Giants in Antiquity

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Are you talking about global warming here?

Or are you talking about giants?

And what does it have to do with either subject?

I am talking about stuff that happened long ago. You guys just want to play games and refuse to partake in a serious discussion about a fascinating topic.

Remember, at one time, everyone believed the earth was flat but every once in a while. an artist produced a painting depicting it as round...

Actually, I had commented on how the so called giants in Canaan were men of a different ethnicity and diet, but so far no one has responded to my post.

Sorry Bill, I did read that and it makes a lot of sense, Essentially what you are saying is define Giant in relation to something? and in this case "giant" means larger than the average person in a specific area. ANA rather than looking for rational explanations or supporting evidence is instead asking us to accept the least parsimonious explanation that only has folklore for evidence. Yes ANA it is possible that hominids the size of with the mass of bull elephants and the height of Giraffes once roamed the earth, but based upon the evidence is it plausible? AS I have already pointed out the Baalbek stones are not the most massive that have ever been moved, the largest was move in the 1700's it was almost twice the weight and was transported about the same distance
Thunder Stone

The photo of the stone which is not part of the structure was never moved and is still connected to the bedrock.To move and raise the stones it has been calculated that the combined efforts of around 550 men would have been required. Your one piece of non folkloric evidence for Giants is therefore fallacious. Yes Giants may have been employed to move them, but please understand that Giants ARE NOT needed to explain how it was done, and neither for that matter are alien spacecraft.

Basically, they were giants in that they stood around five foot seven or eight, while the average Hebrew stood barely more than five feet. As I had written before, these so called giants who the Hebrews had found in Canaan - which included the Philistines - were actually recent arrivals for the most part themselves. These were the same people who the Egyptians had called the Sea People, and who had been defeated by Ramses III after an unsuccessful invasion, and who were raiding throughout the east end of the Mediterranean (the Trojan War very possibly had been part of these outrages). The Sea People/Philistines had seemingly exploded out of late Bronze Age Mycenaean Greece and adjacent areas, while related tribes from even further north (the Dorian ancestors of the Spartans) overran and destroyed the Mycenaean towns and cities. As of Indo-European stock, they were generally of larger stature and body mass due to a diet of high protein and dairy products (even today, Semites tend to have higher rates of lactose intolerance). So people of martial ability and of good physical size? Most certainly. But real giants? Probably not, with the exception of individuals like Goliath who probably suffered from gigantism. As for the giants earlier in the Bible - I suspect that has more to do with myth.

Makes perfect sense to me.

Now, more importantly, would you allow these new arrivals dual citizenship

Well, apparently the Philistines had become absorbed eventually into the Hebrew population. After defeating them, David chose not to exterminate them but to incorporate them into his army, such was his respect for their warlike prowess. So, I guess in that sense, maybe so.

That isn't quite right. We need evidence, we need observations, we need to repeat our experiments, but we don't need to directly see something happen to know that it happened. For example, if I took DNA samples from you and your parents, I could tell that you were their child even though I have witnessed neither your birth nor your conception - but I might want to take multiple DNA samples in case something goes wrong, and my experiment should be one that anyone can replicate.

wrt. the Big Bang, anyone can (with the right equipment) observe the cosmic background radiation, Red Shift, etc. These are scientific, repeatable, falsifiable, empirical observations that demonstrate that the universe was once a point singularity.

Now, what evidence is there for your claim that the universe was created, which cannot be better explained by other hypotheses?


Even amongst the religious, the talking serpent is held to be the personification of Satan rather than an actual talking serpent. We know snakes did not suddenly have their legs removed; we also know serpents could never talk (they would require significantly larger brains for that).

Actually, it was known that the world was round well before the invention of modern painting, people knew because ships disappeared when they sailed over the horizon. In other words, because they made honest observations and came to the logical conclusion, rather than appealing to the supernatural.

Indeed Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the earth sometime in the 3 century bce, he was out by between 400 and 6000 Km no one is really sure, but using his calculations with modern figures he was over by 66 Km,

To Bill: I also read your hypotheisis. Not only do I find it quite interesting and quite plausible, but it actually fits into my own theory as to why the Indoeuropean languages spread so dramatically far and wide in the late neolithic/early bronze age.

