LAND OF GIANTS

 

 

There is a strange passage in the Old Testament that has been the subject of debate by scholars the ologians for centuries:

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and took them wives of which they chose. (Genesis 6:1-2)

 

The biblical account then continues by saying that the offspring of the Sons of God and the daughters of men were "the giants who were in the earth in those days." So numerous did these giants become that they were a threat to the survival of the patriarchal race. Accordingly, the scripture tell us, God gave Enoch a magical or miraculous sword, called the "Sword of Methuselah," with which to slay them in a great purge. The race of giants then dwindled and finally became extinct, Goliath being the last of his race, slain by young David, future King of Israel, sometime prior to 1,000 B.C.

 

For the most part, except for faithful believers, these accounts have been dismissed by scholars as fanciful mythology with little or no basis in fact. After all, there is no archaeological evidence that a race of giants ever lived upon the earth‑is there?... As a matter of fact, there is, and they existed right here in America.

 

In the year 1872, in Seneca Township, Noble County, Ohio, one of the numerous Indian mounds that abound in the Ohio River Valley was opened. This particular one was known locally as the "Bates" mound. It was found to contain the remains of three skeletons, surrounded by a few broken pieces of earthenware, a lot a flintheads and one or two stone implements. There was nothing unusual about the find, inasmuch as a number of similar discoveries had been unearthed; the remarkable feature of these remains were the skeletons, for in life all three would have been at least eight feet in height! Moreover, they had double teeth in front as well as in back of the mouth and in both upper and lower jaws. Upon exposure to the air the skeletons crumbled into dust.

 

In Ashtabula County, Ohio, in 1878, a mound was excavated on land belonging to one Peleg Sweet, who was himself a man of inordinate size with large features. They came upon a skull and jaw which were of such size that the skull would cover Sweet's head and the jaw could be easily slipped over his face, as though the head of a giant were enveloping his.

 

The mounds surrounding the Sweet place were distinguished by slight depressions on the surface of the ground, disposed in straight rows, with intervening spaces or valleys, and covered the entire area. The number of the graves in this area alone has been estimated to be between two and three thousand. Aaron Wright, Esq., in 1800, opened a number of these mounds and found them invariably to contain human  bones which upon exposure to air soon crumbled to dust. According to a history of Ashtabula County, Ohio, "Skulls were taken from these mounds, the cavities of which were of sufficient capacity to admit the head of an ordinary man, and jawbones that might be fitted over the face with equal facility."

Similar accounts can be found from a number of contemporary sources. For example, from the History of Morrow County and Ohio (1880):

 

in 1829, when the hotel was built in Chesterville, a mound near by was made to furnish the material for the brick. In digging it away, a large human skeleton was found, but no measurements were made. It is related that the jawbone was found to fit easily over that of a citizen of the village, who was remarkable for his large jaw. The local physicians examined the cranium and found it proportionately large, with more teeth than the white race of today. The skeleton was taken to Mans-field, and has been lost sight of entirely.

 

Scientific investigation has only recently begun, hindered by the widespread destruction of the earthworks, without cataloging, that has occurred over the last 250 years. A formal discipline in archaeology and anthropology at last reveals a few scant clues about the origins of the moundbuilders. From this study, supplemented by Native American tradition, a history begins to emerge.

 

Long ago in central North America, there was a great civil war. It was a war of many battles, with an incredible loss of life. Like the later historic Civil War, this prehistoric civil war was fought by a southern Confederacy against a northern Union. It spanned the geography of a number of present day states, from the boundary line of ancient Mississippi northward to the Ohio Valley region, including parts of present day Kentucky, West Virginia, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.

 

There lived in the greater Ohio River Valley a race of people which scholars label as Archaic. About 1,000 B.C., a people called the Adena culture came up from the south to challenge the Archaic dominion. The Adena were more advanced and powerful, and soon overcame the native race, and those not killed were assimilated.

The Archaic culture is not believed to have constructed mounds in the Ohio Valley region. The Adena people seem to have introduced this practice, bringing it from an even more ancient culture in the Southern Mississippi region.

