The Giant of Castelnau

Legends of giants permeate folklore of cultures around the world. The ancient Greeks had Gigantes who were born of Gaia (Earth) when blood from the castrated Uranus (Sky) fell on earth. The Gigantes clashed frequently with the Olympian gods, and those who were vanquished were said to be buried under volcanoes. In Norse mythology, the giants stormed Asgard in the battle of Ragnarök and fought the gods until the world was destroyed. Arguably, the most famous of the giants was Goliath, who was slain by David with a single blow from his slingshot. Goliath and David. Many ancient alien propagandist believe that giants existed for real and built many of the large stone monuments of the past such as the Stonehenge and the Pyramids. Even natural geologic features such as the massive basalt columns of the Giant's Causeway on the coast of Northern Ireland were attributed to construction by giants. However, there is no archeological evidence that would suggest that hominins ever grew any taller than we are today. Imagine the surprise, then, when anthropologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge discovered three apparently human bones of gigantic size during an excavation of a Bronze Age cemetery at Castelnau, near Montpellier, France in 1890. As depicted above, one the left is a fragment of a femur, or thigh bone, of enormous girth. It was 14 cm in length and the circumference of the bone was 16 cm. One the right, is the upper part of a tibia, or shin bone. In the middle is a normal-sized humerus, or bone of the upper arm, found from the same cemetery, and positioned between the two finds to illustrate how big the two adjoining pieces are. At the bottom is a fragment that may belong to either a femur or a humerus. Judging from the size of the fragments, Lapouge estimated that the person whose these bones belonged must have stood some 11.5 feet tall. For comparison, the tallest recorded human is Robert Wadlow (1918 – 1940) who stood 8 feet 11 inches.