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GIGANTOPITHECUS AND MEGANTHROPUS

African Giants, Australian Giants, and Giants of the Bible

In this chapter we will examine various accounts of giants from across the globe. We will begin with a discussion of an Asian hominid, Gigantopithecus, from which the Yeti—an early creature that was distinctly not Homo sapiens—may have descended. Another very large apelike human, linked to Homo erectus and known as Meganthropus, was found in Java in the 1900s and attracted the attention of the best paleontologists of the day, whose speculations we include here.

We next turn our attention to Africa, where intrepid explorers found the remains of giants in funerary jars in Chad; huge bones buried in a jungle in Central Africa that did not appear to be human in origin; a mummified ancient Egyptian 2.5 meters tall; very large weapons unearthed in Morocco; and a giant group of people from Sudan, called the Nilot. Following this, we cast our gaze down under to explore Australian reports—including some accounts of giant teeth—before opening the pages of the Bible to examine stories of giants contained therein, including the story of Goliath—that mighty monster of yesteryear.

GIGANTOPITHECUS AND MEGANTHROPUS

Evolutionary biologists have identified a giant humanoid race that they call Gigantopithecus blacki, standing 9.5 feet tall. Some believe that this creature may have been the ancestor of the Yeti, or Bigfoot. The colossal, manlike ape, which ruled the forests of East Asia and other parts of the world for about one million years, has been extinct for the past one hundred thousand years. The species coexisted with our immediate predecessor, Homo erectus, before our own species, Homo sapiens, made its appearance.

What we know of Gigantopithecus comes from the 1934 discovery of more than one thousand fossilized teeth by the Dutch paleontologist and geologist Dr. Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald, who found the teeth in numerous areas throughout Southeast Asia. The Chinese, overlooking them as valuable pieces to our evolutionary puzzle, were selling these teeth (which they called “dragon bones”) as cures for various illnesses. After World War II broke out in Europe in September of 1939, local Japanese authorities arrested Koenigswald as an enemy alien, thus ending his research. He was liberated in 1945, but much of his work had been destroyed in the conflict.

In their book True Giants: Is Gigantopithecus Still Alive? authors Mark A. Hall and Loren Coleman present their theory that “the living descendants of the fossil type known as Gigantopithecus might still be in existence,” albeit in the New World, not in Asia (Hall and Coleman 2010, 119). They further explore anomalous archaeological finds and supposed bones of such giants that had been excavated—or were claimed to have been excavated—by an assortment of professional and amateur archaeologists. According to Hall and Coleman: “The record of giant bones from the New World can be grouped into three categories: (1) Bones recently found and lost; (2) Bones found early in this century [20th century] and in the 19th century; (3) Bones found centuries ago” (2010, 121).

They explain one find in detail from the second category:

The lost bone most familiar to Sasquatch followers is likely to be one cited by John Green in On the Track of the Sasquatch. He learned from a woman in British Columbia how she and her husband had found some bones 20 years earlier (thus in the late 1950s). They were trapping near the Toba River at the time. . . . Over her husband’s objections, she only brought out the jawbone; it was large enough to fit over her face. She kept it around the house and showed it to people for the next 10 years until the house burned down. (Hall and Coleman 2010, 121)

In another report, Dana and Ginger Lamb retrieved a complete skeleton of a giant from an Indian burial mound in Mexico. A smaller dwarflike skeleton accompanied it. The fingers on the giant’s hands were twice the length of Dana’s own. The Lambs assumed that floodwaters inundated and washed away much of the mound, thus exposing the bones for the first time in centuries (Hall and Coleman 2010, 122–23).

In addition to Gigantopithecus, yet another gigantic manlike ape appears in the fossil record, this time in Java. Individuals of this type are grouped under the umbrella genus Meganthropus and are considered by anthropologists to be a significantly larger form of Homo erectus, therefore linking the genus to more humanlike and subsequently more intelligent hominids.

From the beginning, Meganthropus was seen as a seminal find. Franz Weidenreich, an anthropologist from the American Museum of Natural History, analyzed fossil remains that had been found throughout Asia. He wrote about them in his 1946 book Apes, Giants, and Man. In a chapter entitled “Giants as Earliest Ancestors,” and referencing the noted German paleontologist and geologist G. H. R. von Koenigswald, mentioned above, Weidenreich writes:

