joseph Robert Jochmans of South Carolina, who did research for Rene Noorbergen’s Secrets of the Lost Races, relates the following story:

In July, 1877, four prospectors were looking for gold and silver outcroppings in a desolate, hilly area near the head of Spring Valley, not far from Eureka, Nevada. Scanning the rocks, one of the men spotted something peculiar projecting from a high ledge. Climbing up to get a better look, the prospector was surprised to find a human leg bone and kneecap sticking out of solid rock. He called to his companions, and together they dislodged the oddity with picks. Realizing they had a most unusual find, the men brought it into Eureka, where it was placed on display.

The stone in which the bones were embedded was a hard, dark red quartzite, and the bones themselves were almost black with carbonization—indicative of great age. When the surrounding stone was carefully chipped away, the specimen was found to be composed of a leg bone [femur] broken off four inches above the knee, the kneecap and joint, the lower leg bones [tibia and fibula], and the complete bones of the foot. Several medical doctors examined the remains and were convinced that anatomically, they had indeed once belonged to a human being, and a very modern-looking one. But an intriguing aspect of the bones was their size: from knee to heel they measured 39 inches. Their owner in life had thus stood over 12 feet tall. Compounding the mystery further was the fact that the rock in which the bones were found was dated geologically to the era of the dinosaurs, the Jurassic, over 185 million years old. The local papers ran several stories on the marvelous find, and two museums sent investigators to see if any more of the skeleton could be located. Unfortunately, nothing else but the leg and foot existed in the rock.[i]

If this story is true, it is a stunning confirmation of the truth of the Adventist understanding of earth history.

The remains are of exactly the size that Ellen White tells us was the size of antediluvian men—over twelve feet tall—and the remains are found in strata that are unquestionable Flood laid—the Jurassic, or middle dinosaur strata. On the other hand, the story is not as well authenticated as we would like. It is conceivable that the bones in question could have been dinosaurian. No skull was recovered, and it is possible that, for country doctors untrained in comparative vertebrate anatomy, only the skull would be unmistakably diagnostic.

Jochmans relates a few more instances of human remains found in Flood-laid sediment. A human skull, portions of ribs, vertebrae and a collarbone were reported found in sandstone identified as lower Silurian.[ii] Not even a biblical creationist, however, would expect to find human remains in Silurian strata, because land-dwelling animals are not found in those Strata.

Cremo and Thompson report a discovery, in 1862, of human remains in a mine in Macoupin County, Illinois. “The bones, when found were covered with a crust or coating of hard glossy matter, as black as coal itself, but when scraped away left the bones white and natural.” The coal mine probably dates to the Upper Carboniferous, between 286 and 320 million years old, according to conventional geological dating.[iii] The Carboniferous was deposited during the Genesis Flood, and if genuine human remains were found in situ in Carboniferous strata, they would conclusively falsify both Lyellism and Darwinism.

There are also numerous reports of human footprints in Flood-laid strata. As to the most famous of these sites, the Cretaceous limestone of the Paluxy riverbed, near Glen Rose, Texas, there is no reliable evidence of genuine human tracks.[iv] But there are other reported human tracks that have not been falsified.

According to an article by Dr. W. H. Ballou that appeared in the American Weekly section of the New York Sunday American in 1922, Mr. John T. Reid, a mining engineer and geologist, was prospecting for fossils in Nevada when he looked down and found what appeared to be a human footprint. Closer inspection revealed that it appeared to be the imprint of the sole of a shoe. The fossil revealed the well-defined imprint of stitching, which had attached the welt to the sole, along the outline of the sole.

Reid brought the specimen to New York and to the attention of other scientists, including Dr. James F. Kemp of Columbia University, and Henry Fairfield Osborn, W. D. Mathew, and E. O. Hovey of the American Museum of Natural History. They agreed that it was the most remarkable natural imitation of an artificial object that they had ever seen. They agreed that the fossil was from the Triassic, and thus could not have been a shoe, even though there did appear to be imprints of threads.

According to Ballou’s article, Dr. Matthew wrote a brief report on the find and, in a comment reminiscent of the fossil controversy of the sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, declared it to be a remarkable natural imitation—a lusus naturae, or sport of nature. In researching and attempting to verify Ballou’s article, Cremo and Thompson inquired of the American Museum and were told that Dr. Matthew’s report was not in AMNH’s files.