 

The pre-Adena, or Archaic people, were known to have had slender bodies, and been "longheaded," with "narrow" skulls (dolichocranic), i.e. having a breadth of skull small in proportion to length from front to back. The Adena people were not physically akin to these Archaic people. The Adena body bone structure type was more massive. As a group they were more "short-headed" (brachyuranic), i.e. the skull breadth was at least four-fifths Rs length from front to back. They also showed signs of "cradleboard" head deformation. This practice of skull deformation was part of the prehistoric Peruvian, Middle American, and Mexican people's customs. On the other hand, newer evidence seems to discourage the theory

 

that the Adena were descended from the tribes of ancient Mexico, and DNA tends to support the evidence. DNA testing has also found no specific match between the Adena and any existing Native American group. Who were these people?

 

Henry Schoolcraft, a noted scholar on Native American anthropology, derived the first viable hypothesis:

 

The oldest tribe of the United States, of which there is a distinct tradition, were the Alleghans. The term is perpetuated in the principal chain of mountains traversing the country. This tribe, at an antique period, had the seat of their power in the Ohio Valley and its confluent streams, which were the sites of their numerous towns and villages. They appear originally to have borne the name of Alli, or Alleg, and hence the names of Tallijewi and Allegewi. By adding to the radical of this word the particle hany or ghany, meaning river, they described the principal scene of their residence-namely, the Alleghany, or River of the Alleghans, now called Ohio. The word Ohio is of Iroquois origin, and of a far later period, having been bestowed by them after their conquest of the country, in alliance with the Lenapees, or ancient Delawares... From the traditions of the Lenapees, given to the Moravian missionaries... The Alleghans had been a strong and mighty people, capable of great exertions and doing wonders.

 

Schoolcraft is believed to have secured his information specifically from the writings of John Heckewelder, assistant to the Moravian missionary David Seisberger, himself from Moravia. Heckewelder, who received his information from the Delawares, who obtained the tradition from the venerable Lenini Lenape, wrote:

 

Many wonderful things are told of this famous people [Allegewi]. They are said to have been remarkably tall and stout, and there is a tradition that there were giants among them, people of a much larger size than the tallest of the Lenape.

 

It can now be shown that it was the Lenni Lenape who, for some undisclosed reason, moved en masse from the western haft of the present day United States, toward the east, about 1,000 B.C. According to their own tradition, via the Delawares, the Lenni Lenape found themselves on the shore of a great river, which they called the Namesi Sipu-River of Fish. The white man's enunciation turned Namesi Sipu into the Mississippi. There they were confronted by the Mengwe, who had come from a bit further north circa present day Missouri.

 

James A. Jones, writing in 1830, relates that the Lenape sent spies across the river to reconnoiter, and they returned with the following information, according to Jones:

 

They told, that they had found the further bank of the River of Fish, inhabited by a very powerful people, who dwelt in great villages, surrounded by high walls. They werevery tall-so tall that the head of the tallest Lenape could not reach their arms, and their women were of higher stature and heavier limbs than the loftiest and largest man in the confederate nations. They were called the Allegewi, and were men delighting in red and black paint, and the shrill war-whoop, and the strife of the spear. Such was the relation made by the spies of their countrymen.

 

When the Allegewi saw that the Lenape numbered many thousands, they refused permission for them to cross the Namesi Sipu, and war commenced. The Lenape claimed that though it took many years and alliances, they finally defeated the mighty Allegewi, either extirpating them or driving them down the Mississippi. One of the tribes with whom the Lenape allied to defeat the Allegewi was the Mengwe. In time, the Lenape became the Delaware, and the Mengwe became the Iroquois, and they became bitter enemies.

David Cusic, a Tuscorora by birth, wrote in 1825 that among the legends of the ancient people there was a powerful tribe called Ronnongwetowanca. They were giants, and had a "considerable habitation." He states that when the Great Spirit made the people, some of them became giants. They made themselves feared by attacking when most unexpected. After having endured the outrages of these giants for a great long time, the people banded together to destroy them. With a final force of about 800 warriors, they successfully annihilated the abhorrent Ronnongwetowanca. There were no giants anywhere after this, it was said. This was supposed to have happened around 2,500 winters before Columbus arrived in America, i.e. circa 1,000 B.C.-the time that the Adena seem to have arrived in the Ohio Valley.