Early in 1941, I received a letter from von Koenigswald in which he announced the discovery of a fragment of another lower jaw, collected at the same site as the jaw found earlier (Sangiran). But this time the critical teeth were still in their place and showed only slight attrition. A sketch of the piece was added. Von Koenigswald wrote that its proportions are enormous. I asked for a cast. It arrived just a couple weeks after Pearl Harbor. It could be gathered from the label that von Koenigswald intended to give the new human type, represented by the gigantic jaw, the name Meganthropus paleojavanicus, which means “giant man from Java,” and that he regarded the fragment as that of a male individual, which the fragment earlier, not yet recognized, was attributed by him to a female individual of the same type. (1946)

Weidenreich concludes his chapter by trying to place Meganthropus within a framework congruent with the known fossils of the 1940s:

The only skull bone that challenges the Java jaw in massiveness is the jaw of Broom’s Paranthropus robustus from southern Africa. This jaw belongs to that strange group of Australopithecines which shows the typical organization of anthropoids mixed with some human features. The species name, robustus, was given by Broom because of this extraordinary appearance of the jaw. The robustness of the Pithecanthropus skull is the link connecting it with the giant jaw from Java, in addition to the agreement in primitive human traits shown by both. This suggests that there was a continuous line of gigantic and nearly gigantic human forms characterized by a gradual reduction in size, this reduction going hand in hand with a progressive trend in other features. For this reason I distinguish between the big Pithecanthropus. . . . The big skull apparently represents a special type already on the way to gigantism; therefore I gave it the name “Pithecanthropus robustus.” (Weidenreich 1946)

Franz Weidenreich also makes the following observation, comparing Gigantopithecus and Meganthropus: “The molars of Gigantopithecus are more than one-third larger than those of Meganthropus, the Java giant, and almost twice as large as those of the big Pithecanthropus [Homo erectus robustus]” (1946).

Weidenreich’s colleague von Koenigswald was to publish his own book on the issue of giant hominid evolution in 1962, entitled The Evolution of Man. In it he writes:

“Meganthropus had the largest human lower jaw so far discovered. It is roughly the size of a gorilla’s (length of first molar: Meganthropus 14.5 mm; gorilla 15.5 mm; average Homo Sapiens 11.5 mm). [John] Robinson, who considers the jaw as that of Paranthropus, has shown that the two are comparable in size and structure” (Hall and Coleman 2010, 119).

Let’s move on from these fascinating accounts to see what has turned up in Africa.

GIANTS ON THE DARK CONTINENT OF AFRICA

We find several key examples of giants on the Dark Continent of Africa. In 1936, French archaeologists Jean-Paul Lebeuf and G. Calame-Griaule launched an expedition into the north central African nation of Chad. While traversing the plains, they stumbled upon a number of ancient burial mounds. Additional burial mounds were located around Fort Lamy and Goulfeil. The two archaeologists decided to excavate the burial site to determine who or what was interred there.

In addition to jewelry and artwork, they discovered several egg-shaped funeral jars containing the remains of an ancient race of gigantic stature. The archaeological team then questioned the natives. According to them, these giants were known to their people as the Saos. They had a “well-developed religion and culture”; they were fruitful and multiplied; and they established settlements at Fort Lamy, Mahaya, Midigue, and Goulfeil. They managed to avoid conflict, either internally or with neighboring tribes, but in the ninth century CE, the warhorse of Muslim expansion eventually brought an end to their centuries-long peace. The invading Arabs attempted to forcefully convert the Saos, and those who accepted the new Islamic faith lived in servitude and slavery to the Arabs. Those who refused were ultimately exterminated, with the upshot being that, by the end of the sixteenth century, the Saos had all but vanished from the face of the Earth.

In addition to the mysterious Saos, giants have been reported in the fossil record in Kigali Rwanda. These findings are a bit odder in that the creatures they reference may be of extraterrestrial origin. On June 24, 2011, the following article appeared in the Russian newspaper Pravda:

A team of anthropologists found gigantic creatures buried in the jungle near the city of Kigali Rwanda (Central Africa). The remains belong to gigantic creatures that bear little resemblance to humans. Head of research group believes that they could be visitors from another planet who died as a result of a catastrophe. According to the scientists, they were buried at least 500 years ago. At first, researchers thought that they came across the remains of ancient settlements, but no signs of human life have been found nearby. The 40 communal graves had approximately 200 bodies in them, all perfectly preserved. The creatures were tall—approximately 7 feet. Their heads were disproportionately large and they had no mouth, nose or eyes. The anthropologists believe that the creatures were members of an alien landing, possibly destroyed by some terrestrial virus to which they had no immunity. However, no traces of the landing of the spacecraft or its fragments were discovered. (Troitsina 2011)

A cache of huge hunting weapons found in Morocco is another indication that giants once roamed the Dark Continent. Peter Kolosimo reports in Timeless Earth that at Agadir in Morocco, the French captain Lafanechere “discovered a complete arsenal of hunting weapons including five hundred double-edged axes weighing seventeen and a half pounds, i.e., twenty times as heavy as would be convenient for modern man. Apart from the question of weight, to handle the axe at all one would need to have hands of a size appropriate to a giant with a stature of at least 13 feet” (1973, 32).

