Where Have the Giants Gone?

The largest distraction we havewhen discussing giant humanoids or more properly giant primates it that our ownnumbers are huge beyond huge.  This is becausewe learned to modify the land to support us alone.  Before we did all that, our population wasscant as we were an apex predator following herds and competing directly withlions and the like.

This lifeway lasted for hundredsof thousands of years and provided ample opportunity for speciation and gigantismwas a natural step out.  It was alsonatural for niche specialization to take place as in the obvious case of the Sasquatch.Our breakthrough was tool driven and likely took place 200,000 years ago atleast.

This means that the odd membersof our class were never numerous to begin with and soon were unable to directlycompete with us.  Thus such populationssurvived by avoidance.  This is largelydone by adopting a nocturnal lifestyle in one form or the other.

I have reported on a class ofEuropean Giants that were likely Neanderthals that spawned Goliath andobviously interacted with us. Others have also been reported.  What is abundantly clear is that worldwide,small populations of primates exist that are all likely closer to usgenetically than any known primates. Some of these are giants, including Bigfoot.  They all rely on avoidance and nocturnalactivity in woodlands.

Recall that the majority ofhunters work at night because they pretty well have to.  We are the real exception.

Where did all the world's giants go?

http://ca.io9.com/5765840/where-did-all-the-worlds-giants-go

Bigfoot, Nessie, Ogopogo, the atmospheric jellyfish —(most of) these cryptids are household names. But did you know that there's asubfield of cryptozoology that deals with massive hominids, sequestered on ourplanet's hidden places? Let's take a look at some curious cases ofBrobdingnagians amongst us.

Living dinosaurs and skunk apes have leapfrogged giants on the cryptidtaxonomy, but this wasn't always the case. In the 19th century, facsimiles ofgiants and petrified humans captured the public imagination at sideshows. Themost famous of these fakes was the CardiffGiant, a 10-foot-long, 3,000 pound block of gypsum that was sculpted to looklike a fossilized man and was exhibited in upstate New York in late 1869. The Cardiff Giant was the brainchild oftobacconist George Hull, who was inspired by the Nephilim of the Book ofGenesis to create his oversized hoax.

Hull staged an excavation and subsequently profited off his giant...untilP.T. Barnum covertly built his own replica of the Cardiffgiant and displayed his fake (of Hull'sfake) as the real deal. Hull attempted to sue Barnum, but in order to do so, hewould have to swear on the veracity of his own giant. Hull instead revealed to press that his giantwas made of 100% Balonium. Similar "petrified" specimens wereunearthed at the tail end of the 1800s, such as the Solid Muldoon, anotherpetrified man, which too was built by Hull.

As theworld's various mythologies can attest, giants had a following waybefore the age of traveling hucksters. In a fascinating article in Archaeology, MarkRose recounts how an interest in cryptids went hand-in-hand with nascentAmerican life. After all, this was a continent where Southern farmers dugup Basilosaurusfossils to build their homes:

The Massachusetts Puritan CottonMather believed that mastodon fossils found near Albany, New York,in 1705 were those of giants who had perished in Noah's flood. "The Giantsthat once groaned under the waters," he wrote, "are now under theEarth, and their Dead Bones are lively Proofs of the Mosaic history."Nearly a century later, when Connecticutfarmer Pliny Moody discovered foot-long three-toed tracks in a sandstone ridgeon his land, his pastor identified them as from Noah's raven, which had"rested on that ledge and probably slept there before resuming thedangerous journey back to the Ark."The same cleric later deduced that dinosaur bones found to the south were"probably the remains of giant humans."

Thomas Jefferson had his own interest in fossils, and in 1804 he evenset aside a room in the White House for his collection of extinct elephant,giant ground sloth, and bison bones, teeth, and tusks. Earlier, he hadconvinced Yale College president Ezra Stiles that suchremains were of animals rather than giants. Fascinated by an immense claw of aground sloth, Jefferson wrote to a friend,"I cannot...help believing that this animal, as well as the mammoth, arestill existing."

But what about more recent interest in giants?

 Cryptozoologist (and Cryptomundoblogmaster Loren Coleman) isan expert in the extremely rarified study of "true giants" anddetails present-day encounters with massive hominids in his book TrueGiants: Is Gigantopithecus Still Alive? According to Coleman'sstudies, most modern accounts of giants are of hairy creatures that could bedescendants of the 10-foot-tall prehistoric ape Gigantopithecus ratherthan loincloth-clad chaps of the Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum, Jolly Green, or SamuelBeckett variety.

Modern accounts and possible traces of true giants have come from Tajikistan , Malaysia (wherethe creature is known as OrangDalam or Orang Mawas), and the SolomonIslands.

Barring some four-toed footprints, much of this evidence is anecdotal.As fringe as an undiscovered hominid that eclipses Bigfoot sounds, crazierape-like beings have been spotted — for example, gangs of what appeared tobe giantorangutans were observed during the Vietnam War.