This past week I discovered an interesting little tidbit in Facebook feed from a paranormal group about Native American encounters with giant hominoids in ancient times. Included in the article was the above illustration that sparked my interest simply because it looked like the cover of an old Turok Son of Stone comic book. Nostalgia aside, the accompanying story jarred my memory of something I had read years ago about the discovery of a giant skeleton in Lompoc, California sometime in the 1800s. This again sparked my curiosity and I was able to find the story with a quick online search.
In 1833, a group of Mexican soldiers stationed in Lompoc, were digging a powder-magazine pit on the old Lompoc Rancho one morning when they unearthed a human skeleton. This skeleton, found beneath a layer of cemented gravel, was 12 feet tall. The giant had double rows of teeth on its upper and lower jaws and was surrounded by burial offerings such as carved shells, huge stone axes, and porphyry blocks covered with hieroglyphic symbols.
Fearing that the find was a horrible, evil omen, the local Indians panicked. To head off trouble, authorities re-buried the mammoth remains somewhere on the rancho. This was not such a unique event. Giant skeletons were discovered all over America during nineteenth and early twentieth-century archaeological and mining projects. Dozens of similar remains were found in Lovelock, Nevada and the mound country in central Minnesota.
Indians in these areas were familiar with the giants and said their ancestors fought bloody battles against the giants. Archaeologists of today have written off the stories as hoaxes or fantasy, but we can't be sure. All of the giants remains have been lost or destroyed due to poor record keeping practices of those old days. Some day, if excavation occurs in the hills around Lompoc, they may again uncover the 12 foot wonder.
Interestingly enough my search also yielded this interesting newspaper story from July 18, 1908:
Santa Monica. —What is believed to be the burial ground of the giant race which inhabited these shores before the discovery of California by Cabrillo was found last week by campers. On the beach of Malibu ranch, where they camped, the party observed a skull protruding out of the ocean’s shelving bank of sand and gravel. Digging a few minutes they unearthed fourteen more skulls and a number of complete skeletons, all more than seven and several over eight feet long. A large collection of heavy stone mortars, pestles, utensils of various kinds and arrow points were dug up near by.
Strangely enough, there are many more such stories from the 19th and early 20th century out there. Many of these can be simply written off as hoaxes due to the fact that many newspaper writers fabricated stories like this to get people to buy their publication. Others, however, may indeed be based on actual events.
The fact that several tribes of Native Americans share stories of encounters and, in some instances, even prolonged wars against races of giants adds credibility to the idea that such beings once truly existed. Many readers who commented on the original Facebook post that I mentioned earlier speculated that the Indians may have encountered Vikings. Though the indigenous people of North America undoubtedly encountered Viking warriors, their description of these giants doesn't seem to exactly match. These encounters on the east coast may have indeed been Vikings, but how do you explain the stories from the Midwest and California?
Interestingly enough the Vikings had a mythology about giants as well:
Although the word jötunn is most often translated as "giant," because many of them were considerably larger than humans, the word also has other meanings, such as "ogre," "troll," or "monster," as not all jötunn in Norse mythology were literally enormous. The diacritical spellings jtunn, iötunn, and itunn are among the options.
A giant was known as Jotun or Iotun in the realm of the Norse. Giants come in many distinct varieties. The most prevalent giants were the frost-giants, who were residents of Jotunheim, one of the nine planets. Utgard, the frost-giants' stronghold and the residence of Utgard-Loki or Utgardaloki, served as Jotunheim's capital. The giants' homeland is frequently referred to as Giantland.
There also tales of wars between the Vikings and a race of giant hairy creatures that invaded their lands and were in direct competition for food, water and other resources.
One way to try to explain what the Native Americans were encountering can possibly explained by what exactly ancient cultures considered 'giant'. It is commonly believed that in past civilizations anyone who was larger than a typical human being was considered a giant. A good example of this is the most famous giant of ancient literature, Goliath, who according to his description in the Bible was approximately 9 and 1/2 feet tall. A large human being for certain, but not as large as he has been portrayed in illustrations and popular culture and he certainly wasn't 'Godzilla-sized' like the three fellows in the above painting. To put it more into perspective, the staring line-up of an NBA team would be seen as giants to the people of ancient times.
Goliath was not the only giant mentioned in the holy scriptures in fact there were several races of such beings that included the Amorites, Emim, Zuzim, Rephaim, Nephilim and Anakim. According to the book of Amos the Amorites were truly monstrous indeed stating that they were as tall as Cedars which in the holy land grow as tall as 120 feet.
Yet it was I who destroyed the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars, and he was as strong as the oaks; yet I destroyed his fruit above and his roots beneath. Also it was I who brought you up from the land of Egypt, and led you forty years through the wilderness, to possess the land of the Amorite (Amos 2:9–10).
The Nephilim were the spawn of an unholy union between heavenly beings (presumably fallen angels) and earthly women.
There were giants [nephilim] on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of men and they bore children to them. Those were the mighty men who were of old, men of renown (Genesis 6:4).9
There are so many wonderful and mysterious stories about monsters in the Bible!
These Biblical accounts were also mentioned in Greek mythology as the Nephilim and their human consorts are attributed as the parents of many of the Greek deities.
The antediluvian Nephilim are the product of actual marriages between gods and women. The only Greek god who really marries a mortal is Dionysus, but several divine–human relationships produce children who are divinised – Apollo and Coronis, Zeus and Leda, Zeus and Alcmene. - Cambridge University
These ancient texts show that to the people of that time giants were simply another species of human but today we have to ask the question of where did they all go? According to the accounts of both the Native Americans and Vikings they were all killed off in conflicts that spanned generations. To other cultures around the globe they never went away. In Russia to this day there reports of sightings of what the locals call The Almas (Alama or Almasty) which is reportedly a large primitive race of people. In the 1800s one of the giants was allegedly captured.
A wild woman named Zana is said to have lived in the isolated mountain village of T'khina fifty miles from Sukhumi in Abkhazia in the Caucasus; some have speculated she may have been an Almasty.
Captured in the mountains in 1850 Zana was violent towards her captors at first but soon became domesticated and assisted with simple household chores. Zana is said to have had sexual relations with a man of the village named Edgi Genaba, and gave birth to a number of children of apparently normal human appearance. Several of these children, however, died in infancy. Some commentators have attributed these early deaths to Zana's genetic incompatibility (as an Almas) with humans.- Source
There is of course the thousands of reports from around the globe of giant hairy hominoids that are commonly known as Bigfoot or Sasquatch. Despite what you may think of that phenomena it should be noted that the descriptions of this creature range from that of a primitive looking human to something that is undeniably semeion. It may be easy to discount all of the reported sightings as hoaxes or the misidentification of known species, but yet the sheer number of them can't all be easily dismissed. There is some good evidence out there that a giant humanoid race may exist in the remote areas of our world.
Of course, the Native Americans of this country know of them all too well. They regard these wild people of the woods as part of their natural world. To them this isn't some sort of myth or fanciful stories told over some campfire to scare youthful listeners into keeping their noses clean. When a tribal chieftain in the Pacific Northwest was asked about Sasquatch he replied, 'So the White Man is finally discovering something we have known about for eternity?" The indigenous people of this country, as well as others around the globe, all regard these beings as real entities. Maybe it's time we all started doing the same!
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