According to the article, Reid persisted with his investigation of the imprint, taking it to a micro-photographer and analytical chemist of the Rockefeller Institute, who, on his own time, made microphotographs of the specimen. “The microphoto magnifications are twenty times larger than the specimen itself, showing the minutest detail of thread twist and warp, proving conclusively that the shoe sole is not a resemblance but is strictly the handiwork of man. Even to the naked eye the threads can be seen distinctly and the definitely symmetrical outlines of the shoe sole. Inside this rim and running parallel to it is a line which appears to be regularly perforated as if for stitches.”[v] 

Another well-documented case concerns bipedal trackways found in the Carboniferous of Kentucky. One set of tracks was discovered in 1885 at the summit of Big Hill in the Cumberland Mountains in Jackson County, Kentucky. Apparently, road-building activity uncovered the trackways on a layer of Carboniferous limestone. A professor J.F. Brown of Berea College was called in to investigate, as reported in the American Antiquarian.[vi]

Another set was found in the 1930s on a farm belonging to Mr. O. Finnell in the hills in the southern part of Rockcastle County, Kentucky. Another professor from Berea College, Wilbur Greeley Burroughs, investigated the site. Professor Burroughs concluded that,

during the beginning of the Upper Carboniferous (Coal Age) Period, creatures that walked on their two hind legs and had human-like feet, left tracks on a sand beach in Rockcastle County, Kentucky. This was the period known as the Age of Amphibians when animals moved about on four legs or more rarely hopped, and their feet did not have a human appearance. But in Rockcastle, Jackson and several other counties in Kentucky, as well as in places from Pennsylvania to Missouri inclusive, creatures that had feet strangely human in appearance and that walked on two hind legs did exists. The writer has proved the existence of these creatures in Kentucky. With the cooperation of Dr. C.W. Gilmore, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology, Smithsonian Institution, it has been shown that similar creatures lived in Pennsylvania and Missouri.[vii]

Burroughs stated that “there are three pairs of tracks showing left and right footprints. . . . Each footprint has five toes and a distinct arch. The toes are spread apart like those of a human being who has never worn shoes.”

David L. Bushnell of the Smithsonian suggested that Indians had carved the prints. To rule out this hypothesis Burroughs studied a cross-section of the prints under the microscope. Microscopic analysis of the density of sand grains confirmed that the grains under the track were closer together.

The sand grains within the tracks are closer together than the sand grains of the rock just outside the tracks due to the pressure of the creature’s feet. Even the sand grains in the arch of one of the best preserved tracks are not as close together as in the heel of the same track, though closer together than the sand outside the track. This is because there was more pressure upon the heel than beneath the arch of the foot. In comparing the texture of sandstone, only the same kind of grains and combinations of grains within and outside of the tracks are considered.[viii]

There were no telltale marks of carving, either.[ix] Measuring the density of sand grains is considered a reliable technique for determining whether a track was carved or was impressed before the sediment hardened. This same technique was used to determine that some of the most human-like Paluxy River tracks were carved, and not genuine.[x]

A few antediluvian artifacts have also been reported, including a gold thread in Carboniferous stone,[xi] a metallic vase-like object from the Precambrian rock of Massachusetts,[xii] a gold chain in Carboniferous coal in Illinois,[xiii] a carved stone in the Carboniferous of Iowa,[xiv] an iron cup from the Carboniferous of Oklahoma,[xv] and metallic tubes from the Cretaceous of France.[xvi] If any of these finds is genuine, and was genuinely in situ in the indicated strata, it destroys the entire Lyellian/Darwinian worldview. Very seldom, however, has anyone even claimed to find human artifacts that might be of antediluvian origin.[xvii]

What accounts for the, at best, extreme rarity of pre-Flood human traces or remains? It has been suggested that the pre-Flood population remained quite small.[xviii] This has the flavor of an excuse. Assuming that antediluvian women were fertile for a third of their lives, they would have been fertile for 300 years. According to Jewish tradition, Adam and Eve had 56 children, thirty-three sons and twenty-three daughters.[xix] Assuming that each couple had six children—an unrealistically conservative assumption—Whitcomb and Morris calculate that in the 1650 pre-Flood years, the antediluvian population could easily have reached one billion.[xx] (Ellen White refers to the antediluvian population as “vast.”[xxi])

Yet it would appear that the Genesis Flood utterly destroyed the antediluvians, whatever their numbers, leaving no trace of them or their artifacts. With regard to artifacts, God seems to have supernaturally intervened to destroy them:

The people first beheld the destruction of the works of their own hands. Their splendid buildings, and the beautiful gardens and groves where they had placed their idols, were destroyed by lightning from heaven, and the ruins were scattered far and wide. . . . As the violence of the storm increased, trees, buildings, rocks, and earth were hurled in every direction. The terror of man and beast was beyond description.[xxii]

With regard to the bodies of the people themselves, there have been several suggestions. It would seem that during the Flood, people, being highly intelligent and highly mobile, would have reached the highest ground and would have been among the last to be carried away by the deluge. By this time, most of the sediment that would deposited during the Flood had already been laid.

