“Now that’s an odd question,” you ask. “Giants?”
Well, I haven’t posted on ancient history in awhile, so let me wander for a bit. The thing is, many of the old county histories detail the findings of giant human bones throughout the country. There have been hoaxes, so many are apt to discard all accounts. Why would history after history write about something nonexistent? These books aren’t full of fantastic tales, but report local history matter-of-factly.
Then we never hear about the giants again.
Suspicious? Perhaps. Why no discoveries since? A cover-up or were there simply not that many of them? Were they just inspired by the tall-tale-telling of the 19th Century? Was inserting giants into histories just a passing fad?
The tone and widely spread accounts seem to argue for authenticity in the face of no proof of hoaxing. So were they all misidentifications of mammoth or other animal bones, as some have suggested? Or perhaps we are just reading our understanding of the past into history.
Without actual bones, this is mostly an exercise in various views trying to disprove the other. Perhaps if some of the more extreme views have not clouded the issue, and others weren’t so quick to dismiss things that didn’t fit the status quo, maybe it wouldn’t be such a fringe topic.
Ultimately, we should ask, legends often have kernels of truth, so why not history itself?
Darrick Dean 