In the summer of 1520, the Spanish expedition led by Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan was well into its circumnavigation of the globe. By the time he reached to the shores of Argentina, they had already encountered several native tribes, but there was something special about the natives of this land and the account from Antonio Pigafetta. The voyages official chronicler would capture the imaginations of Westerners for years to come.  According to his journal, the Patagonia Giants existed.  Myths and legends of giants go back through every

culture in every corner of the world, and in many cases the mythological aspect of  these giants is an obvious take. For example, Atlas the giant from Greek mythology was tasked with holding the world on his shoulders. However, sometimes the stories are not so heavily exaggerated and there is even evidence that Giants did once walk the earth in the 1800s.  When European settlers continue to expand West across the United States, they started coming across earthen mounds that had been constructed by native inhabitants of North America.

The settlers started excavating the mounds with little regard for the native cultures who had built them for religious ceremonial and burial purposes. The sensational headlines regarding what people found in those mounds all reported one-thing giant skeletons. However, these were not just a few obscure papers these were reputable sources like the New York Times and Scientific American. Even Abraham Lincoln references the Giants in 1848, during his visit to Niagara Falls saying, “the eyes of that species of extinct Giants whose bones fill the mounds of America have gazed on Niagara as ours do now.” According to the numerous articles published during this time, the skeletons were regularly found to be between seven and ten feet tall and some even reported taller individuals. According to one report in this New York Times article from 1885, if the whole frame is in proportion to two things that people found, the owner of these bones must have stood at 14 feet high. A representative from the Smithsonian Institution was there investigating the curious relic. The fact that a representative of the Smithsonian was investigating it may not seem out of the Ordinary, but it appears to be a theme seen throughout these reports. Some believe that the Smithsonian was involved in covering up these artifacts, which people often surrendered to the museum for further study.

Many people support this theory because no studies or exhibitions followed the initial reports of these anomalous discoveries. The accounts become even more compelling when you consider how many oral traditions of the Native American tribes in those regions tell of a race of Giants.  In a more recent discovery, 205 graves were unearthed in China’s Shandong Province. The archaeological dig found that a significant number of these men stood around the six-foot mark with the tallest man standing at 6 feet and 3 inches. Now this may not seem incredibly tall by today’s standards after all the average height of today’s NBA player is around 6 feet and 7 inches, but 5,000 years ago when these Longshan people were still alive, they would have loomed over their Neolithic contemporaries who were much shorter by comparison.  The Central American Mayans, for example, had an average male height of 5 feet and 2 inches and an average female height of 4 feet and 8 inches. The giants of Longshan were unusually tall for their time, but their height was not out of the realm of what we consider possible within the established narrative of our past. Thus, what happens when we find evidence that could completely up end that narrative?

In the 1960s, miners in the Otavi Mountains of Northern Namibia discovered the fossilized segments of a femur. The miners turned the mineralized bones over to Philip Tobias the late paleoanthropologist from South Africa, and it remains in his fault at Wits University in Johannesburg to this day. In Michael Tellingers video, posted in 2013, he visits Professor Francis Thackeray at the University to view the impressive artifact the professor identifies.  The mineralized bone as having belonged to a Homo Sapien and when he brings out an average-sized femur for comparison the difference is clear the fossilized femur appears to be at least twice the size of the normal one but despite the abnormal size there seems to be no outside  interest in studying or dating the artifact. While one piece of femur does not exactly amount to proof of a race of giants,  anthropologists agree that there are large gaps in the fossil record that mask absolute truths. Even the researchers who completed the largest study of hominid body size throughout evolution sometimes had to estimate Heights based off fragments as small as a single toe bone.  How would our evolutionary tree differ if they had recovered fragments of someone like Robert Wadlow?  He was the tallest man in recorded history. People knew him as the giant of Illinois. Wallow reached a height of 8 feet 11 inches before his death in 1914.  He suffered from hyperplasia of his pituitary gland, which results in an abnormally high level of human growth hormone and most of the well-known Giants of our time suffered from similar disorders.  One Photograph show Wadlow standing next to his father Harold Wadlow, who was 5 feet and 11 inches tall, but standing next to his son he appears almost dwarf-like with his head coming up just over his sons waste and this comparison happens to be reminiscent of the Giants of Patagonia.

According to Antonio Pigafetta’s journal, one day without anyone expecting it we saw a giant who was on the shore.  He was so tall that the tallest of us only came up to his waist. The account goes on to say that two of these giants were seized as hostages, but they did not survive the journey back to Spain, which may sound a good convenient coincidence, but considering that only 18 of the 270 men who began the voyage made it back alive their odds of survival were not very great to begin with.  Even Magellan himself, did not make it back 60 years later.  When Sir Francis Drake made it to Patagonia during his circumnavigation, his nephew wrote that Magellan had exaggerated the height of these natives, stating that the men were only five cubits, which is seven feet and six inches tall.  Thus, even by today’s standards these were massive people.  We will probably never know if giant human populations walked the Earth or know for sure how much truth there is to the giant mythologies present throughout ev

ery culture. However consider this most animals that walk the Earth today have a giant prehistoric ancestor. For example, the great white sharks have the Megalodon who beats their size by about 40 feet. There was the Titanoboa a giant snake, which reached 42 feet in length.  Even sloths had a giant ancestor the Mega-therium and these beasts were as big as modern-day elephants. Therefore, it is very likely that some of our ancestors were giant people twice the size of modern living populations.

PRIMARY SOURCES: GAIA Videos on Giant Humans