Additionally, studies have shown that both living and dead mammals tend to float on water. In the case of dead animals, gases created during decomposition aid buoyancy.[xxiii] Thus, mammalian remains would have tended to come to rest on top of the Flood-laid sediments as the floodwaters subsided and drained. And thus, most of the human and mammal remains would have escaped burial and fossilization in Flood-laid sediments.

In the natural course, the remains would have decomposed on the surface of the ground, leaving few if any fossils. Ellen White tells us, however, that God supernaturally intervened to prevent this process running its course:

Everywhere were strewn the dead bodies of men and beasts. The Lord would not permit these to remain to decompose and pollute the air, therefore He made of the earth a vast burial ground. A violent wind which was caused to blow for the purpose of drying up the waters [Gen. 8:1], moved them with great force, in some instances even carrying away the tops of the mountains and heaping up trees, rocks, and earth above the bodies of the dead.[xxiv]      

Clearly, God must have buried the bodies deep, making them difficult to find or stumble upon.

Although the lack of antediluvian human fossils is a serious problem for creationists, Darwinists have a similar problem. If humans have been around for 200,000 years in more or less their present form, and at least another two million years as transitional creatures, scientists should have found many more hominid and human fossils than they have, to say the least. “The creationist difficulty of explaining the scarcity of human [fossils from] the short period before the flood,” writes Ariel Roth, “is probably not as serious as the evolutionist problem of accounting for the sparsity of human remains and activity during at least a half million years of proposed human (Homo sapiens) evolution.”[xxv]

And the lack of human fossils is far from the Darwinists’ most serious difficulty with the fossil record. Recall that at least half of the predicted fossil record is completely missing. “If my theory be true,” wrote Darwin, “it is indisputable that before the lowest [Cambrian] stratum was deposited, long periods elapsed, as long as, or probably far longer than, the whole interval from the [Cambrian] age to the present day; and that during these vast, yet quite unknown, periods of time, the world swarmed with living creatures.”[xxvi]

Yet the fossil record reveals not a trace of those swarms of living creatures.

NOTES:

[i]. Jochmans, J.R., “Strange Relics from the Depths of the Earth.” Found all over the Internet, including at http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3924ba1b649c.htm. Jochmans does not cite a source for this story, but Scientific American and American Antiquarian, ca. 1880s, would be good places to look.

[ii]. Jochmans, supra, citing Scientific American, 1880, reprinting the particulars of a discovery made in the spring of 1880, first reported in the St. Louis Republican.

[iii]. Cremo, et al., at 454, citing The Geologist, December 1862.

[iv]. Around 1950, a Seventh-day Adventist researcher named Clifford L. Burdick claimed to have found human tracks in the Cretaceous limestone of the Paluxy Riverbed. Two Adventist science Ph.Ds (Southwestern Adventist University is about thirty miles from the site), Berney Neufeld and Arthur Chadwick, have both repudiated the supposed man tracks. Neufeld sectioned some of the tracks in the early 1970s. The sections indicated that the tracks were probably carved hoaxes. See Neufeld, “Dinosaur Tracks and Giant Men” Origins, 2(2):64-76 (1975) http://www.grisda.org/origins/02064.htm. Later creationist researchers have claimed that certain elongate tracks were “giant man tracks,” but it appears that the better explanation is that three-toed dinosaurs made these tracks in soupy mud. The toes filled in before the tracks were preserved. See Kuban, “The Taylor Site ‘man tracks,’” Origins Research 9:1-10 (1986).

