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Draft:Giantology

Giantology is the study of giants.[1] Much of the study of giantology has been based on myth and a lack of physical evidence. Much of the purported evidence introduced as giant human bones have been shown to be the bones of other large animals.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries newspapers around the world reported on discoveries of giant skeletons. The news stories about giants were never verified. Giantology, a subtype of cryptozoology, is classified as a pseudoscience.[2]

Investigation

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Much of the study of giantology is taken from mythological or oral tradition evidence: the existence of giants has been passed down through various cultures from around the world. Hugh Newman who authored the book Giants on Record: America's Hidden History, Secrets in the Mounds and the Smithsonian Files stated that Ross Hamilton is considered to be the godfather of giantology.[3]

The bible features stories about giants: specifically the Nephilim tribe. In may of 2019 Hugh Newman was scheduled to give a lecture at the Contact in the Desert conference in Indian Wells. The lecture was about "Nephilim, the Denisovans, and giants" and it was titled: "Giantology: Scientific Evidence For A Worldwide Culture Of Giants in Prehistory".[4]

Claudine Cohen, in her 2002 book The Fate of the Mammoth, argued that the history of human interaction with fossil bones of prehistoric megafauna was heavily influenced by giant lore.[5] Per Cohen, the proto-scientific study of giants appears in several phases of human history: Herotodus reported that Orestes § Reported remains were found in Tegea; Pliny described a giant's skeleton found in Crete after an earthquake, and seemed to refer to evolution as the process by which giants become human-size over time; and Saint Augustine mentions what is believed to have been the fossilized molar of an ancient Elephantidae in his City of God, in a passage reflecting on the nature and meaning of the Noahacian deluge.[5] The academic consideration of giants continued through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and even the early modern period. Boccaccio devoted a passage of his Genealogies of the Pagan Gods to purported archeological discoveries in Sicily that he thought might be evidence of the historicity of The Odyssey's Polyphemus.[5] Massive bones found in 1613 in France were initially assigned to Teutobochus but the examinations of them by various physicians and their publication of diverging conclusions about the bones kicked off a "pamphlet war" between anatomists and surgeons of the day.[5] The bones were eventually identified as belonging to a Deinotherium.[6] Rabelais created a wholly "fabricated giantology" for his 16th-century Gargantua and Pantagruel.[7] The discovery of the so-called Claverack Giant in colonial New York triggered giantological investigations by two important early American intellectuals, Cotton Mather and Edward Taylor.[8]

Folklorists and historians examine the role giants are assigned in regional geomythologies. For example, Fionn mac Cumhaill is said to have built the Giant's Causeway on the island of Ireland.[9] Per a 1965 examination in an American studies journal, "It is generally admitted today that Paul Bunyan was a synthetic figure conceived by advertising men rather than the spontaneous product of the folk mind, yet he has been adopted by the American people with enthusiasm...Paul and his blue ox Babe are supposed to have altered the appearance of the American continent; the animal's hoof prints became the lake beds of the Northwest and from its drinking trough spilled the Mississippi River."[10] Fossilized remains of ancient mammals and reptiles common to the Sivalik Hills of India may have influenced aspects of the Mahabharata that tell of battles in which "hundreds of mighty, and sometimes gigantic, heroes, horses, and war elephants are said to have died."[11]

History

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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries newspapers around the world printed stories about the discovery of giant skeletons. These news stories about giants were used as evidence by giantologists to reinforce their belief in giantology.[12] North American news reports in the 19th Century commonly referred to "giantology" and the discovery of giants in Indian mounds, but according to The Columbus Dispatch, such reports were "imaginative journalistic fantasy".[12]

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In 2018 The Washington Post published a review of a television show (Legends of the Lost with Megan Fox featuring an "expert" giantologist. The show suggested that stories about the discoveries of giant skeletons related to, Native Americans had been suppressed by the government. The Washington Post concluded that the show promoted pseudoarchaeological claims.[13]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Wood, Edward J. (1868). Giants and Dwarfs. London: R. Bentley. Archived from the original on 2023-12-09. Retrieved 2023-07-09.
  2. ^ Shermer, Michael. "Do Mythic Creatures Exist? Show Me the Body". Scientific American. Archived from the original on 2023-05-17. Retrieved 2023-05-17. giant Yeti
  3. ^ Fessler, Bruce (26 May 2019). "Giants Among Men". The Desert Sun. Archived from the original on 14 May 2023. Retrieved 14 May 2023.
  4. ^ Fessier, Bruce (23 May 2019). "Did 14-foot giants exist? Did they differ from humans? Author explores these ancient beings". The Desert Sun. Archived from the original on 30 January 2023. Retrieved 15 May 2023.
  5. ^ a b c d Cohen, Claudine (2002). The Fate of the Mammoth. University of Chicago Press. pp. xiv (prescientific analysis of megafauna fossils), 23–26 (historiography of giant lore), 27 (Boccaccio), 31 (1613 France). ISBN 9780226112923.
  6. ^ Adrienne Mayor (2001). The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times. Princeton University Press. p. 77. ISBN 0691058636. Archived from the original on 2023-03-29. Retrieved 2023-05-18.
  7. ^ Smith, P. J. (2019). Parody and Appropriation of the Past in the Grandes Chroniques Gargantuines and in Rabelais’s Pantagruel (1532). In K. A. E. Enenkel & K. A. Ottenheym (Eds.), The Quest for an Appropriate Past in Literature, Art and Architecture (Vol. 60, pp. 167–186). Brill. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctvbqs5nk.14
  8. ^ Amy Morris (2013). "Geomythology on the Colonial Frontier: Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather, and the Claverack Giant". The William and Mary Quarterly. 70 (4): 701–724. doi:10.5309/willmaryquar.70.4.0701. JSTOR 10.5309/willmaryquar.70.4.0701. Archived from the original on 2023-05-17. Retrieved 2023-05-17.
  9. ^ "Geomythology. Giant's Causeway – the mythical stone way". Tectonics and Structural Geology. Archived from the original on 2023-05-17. Retrieved 2023-05-17.
  10. ^ Flanagan, John T. (1962). "The Impact of Folklore on American Literature". Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien. 7: 67–76. ISSN 0075-2533. JSTOR 41155003. Archived from the original on 2023-05-17. Retrieved 2023-05-17.
  11. ^ Van Der Geer, Alexandra; Dermitzakis, Michael; De Vos, John (April 2008). "Fossil Folklore from India: The Siwalik Hills and the Mahâbhârata: RESEARCH ARTICLE". Folklore). 119 (1): 71–92. doi:10.1080/00155870701806225. ISSN 0015-587X. S2CID 162117744. Archived from the original on 2020-02-08. Retrieved 2023-05-17.
  12. ^ a b Lepper, Brad (27 December 2020). "Archaeology: Newspapers have been debunking giant hoaxes for a long time". The Columbus Dispatch. USA Today. Archived from the original on 27 October 2021. Retrieved 14 May 2023. In 1862, Mark Twain was so fed up with all the sensationalistic fake news circulating in newspapers at the time that he wrote a satirical article about the discovery of a petrified man in Nevada: 'Every limb and feature of the stony mummy was perfect … the right thumb resting against the side of the nose … and the fingers of the right hand spread apart.'
  13. ^ Anderson, David S. (27 December 2018). "How TV shows use serious archaeology to promote bogus history". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on 17 May 2022. Retrieved 14 May 2023.

Further reading

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