 

The Scientific American, in 1883, published the following account:

 

Two miles from Mandan, on the bluffs near the junction of the Hart and Missouri Rivers, says the local newspaper, the Pioneer, is an old Cemetery of fully 100 acres in extent filled with bones of a giant race. This vast city of the dead lies just east of the Fort Lincoln road. The ground has the appearance of having been filled with trenches piled full of dead bodies, both man and beast, and covered with several feet of earth. In many places mounds from 8 to 10 feet high, and some of them 100 feet or more in length, have been thrown up and are filled with bones, broken pottery, vases of various bright colored flint, and agates ... showing the work of a people skilled in the arts and possessed of a high state of civilization. This has evidently been a grand battlefield, where thousands of men ... have fallen. ...Five miles above Mandan, on the opposite side of the Missouri, is another vast cemetery, as yet unexplored. We asked an aged Indian what his people knew of these ancient grave yards. He answered: "Me know nothing about them. They were here before the red man."

 

What emerges is evidence that the Adena people themselves were not inordinately tall, male skeletons measuring on the average 168.0 cm (about 5'6") and the female skeletons proportionally smaller at 158.8 cm (about 5'3"). But within the Adena culture was a special class of individuals, bred apparently from a more ancient ancestral gene pool, whose height averaged from six to eight feet. These people appear to have been bred selectively but from a more ancient gene pool than the Adena themselves.

 

Robert Silverberg, a modern scholar, writes: "This band of people of great size forced Rs way into the Ohio Valley about 1,000 B.C., it seems. ..Perhaps there was a small elite of round-headed giants dominating and ruling an existing long-headed Ohio Valley population."

 

Pioneer white settlers, inspired by Heckewelder's reference to the Allegewi as giants, began opening up mounds on their farms from Pennsylvania to Indiana. The number and extent of these mound graves stagger the imagination. Some Adena would be interred right into the floor of their dwelling, the whole covered with earth, making little clusters of mound at intervals throughout the region. As it turned out, numerous skeletons of "giants" were reported found in the various records of townships and counties, all independent of one another.

From the Ironton Register, a small Ohio River town newspaper, dated 5 May 1892, we find the following:

 

Where Proctorville now stands was one day part of a well paved city, but I think the greatest part of it is now in the Ohio river. Only a few mounds, there; one of which was near the C. Wilgus mansion and contained a skeleton of a very large person, all double teeth, and sound, in a jaw bone that would go over the jaw with the flesh on, of a large man; The common burying ground was well filled with skeletons at a depth of about 6 feet. Part of the pavement was of boulder stone and part of well preserved brick.

 

In Brush Creek Township, Muskingum County, Ohio, a document dated 3 March 1880 records the excavation of a mound located on the farm of J. M. Baughman, which mound measured 64 feet in width, 90 feet in length, and 11 feet 3 inches in height. It was flat on top, an unusual condition for a mound. The odd shape of the mound was probably due to a stone altar, owning similar dimensions, found within. The structure was situated on the summit of a hill, 152 feet above the Brush Creek. In it were discovered the bones of men and women, buried in couples the length of their skeletons exceeding eight and even nine feet! The excavation was started in early December 1870.

The most interesting aspect of the Brush Creek excavation was a large stone tablet inscribed with strange characters found among the giant skeletons. Native Americans had no known form of writing (with the exception of the Maya, Aztec, Inca and more southern races), and the inscriptions found on the Brush Creek Tablet showed profound Greek influence.

 

Interestingly, the Greeks have extensive mythological accounts of giants. They were often held as a reclusive race, whose lineage went back to a time of great antiquity, perhaps prior to the last Ice Age (about 11,000 years ago).

 

Accounts of discoveries of giant skeletons in ancient mounds can be found in independent sources from various locations throughout the region. From the History of Logan County, Illinois, (1886):

 

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish the place of sepulture raised by the Mound Builders from the more modem graves of the Indians. The tombs of the former were in general larger than those of the latter, and were used as receptacles for a greater number of bodies, and contained relics of art, evincing a higher decree of civilization than that attained by the Indians. The ancient earthworks of the Mound Builders have occasionally been appropriated as burial places by the Indians, but the skeletons of the latter may be distinguished from the osteological remains of the former by their greater stature.