[v]. Cremo, et al., at pp. 807, 808, citing Ballou, W. H. “Mystery of the Petrified ‘shoe sole’ 5,000,000 years old,” American Weekly section of the New York Sunday American, October 8, 1922. This paper is no longer in business, and I have not been able to secure a microfiche copy. There may be a mention of this story in a journal cited as follows: Victoria Institute, 80:21, 22 (1948). Harold W. Clark relates this story in his 1929 book Back to Creationism, at pp. 24-26. He writes:

When the discovery was first made, I wrote directly to the American Museum of Natural History, New York, for it was announced that the specimen had been sent there for study. In reply, the curator, W. D. Mathew, stated that he had examined it, but, to quote his exact words, that ‘the discovery is of course arrant nonsense. The specimen is, in fact, a flat siliceous concretion, of a type not uncommon in limestones, with some accidental resemblance to a part of a shoe-sole, weathered to a rusty brown and with a row of little holes near the margin where a band of small calcite crystals, formed at one stage of the growth of the conretion, has weathered out.’ . . . It certainly is remarkable that the ‘flat siliceous concretion’ should resemble a shoe-sole so closely both in shape, color, and in the possession of a row of little holes just where the sewing should be, and not only that, but show some portions of the thread left so plain that the very twist of the thread can be measured.

Jochmans relates a very similar story in “Strange relics from the depths of the earth.” Although Jochman’s story has a different date (1927, instead of 1922) and a different discoverer (Albert E. Knapp, instead of John T. Reid), it is so similar to Cremo and Thompson that it must be a garbled version of the same story (or perhaps Cremo and Thompson’s is the garbled version). I reproduce Jochman’s version here:

One of the most remarkable tracks was found in Fisher Canyon, Pershing County, Nevada. On January 25, 1927, an amateur geologist named Albert E. Knapp was descending a small hill in the canyon, when he spotted the fossil laying topside up among a pile of loose rocks. He picked up the find, and took it home with him. Upon closer examination, Knapp was astounded to discover, "it is a layer from the heel of a shoe which had been pulled up from the balance of the heel by suction, the rock being in a plastic state at the time." The shoe print was in a marvelous state of preservation - the edges of the heel were smooth and rounded off as if cut, and its right side appeared more worn than the left - suggesting it had been worn on the right foot. But what Knapp found really amazing was that the rock in which the heel mark was made, was Triassic limestone—225 million years old—which runs in a belt through the canyon hills he had been exploring. The rock was later examined by an expert geologist at the Rockefeller Foundation, who confirmed Knapp's analysis. The presence of minute crystals of sulphide of mercury throughout spaces in the fossil also testified to it being of great antiquity.

The real surprise about the age-old heel imprint, however, did not come until micro-photographs revealed that the leather had been stitched by a double row of stitches, the twists of the threads is very discernable. One line followed along the heel's outer edge, and the second line paralleled the first precisely, inwards by one-third of an inch. What baffled investigators was the fact that this double-stitching had been done with thread much smaller, and more refined in workmanship, than that used by shoe-makers in 1927, when the fossil print was discovered. As Mr. Samuel Hubbard, Honorary Curator of Archaeology of the Oakland Museum in California, commented: "There are whole races of primitive men on earth today, utterly incapable of sewing that moccasin. What becomes of the Darwinian theory in the face of this evidence that there were intelligent men on earth millions of years before apes were supposed to have evolved?”

[vi]. Jochmans, citing Allen, E.A., American Antiquarian, 7:39 (1885), and Louisville Courier-Journal, May 24, 1953.

[vii]. Cremo, et al., at p. 455, citing W. G. Burroughs, “Human-like footprints, 250 million years old,” The Berea Alumnus, (November, 1938) pp. 46, 47.

[viii]. Cremo, et al., at p. 455, 456.

[ix]. Cremo, et al., at pp. 454-458, citing Kent Previette, “Who went there?” Courier-Journal Magazine, Louisville, Kentucky, May 24, 1953; A.G. Ingalls, “The Carboniferous Mystery,” Scientific American, 162:14 (1940).

[x]. See, e.g., Neufeld, Berney, “Dinosaur Tracks and Giant Men,” Origins, 2(2):64-76 (1975).

[xi]. Cremo and Thompson, at p. 198, citing The Times of London, June 22, 1844. “A few days ago, as some workmen were employed in quarrying a rock close to the Tweed about a quarter of a mile below Rutherford-mill, a gold thread was discovered in the stone at a depth of eight feet.” Dr. Medd of the British Geological survey relates that the stone is of early Carboniferous age. See also Rene Noorbergen, Secrets of the Lost Races  (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1977), p. 42

[xii]. Cremo and Thompson, at pp. 798, 799, citing “A Relic of a Bygone Age,” Scientific American, (June 5, 1852). See also Jochmans (who cites Scientific American, 7:298-299 (June 1851)); Noorbergen, p. 41; Brad Steiger, Worlds Before Our Own (New York: Berkeley Books, 1978), p. 7, with illustration between pp. 88 and 89 (see below).