Another example of African giants is not that of an extinct race, but a race that survives to this day, in the Sudan. Unfortunately, little has been written about this extraordinary people and yet we do have the brilliant and comprehensive work Inside Africa, by author and explorer John Gunther, that addresses the subject. In this seminal tome, Gunther names the race in question as the Nilot. According to him, they “have spread their virile blood far afield, as witness the Masai in Kenya and the giant Watusi in Ruanda-Urundi, who are cousins to the Hamitic Sudanese” (Gunther 1955).

The late professional basketball star Manute Bol is an ideal exemplar of this gigantic but very slender race of Dinka (the Dinka are derived from the Nilot). Bol was from the Sudanese region of Africa, where his height of seven feet seven inches was not an anomaly. According to the traditional creation myth of the Nilot people, in the beginning the universe was covered with sand and rock. Licking his way out of one salty block of rock came a giant, Binbali, who became the first living being. Then the sky people came and decided to divide Binbali’s body into two parts and took his blood to form the rivers and lakes of northeastern Africa—including the Nile and the Indian Ocean to the east. The sky gods next took a primitive creature called Imzadi, raised him, and gave him super strength and height, making him the earliest member of the first race of giants, who were the ancestors of the Nilot.

Lesa, the most important of these ancient sky gods, came down to Earth to create the world. Lesa and the other sky gods were giants. They arrived on a shimmering cloud, and after they landed, they traveled east across the land. They created everything we now recognize as being part of the African landscape—rivers, hills, trees, grass, and sand. The sky people established the various nations and tribes of the Earth before traveling west and then back to the heavens. Lesa promised his children that he and the sky people would one day return. Before they left, as they walked across the Itabwa plain, they left their footprints in the mud. These footprints later hardened into stone and were preserved in solid rock. Called “the footprints of giants” due to their colossal size, they can be seen there to this very day.

The interesting aspect of this myth is how it contains elements of both the ancient astronaut theory and the ancient giant theory, and directly connects the two, proving that they are compatible.

THE TRUE GIANTS OF THE COMOROS ISLANDS

Located in the Mozambique Channel, four hundred kilometers east of the African continent, are the Comoros Islands. This ancient archipelago, volcanic in origin, hides one of the greatest secrets of the modern world—the presence of living giants. In 2005, Matthew Green of Reuters reported the islanders’ belief in the Red Headband, a dangerous and powerful creature of giant-size stature:

Nobody has ever seen him and lived. Quite how the ancestors ever verified the existence of “Red Headband”—the Indian Ocean’s answer to Big Foot, the Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster—is thus a mystery. What is clear is that when a volcano erupted on the largest island in the Comoros archipelago on April 17, an old story gained a new twist. Since time began, an evil spirit which appears as a giant human wearing his eponymous red headband has stalked the crater at the summit of Mount Karthala, sometimes appearing as tall as a house, or even, deceptively, as a dwarf. That’s only when he’s viewed from far away. “When people leave the village and they don’t come back, we suspect they have seen Red Headband,” said Ibrahim Ali, 60, a farmer from the mountain village of Idgikoundzi. . . . “Some people say they have seen him, and he looks like a giant,” he said.

MYSTERIES OF THE ANCIENT AUSTRALIAN GIANTS

Moving from one part of the world to the next in our search for the remains of ancient giants, we now focus our attention on Australia and some archaeological finds that have surfaced there, specifically petroglyphs that are thousands of years old and as such, date to prehistory. They are depictions of four giant-sized figures with blue halos around their heads, their bodies fitted with long robes. Included with these images are inscriptions written in an unknown language.

While many adherents of the ancient astronaut theory consider them an early illustrated account of an extraterrestrial visitation, I think they might represent instead a forgotten race of giants. According to local Aboriginal belief, these drawings illustrate the first humans and were drawn by another race. The Aborigines also believe that both their own technology and their folk medicine derive from this single culture race, and posit that during the Dreamtime the first humans were beneficiaries of their immense power. There is nothing in this description, nor in the Aborigines’ own words, that implies any kind of an extraterrestrial explanation.

One thing is certain: The Aborigines were not the first to reach Australia. Anthropologists maintain mainland Aborigines are in fact quite recent arrivals. Aborigines themselves acknowledge in their ancient folklore that this land was inhabited by several groups of humans, as well as giants, before they settled here.

