Every nation and people on Earth seem to have their own stories, myths and legends about giants. They are the common type of “mythical” creature. Usually the giants are gods or demi-gods, and they often rule the land until they disappeared or were overthrown by mankind.
Is it really just a coincidence that, from Japan to Chile, Alaska to Australia, there are stories of giants?
Or did real giants actually walk the Earth in days gone by?
These are the questions now being asked by experts – and many are now concluding that all the stories of giants are based on fact. They think there really were giants.
Legends usually based on reality
Five hundred years ago, if you asked most people whether they believed in legendary stories, they would have said YES. But then came the Enlightenment era that led to the rise of science and facts over beliefs and stories. Legends like stories about giants were dismissed as inventions. Most scientists and historians rejected any talk about strange creatures, and no expert who wanted to be taken seriously would have suggested that legends could be based on the truth.
But over the past one hundred years, and especially the past fifty year, the pendulum has swung the other way, and now many legends that used to be dismissed as fairy tales have been found to have some factual inspiration after all. Things may have been exaggerated, or facts garbled, as storied were passed on for hundreds or even thousands of years, but there are solid facts behind many of our favourite stories.
So is the same thing true for giants?
Giant Gods and Demi-Gods
The most common stories about giants are the creation stories of many races. Time and again, when we read creation stories, their gods are giants, mostly (but not always) human-like, but with superhuman size and strength. Demons and evil gods are usually giants too, and there are also many demi-gods: half-man, half-god people who are smaller than the gods, but still much bigger ands stronger than humans (an example of a demi-god is Hercules from Greek mythology).
In Japanese legends, there are the giant Daidarabotchi, who live in the mountains and are so large that they can make mountains rise or fall.
The Chinese have endless giants in their stories. The Hindus of India have giant gods such as Krishna and Aryuna.
Every European race has giants. The ancient Greek gods were all giants, and lived on Mount Olympus, but could disguise themselves in human or animal form. The Greeks also had the Titans, children of the gods who were also giant in size: the most famous is Atlas, who held the world on his shoulders, and the Cyclops, who had just one eye in the middle of his forehead. The Celts of Europe and the Norse also had many giants, ranging from gods and demi-gods to people who just seemed like large human beings.
Even the Jewish Bible has giants. The Jews were supposed to be one of the first peoples to have just a single God (monotheists). But actually, they did start out with many different gods, and some of those myths have remained as strange parts of the book of Genesis. After the Creation story of Adam and Eve, the Bible says that giants walked the Earth – sons of God called the Nephilim, who bred with human women and fathered mighty children. So even a people who try to ignore their pagan past have kept stories of giants.
And in the Americas, from east coast to west, prairie to mountain, every tribe had its own stories about a giant race. These were not giants who lived in some distant past, semi-mythic figures who were gods, but true and mortal giants who lived until quite recently. When Christopher Columbus and his successors first encountered Native American tribes, they were told stories about giant races who had only died out within the past century or two (i.e. about the year 1300), and even to this day there are rumours about giants who hide away in the American wilderness, like the famous Sasquatch or Bigfoot).
Giant graves and skeletons
Many people will say at this point, “If there were giants, where is the proof? Where are their homes or cities? Where are their graves or skeletons? There aren’t any, because they don’t exist!”
But this is simply not true. There are giant buildings and giant graves found all over the world. Giant skeletons of human-like creatures have been found on every continent and in most countries. In Japan we even have the giant walking skeleton Gashadokuro as one of our Yokai – perhaps a story inspired by the discovery of a giant burial? All over Asia strange burials have been found. But once again, North America seems to have the greatest number of giant burials. There are far too many stories to print, but we will mention the 1931 discovery of a 4m tall skeleton near Humboldt Lake, and a mass burial of human-like skeletons found in a cave in Nevada whose jaw bones were twice the size of a normal modern person’s jaw.
So why aren’t these giant burials better known or reported? Because conventional science says that giants can’t exist, then any discovery is dismissed as a fraud or mistake. There is a circular argument used by scientists:
Giants don’t exist, because we never find any skeletons
This giant skeleton must be a fake, because giants don’t exist.
We saw something like this just a few years ago. Remember the “hobbits” found in a cave in Indonesia? These ancient skeletons were found by a prestigious academic expedition, run by highly reputable scientists and filmed every step of the way.
But when the archaeologists announced that they had found a new species related to us, but much smaller, then the scientific establishment first reacted with disbelief. They said there must be a mistake – this new species was impossible. “They must be children”. “They must be pygmies.” Even “they must be humans with a genetic disease that makes them small”. They tried to find any way they could to discredit the discovery. Science took a long time to accept the proof that these hobbits were our smaller cousins – and even today, some scientists still argue against that conclusion.
What were the giants and what happened to them?
We believe that the myths and legends about giants were inspired by a real race who lived alongside our ancestors in the distant past. So who were the giants?
Some think that, like the hobbits, giants were cousins of the human race. Our species is called Homo sapiens (the hobbits are Homo floriensis). There were other species who have now died out, such as the Neanderthals. Some researchers believe that the giants were actually another species within the Homo family. A species who were much taller and stronger than us. These cousins must have been spread through much of the world to inspire the legends of giants.
So is this the explanation? It is possible, but a cousin of mankind would not explain why so many stories say that the giants were gods, with incredible powers as well as size.
There does seem to be one explanation that would fit the facts: that the giants were all over the world, that they had godlike powers, and that they disappeared.
As we have said many times before, the ancient gods who mankind spoke about may have come from “the sky”, but they walked on our planet and lived alongside mankind. They even bred with human women and had children. These gods, who were also giant in size, were real. They travelled in fiery craft and could be hurt or even killed by human weapons. They were definitely flesh and blood, even if not human flesh and blood.
So, as we have said before, we believe that the giant gods were aliens who came to Earth to help mankind develop civilisation. And they did not die out, like our human cousins the hobbits and Neanderthals. They simple returned to their home planet as mankind developed.
This explanation fits all the facts perfectly so surely it must be true.
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