Many legendary giants were probably born from fossil bones nobody could explain
Ancient writers kept reporting enormous skeletons: a hero seven cubits long dug up by Spartans, a giant exposed by an earthquake in Crete, a colossal tooth pondered by Saint Augustine. Historians now suspect that fossils of mammoths and other vanished beasts fed centuries of giant lore, and even early science.
The English word giant first shows up in 1297 in the chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, borrowed from the Gigantes of Greek myth. According to Hesiod, those beings were children of Uranus and Gaia, sometimes drawn with serpent legs, who stormed Olympus until Heracles tipped the battle. Greeks believed some, such as Enceladus, lay buried beneath the ground, their writhing causing earthquakes and eruptions.
Claudine Cohen argued in her 2002 book The Fate of the Mammoth that encounters with megafauna bones were shaped by giant stories. Herodotus described Spartans unearthing Orestes at Tegea, a body of about 3.7 metres. Pausanias claimed Ajax had kneecaps as wide as a boy's discus, implying a man over four metres tall. The pattern continued: Boccaccio wondered whether Sicilian finds proved Polyphemus was real, huge bones found in France in 1613 set off a pamphlet war among anatomists, and the Claverack Giant in colonial New York drew the attention of Cotton Mather. Fossils in India's Sivalik Hills may even echo in the Mahabharata's gigantic warriors.
Scripture adds its own cast. Genesis mentions the Nephilim, sometimes translated as giants, and the spies Moses sent into Canaan said they felt like grasshoppers beside them. Goliath is surprisingly modest by comparison. The Masoretic text puts him at six cubits and a span, perhaps 3.1 to 3.7 metres, while the Septuagint, Josephus and the Dead Sea Scrolls say four cubits and a span, perhaps 2.2 to 2.6 metres.
Giants also explain landscapes. Fionn mac Cumhaill supposedly built the Giant's Causeway, Basque giants are credited with dolmens and stand for villagers who clung to old ways instead of converting, and Aztec tradition says the Quinametzin built Teotihuacan. One American giant is admittedly fake: a 1965 study judged Paul Bunyan, whose ox's hoofprints supposedly became northwestern lakes, an invention of advertising men.
Source: Giant