Be this as it may, there also remains the strong possibility that these figures represent yet another distinct culture, perhaps travelers from the fabled continents of Atlantis or Lemuria, cultures highly advanced and of this world. The question is, of course, where did the Atlanteans and Lemurians get their technology?

Let’s drill down a little deeper on the question of whether these figures represent ancient giants. Stephen Quayle touches upon the issue in his monumental undertaking Giants: Master Builders of Prehistoric and Ancient Civilizations. Regarding the possibility of giants in Australia, Quayle writes: “Because Australia has been settled only recently outside of the aboriginal tribes that have inhabited it for some time, not a lot of giants have been discovered on this vast continent. However, there are signs that giants walked this continent as well as other areas of the world, and some anthropologists have even gone so far as to suggest there was an entire race of such beings that should be classed as meganthropus” (2002, 308).

According to Quayle, in 1970 a number of gigantic fossilized footprints were discovered in Australia’s Outback. This captured the attention of Dr. Rex Gilroy, director of the Mount York Natural History Museum at Mount Victoria, New South Wales. This finding was so significant and provocative that, after plaster casts of the footprints were made, Gilroy immediately started excavations in the Outback. Soon huge stone artifacts—clubs, pounders, adzes, chisels, knives, and hand axes—were uncovered “all of tremendous weight . . . scattered over a wide area. These weigh anything from 8, 10, 15, 21 and 25 pounds, implements which only men of tremendous proportions could possibly have made and used. Estimates for the actual size of these men range from 10 to 12 feet tall and over, weighing from 500–600 lbs” (Beckley 2009).

Gilroy became enamored with his quest and, throughout his career, attempted to prove his theory of the giant habitation of Australia. He was to continue to find ample evidence to establish that an ancient race of giants once dwelled on the Australian continent.

Another compelling find in Australia—that of a massive human molar—was uncovered by an archaeologist excavating the Winburndale River north of Bathurst. It was far too large to have belonged to modern Homo sapiens. An additional discovery was made near Dubbo, New South Wales, that closely parallel the tooth found at the Winburndale River. The Bathurst district also yielded a number of other intriguing finds. In the 1930s prospectors working there allegedly uncovered a number of large human footprints. They were found fossilized in shoals of red jasper.

Additional finds were also unearthed at Gympie, Queensland. A farmer named Keith Walker discovered the large fragment of the back portion of a jaw while plowing his field. The jaw still possessed a hollow cavity for a missing back molar. The owner of the tooth must have exceeded ten feet in height, a true giant by any means. The jaw and the discovered tooth later came into the possession of Rex Gilroy, the owner of the plaster footprint casts mentioned above (Beckley 2009).

In the Megalong Valley in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, yet another phenomenal discovery was made. A large humanlike footprint was found in ironstone jutting from a creek bank. According to Beckley: “The print was that of the instep, with all 5 toes clearly shown. This footprint measures 7 inches across the toes. Had the footprint been complete it would have been at least 2 feet (60 cm in length, appropriate to a 12 foot human. However, the largest footprint found on the Blue Mountains must have belonged to a man 20 feet tall!)” (2009).

Beckley’s compilation goes on to mention additional finds of this nature. “A set of 3 huge footprints was discovered near Mulgoa, south of Penrith, N.S.W. These prints, each measuring 2 ft. long and 7 inches across the toes, are 6 ft. apart, indicating the stride of the 12 ft. giant who left them. These prints were preserved by volcanic lava and ash flows which ‘occurred millions of years’ before man is supposed to have appeared on the Australian continent (if one is to believe the evolutionary theory)” (2009).

These last remaining relics of a forgotten age stand as a testament to a time when giants trod the Australian continent. However, in addition to the prevalence of these giants, Australia was also home to a number of ancient and sophisticated civilizations: some sources have proposed that the Egyptians, Celts, and Phoenicians may have been regular visitors to the southern continent.

Artifacts attesting to this have appeared in many areas throughout Australia, specifically, seventeen granite stones bearing confirmed Phoenician inscriptions. One reads: “The Eye of Ra the sun rule Sinim.” Sinim is the Hebrew name for a mysterious southern continent described in the Old Testament. This land has also been associated with the Phoenician “Ofir,” which was the source of King Solomon’s gold. The Egyptians also referred to it as “the land of Punt.” Other artifacts, seemingly Egyptian, have also been uncovered: In 1983, a “hand-made glass amulet” was found in the New South Wales town of Kyogle. It featured a stretched pyramid shape and Egyptian characters on four sides. A close comparison with other similar icons in Egypt and elsewhere led some experts to conclude that it must be at least five thousand years old.