 

The Firelands Pioneer, Vermillion Township, Erie County, Ohio, (1858):

 

There are quite a number of mounds, in the township, where the bones, and sometimes the whole skeleton of the human race have been found. The bones and skeletons found are very large, and some of the inhabitants think they must have belonged to a race of beings much larger in size than the Indians found here by the first settlers.

The History of Medina County, Ohio, (1881):

In digging the cellar of the house, nine human skeletons were found, and, like such specimens from other ancient mounds of the country, they showed that the Mound Builders were men of large stature. The skeletons were not found lying in such a manner as would indicate any arrangement of the bodies on the part of the entombers. In describing the tomb, Mr. Albert Harris said: "it looked as if the bodies had been dumped into a ditch. Some of them were buried deeper than others, the lower one being about seven feet below the surface." When the skeletons were found, Mr. Harris was twenty years of age, yet he states that he could put one of the skulls over his head, and let it rest upon his shoulders, while wearing a fur cap at the same time. The large size of all the bones was remarked, and the teeth were described as "double all the way round."

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From the Historical Collections of Virginia, (1845):

 

On the Wappatomaka have been found numerous Indian relics, among which was highly a finished pipe, representing a snake coiled around the bowl. There was also

 

discovered the under jawbone of a human being (says Kercheval) of great size; and, what is more remarkable the teeth stood transversely in the jawbone. It would pass over any man's face with entire ease.

 

Cusick relates a romantic story about how the races of Lenape and Allegewi commingled. A giant abducted the daughter of a noble chieftain from the enemy tribe. Her brothers searched for her, and when they at last found her they were shocked to learn that she had fallen in love with the giant, and was uninterested in returning to her family. Thus we are reminded of the passage from Genesis, wherein the Sons of God took the daughters of men.

 

The question then arises: from whence came the race of giants, and where did they go? The answer to the first question may lie in the ancient tradition that there was once upon the earth a race called the Aryans, a warlike people who were giants, being from 8 to 11 feet tall and more (There are accounts of giants from 12 to 16 feet!). They derived from an advanced race, supposedly from another world, who were so warlike they destroyed themselves about every 10,000 years by internecine wars. These Aryans are the same race spoken of by the Greeks, and found in the traditions of many other cultures of ancient origin.

 

That giants once existed now seems assured; but where did they go?

 

Modern anthropologists have put forward the theory that once the giants existed in great number, and were the dominant race prior to the advent of modem and smaller races of men and women. Being warlike, they diminished their number in great wars (as the thousands of mound burials in the Ohio River Valley attest), and were eventually subjugated by the smaller, but more numerous races.

 

The evidence then shows that the giant race was bred, much like thoroughbred livestock, to perpetuate a race of warriors. In ancient times of warfare, these were the ones selected first-often the "champions" of kings. This practice of taking the big men first is believed to have systematically depleted the gene pool among the older European, Asian, and Middle Eastern stocks, reducing the average height of modern man to something less than it could possibly have been. Mankind of even two hundred years ago is known to have been much shorter in height, and modern man grows progressively taller. Some geneticists believe that this is due to those predominant "giant" genes emerging to prominence. Perhaps, in a few hundred or thousand years, our

descendants will again be giants.

 

Sources:

Mounds For The Dead, Don W. Dragoo, Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh, 1963,

Traditions of the North American Indians, James Athearn Jones, Colbum and Bently, London, 1830.

The Mound Builders, Robert Silverberg, Ohio Univ. Press, Athens, Ohio, 1986.

The Adena People, Wm. S. Webb & Chas. E. Snow, Univ. of Ky., Lexington, 1945

History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations, Hist. Soc. of Pennsylvania, 1876 (originally published in 1819).

  Source:
Ross Hamilton & Patricia Mason
SERPANT MOUND MYSTERIES
http://www.greatserpentmound.org

 

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