Metallic object found in “pudding stone” of Meeting House Hill

[xiii]. Cremo and Thompson, at p. 805, citing The Morrisonville Times, June 11, 1891. See also Noorbergen, at pp. 41, 42; Jochmans.

[xiv]. Cremo and Thompson, at p. 806, citing the Omaha, Nebraska, Daily News, April 2, 1897.

[xv]. Cremo and Thompson, pp. 806, 807, citing Wilbert H. Rusch, of Concordia College, Ann Arbor, Michigan, who learned of it in 1966 from Frank Lewis Marsh, of Andrews University, who learned of it from Robert Nordling, in 1949. Nordling had visited a friend’s museum in southern Missouri, and found among the curios an iron cup, which was on display along with an affidavit of Frank J. Kenwood of Sulphur Springs, Arkansas. Kenwood signed a sworn affidavit on November 27, 1948, stating, “While I was working in the Municipal Electric Plant in Thomas, Oklahoma, in 1912, I came upon a solid chunk of coal which was too large to use. I broke it with a sledgehammer. This iron pot fell from the center, leaving the impression or mould of the pot in the piece of coal. Jim Stall (an employee of the company) witnessed the breaking of the coal, and saw the pot fall out. I traced the source of the coal and found it came from the Wilburton, Oklahoma mines.” The mines in question are dated to the Carboniferous, about 312 million years old by conventional dating.

[xvi]. Cremo and Thompson, at pp. 809, 810, citing William R. Corliss, Ancient Man: A Handbook of Puzzling Artifacts (Glen Arm, MD: Sourcebook Project, 1978), pp. 652, 653.

[xvii]. The whole subject of out-of-place artifacts, or “ooparts” as Rene Noorbergen referred to them, calls for prudence, caution, and a healthy dose of skepticism. For many years, something called the “Coso artifact” was on everyone’s list of “ooparts.” (See, e.g., Noorbergen, at pp. 43-45). Three rockhounds—Mike Mikesell, Virginia Maxey, and Wallace Lane—found it in 1961 while looking for geodes in the Coso Mountains near Olancha, California. It appeared to be a regular geode, but Mikesell nearly ruined a ten-inch diamond saw trying to cut it in half, because he cut through a piece of metal. They sent the object to Ron Calais, who brought it to the attention of the Fortean Society, which specializes in anomalous finds. X-rays were taken of the rock, revealing that it contained some form of mechanical apparatus that looked a lot like a spark plug. To make a long story short, it was a spark plug. A 1920s-era Champion spark plug, to be exact. A couple of skeptics named Pierre Stromberg and Paul Heinrich submitted the information and X-rays of the artifact to Chad Windham of the Spark Plug Collectors of America, who positively identified it. It turned out that mining operations had been conducted in the Olancha area in the early twentieth century, and the spark plug was apparently discarded at that time and subsequently became encrusted with minerals in a way that mimicked the look of a geode. See, “The Coso Artifact: Mystery from the Depths of Time,” by Pierre Stromberg and Paul Heinrich.

[xviii]. See, e.g., Roth, Ariel, Origins (Hagerstown, MD: Review and Herald, 1998), pp. 123, 124; Woodmorappe, John, “A diluviological treatise on the stratigraphic separation of fossils,” Studies in Flood Geology (El Cajon, CA: Institute for Creation Research, 1999), pp. 57-61.

[xix]. Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, book I, ch. II, paragraph 3, in Whiston’s Josephus, the Excelsior Edition (London: William P. Nimmo) p. 27.

[xx]. Whitcomb, John C., and Henry Morris, The Genesis Flood (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 1961), pp. 25, 26.

[xxi]. White, Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 102 (“Of the vast population of the earth before the Flood, only eight souls believed and obeyed God’s world through Noah.”).

[xxii]. White, Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 99.

[xxiii]. Woodmorappe, supra, at p. 60, citing Schafer, Wilhelm, Ecology and Paleoecology of Marine Environments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972) p. 20.

[xxiv]. White, Patriarchs and Prophets, pp. 107, 108.

[xxv]. Roth, at p. 124.

[xxvi]. Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species, 1859, (Reprint: New York: Gramercy Books), p. 313.