Another intriguing anomaly was found on the Isle of New Caledonia, which lies approximately 1,210 kilometers east of Australia. Here archaeologists discovered four hundred anthill-shaped mounds of gravel and sand that they call tumuli. The mounds average eight feet in height and three hundred feet in diameter. As with the mysterious heads of Easter Island, archaeologists are unsure who built them or why. This mystery was only exacerbated by the discovery of upright pillars within a number of the tumuli. Current dating methods indicate that the pillars are between seven thousand and thirteen thousand years old, which engendered speculation from the lost continent and ancient alien theorists, who thought they were either landing beacons for alien spacecraft or the remnants of ancient temples dedicated to the gods of Lemuria or Mu. Academic archaeologists, meanwhile, continue to pursue explanations that better fit the established paradigm.

As the academics debate the vagaries of different facets of this discovery, local natives assert that the gods built the tumuli. Other locals even dare to mention a legend about a race of giants having created the tumuli and many other great monuments on their islands. Oceanic mythology (covering cultures from the Indian Ocean in the west to Easter Island in the east) is replete with references to giants and gods.

GIANTS IN THE BIBLE

The Bible is rich in giant symbolism and, as such, today remains one of the most authoritative works on the subject. In addition to the many pre-Christian Greek myths, the Bible lends credibility, even provability, to claims of the existence of giants.

The Book of Job is considered the oldest book in the Hebrew Bible. Job 26:5–6 reveals: “The primeval giants tremble imprisoned beneath the waters with their inhabitants. The unseen world [the bottom of the sea] lies open before them, and the place of destruction is uncovered.” Author Frank Joseph links this description to an early reference to Atlantis. The giants here could be construed as being the original children of Atlantis, just as the founding fathers of Atlantis were a giant super-race known as the Titans, an earlier population of enormous gods that once ruled the primordial universe (Joseph 2005).

The Bible also describes what is perhaps the most famous giant encounter of all in Samuel 7:1–4: “And there went out a champion from the camp of the Philistines, named Goliath, whose height was six cubits and a span . . . and he was armed with a coat of mail; and the weight of the coat was five thousand shekels of brass and the staff of his spear was like a weaver’s beam; and his spear’s head weighed six hundred shekels of iron.”

Goliath was the direct descendant of King Og of the Ammonites. Chronicles 20:3–8 gives a description of Goliath’s lineage and how he came to confront David:

And he brought out the people that were in it, and cut them with saws, and with harrows of iron and with axes. Even so dealt David with all the cities of the children of Ammon. And David and all the people return to Jerusalem. And it came to pass after this, that there arose war at Gezer with the Philistines at which time Sibbechai the Hushathite slew Sippai, that was of the children of the giant: and they were subdued. And there was war again with the Philistines; and Elhanan the son of Jair slew Lahmi the brother of Goliath the Gittite whose spear staff was like a weaver’s beam. And yet again there was war at Gath [the legendary Philistine city and home of Goliath] where was a man of great stature, whose fingers and toes were four and twenty, six on each hand, and six on each foot and he also was the son of the giants. But when he defied Israel, Jonathan the son of Shimea David’s brother slew him. These were born unto the giant in Gath; and they fell by the hand of David and by the hand of his servants.

Recently, a pottery shard was found in the ruins of Gath, dating to 950 BCE. It was inscribed with two non-Semitic names etymologically similar to the biblical name Goliath. Both names, “ALWT” and “WLT” , were written in Semitic “Proto-Canaanite” letters. The dating of the artifact was consistent with the traditional biblical date as well. It is hoped this random discovery will lend credibility to the scriptural account (Maeir et al. 2008, 20).

In addition to the account of Goliath, the Bible contains more examples of giants, which should be mentioned here. In his book Twilight of the Gods, author Erich von Däniken devotes several pages to various biblical accounts of what may have been items belonging to ancient giants. For example, in the fifth book of the Pentateuch (Deuteronomy 3:11), the narrative speaks of a gigantic sarcophagus: “For only Og king of Bashan remained of the remnant of giants; behold, his bedstead was a bedstead of iron; it is not in Rabbath of the children of Ammon? Nine cubits was the length of it [about 8.5 feet], and four cubits the breadth of it, after the cubit of a man.”

The farther we travel, the more evidence we gather; records of giants exist the world over. In this chapter we recounted more of them, including those found in the Bible, which provide scholars with some of the most culturally and religiously significant accounts of giants available in all the European and Near Eastern traditions. However, other accounts are linked not to the Judaeo-Christian culture, but rather to the diverse traditions of the New World. Let’s set our sights on the Americas next, beginning with North America, before we move down to Central America, South America, and the ancient islands known today as Polynesia.