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Giants: Fact, Fable, or Legend?
From North America to Europe and the Near East, myth and legends of giants are
found in almost every archaic culture. Some are fanciful fables of mythical monsters, but others hint of real
history such as the wars of the Israelites during the 1st millennium BC. Giants were almost always on the frontline
with the Philistine army. According to the first century Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus (37-100 AD), giants were real:
"For which reason they removed their camp to Hebron; and when they had taken it, they slew all
the inhabitants. There were till then left the race of giants, who had bodies so large, and
countenances so entirely different from other men, that they were surprising to the site, and
terrible to the hearing. The bones of these men are still shown to this very day, unlike to any
credible relations of other men."
- Antiquities of the Jews, Book V, Chapter 2, Section 3
Stories and Legends of Giants
Stories of giants are found on the west side of the Atlantic. From the Iroquois Nation of the East to the
Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest, tales of giants are found in almost every Native American culture.
According to legends of the Oglala Sioux giant white men lived in the northern areas. (Black Elk Speaks,
John G. Neihardt, 1932) In Sketches of Ancient History of the Six Nations, David Cusick writes that “…after
a time some of the people become giants and committed outrages upon the inhabitants”. A tribe of giants
whose origin was in the north and of considerable population, launched raids against the Eagwehowe (original
people), typically to pillage.
In his article “The Discovery of fossil vertebrates in North America” (Journal of Paleontology, 1943), George
Gaylord Simpson writes of a letter dated August 22, 1762, from James Wright to John Bartram. It tells of mammoth
remains and relates an Indian legend of giant men:
"The bones were of enormous size and were accompanied by tusks ten or twelve feet long. No such creatures as these had ever been seen alive by the Indians, but legend said they had once been hunted through the forests by men of gigantic stature and that when the last of these men had died, God had destroyed their mighty prey in order to protect the present race of Indians."
Stories and legends of giants are relegated to tales of mythical times. Yet, as settlers moved across the Appalacians into the Ohio Valley evidence of their existence became apparent. As farmers cleared the land to plant their crop, they encountered burial mounds of which comtemporary natives knew nothing about. Some of these mounds entombed the remains of giant men. As time marked the passing of the 19th century mounds were found in almost every state east of the Mississippi. Some people believed the survivors of Atlantis built the mounds. Others beleived they were the constructs of Phoenicians, Vikings, and even the lost ten tribes of Israel. Eventually the USGS became involved to debunk that the mounds were built by anyone but Native Americans. They accomplished their goal, but also corroborated the finds of earlier settlers by the excavation of giant skeletons. There finds are documented in the 12th Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1894. The general understanding of Native American beliefs is that they were primitive, pagan, and wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although there is no evidence that Native Americans believed in a personalized Hebrew-Christian style God, they did believe in one God and often referred to as the ‘Great Spirit’, ‘Old-One’, or ‘Man in the Sky’. They also believed other ‘spirits’ existed, not all that different than Jewish and Christian traditions.
In a general way, some Indian stories parallel those of the biblical Genesis. According to the Okanogan tribe of Northwest Washington, man was created from the soil and animated by the breath of God. The Old-One made mud-balls, the first of which became the animals, and the later ones, he rolled over and over and shaped like Indians. And when he blew on them, they became alive.
Did giants exist during ancient times?
It appears the concept that mankind evolved sequentially over millions of years may no longer be the case for
evolutionary thinkers. Rather, there were a number of different species of Homo that had to compete socially and
economically for territory. Of those various species paleoanthropologists generally believe that Homo erectus
was the ancestor to anatomically modern humans whose origins were in Africa but expanded its territorial homeland
into parts of Europe and Asia beginning close to two million years ago. In Africa, skeletal remains of Homo erectus
have been discovered suggesting that when alive this individual were more than six feet tall. Nicknamed “Goliath”
by the writers of National Geographic’s Search for the Ultimate Survivor television documentary, anthropologists
Lee Berger and Steve Churchill claim that this type of human didn’t make it as a result of a changing climate in Africa.
But, how do we know fo sure? 
