Giants of North America

[loki44]

Talk about your tall tales! Even the feller who killed & buried it only claimed it was 12' long! (Upon exhumation it was estimated at 8').

You see how these stories get started and then take on life of their own.....

 

[The Grumpy Celt]

There is a story my grandfather used to tell, which I have always considered entertaining and apocryphal, about how the family had a land grant in North Carolina and when they were first colonizing it the settlers discovered graves of “Indians” who were between 8 and 10 feet tall.

It’s nonsense – everyone in the family really knows the land was first settled by space aliens, not giants.

All joking aside, the genetic defects causing dwarfism and giantism (inaccurate terms, I know) are not unique to Europe and discovering the bones of an oddly-sized human somewhere is not evidence of a new species.

There are likely a lot of these stories that people take too seriously because they are entertaining.