Agriculture had already been invented. The Egyptians and Sumerians were building civilizations at the dawn of the Bronze Age. But offstage in the primitive hinterland of central asia there was a tribe of people who would change the world. Normally mammals (including humans) loose the ability to digest milk once they reach adulthood.

In the third millenium BC cattle raising was widespread. But one small group of people (maybe only a tribe of 500 nomads) had an abnormal number of wierdo mutatants who could continue to digest milk as adults. And this tribe also probably had an abnormal number of cows in their herds that were also genetic mutatants who could give surplus milk. Both the cows and the people had reached a fateful genetic tipping point. And these people just happened to speak a certain language. Nothing special about the language itsself. But the language would ride on the backs of the people (who in turn would be propelled by their cows) and spread.

This double genetic change enabled this group survive in the vast stretches of the Eurasian Steppe living off of nothing but grass (both the cows and the people). The protein supply (and the calcium) made them big and strong. This combination of strength and mobility gave this small group the ability migrate great distance, and to conquer and abrorb sedentary farmers far and wide. The result: this language spoken this small group in what is now southern Russia spread from what is now Bangladesh to what is now Ireland (most of the modern languages of Northern India, Iran, and Europe (including English, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit) are all Indoeuropean. One of the last migrations was that of the Aegean seafarering mauraders on Canaan. These are the folks we remember as the "Philistines" in the Bible. In this case the Indoeuropean invaders got absorbed into the Semetic speaking culture of the locals. But their name lives on in one of the two modern names of the region: Palestine.

In college I learned something about Christopher Columbus that gave me a paradigm shift. In the U.S. there was quite a bit of historical mythology surrounding Columbus. This mythology is presented as fact to children, usually somewhat before Columbus Day (a U.S. holiday of course) so the kids have a clue what the holiday is for. Basically we were taught that the brave and brilliant Columbus had deduced that the Earth was round and that it would be safe to sail from Europe to China without falling off since everybody else thought it was flat. Older U.S. posters of my generation will remember learning a version of this in school. I don't know about younger ones since I don't if the curriculum. Has
changed. I can't go by own daughter because she goes to an autism specialty school which has a necessarily limited curriculum (intellectual disability is a prerequisite to get in) and they only explained that Columbus existed and roughly what his mission was.

Anyway, in college I learned that earth=sphere was common knowledge amongst Columbus's peers (perhaps not every peasant knew, but that wouldn't affect him). It wasn't that Columbus was right where everybody else was wrong. He was wrong where everybody else was right and he thought Europe and Asia were closer together than they actually are. He was reasonably told he and crew would die in the ocean since it wasn't possible to survive such a long ocean voyage. And they were right. He would have if there wasn't a giant continent in the way that nobody knew about.

In then wake of this new (to me) information I had to reframe several things.

1)I had to reframe my own judgment of the past people. I had been thinking it was correct (Columbus) vs. incorrect (his peers) but actually they were all wrong except Columbus was the most wrong of all. Nobody knew about the large landmass but at least his peers were correct about the distance between Europe and Asia.

2)Sometimes new information changes everything. No Europeans knew about this landmass and that new information changed a world paradigm. But new information does not mean that guesses should be treated as information. Columbus was still wrong about the distance between Europe and Asia. Learning something new is not license to throw out old information willy nilly. Only old information that is inconsistent with the new information should be discarded. I had to be careful in my own life not to discard too much old information unless it had actually been displaced with new information. There is a tendency in college for some people to discard all the lessons from their parents as they learn new things away from home. I had to be careful not to discard old knowledge that hadn't actually been displaced in my fervor to embrace new things my parents never taught me.

3)Sometimes as a child you are taught things that are wrong. But that doesn't mean everything you were taught as a child is wrong. I learned some wrong things about Columbus. But I learned some right things about fossils.


All this to say that it is important to think about how you know what you know and not embrace things (like "there were giants") unless old knowledge ("there weren't") has actually been displaced by new information. No such displacement has occurred with reference to giants. The understanding that taller people look like giants to shorter people is sufficient explanation. So are pituitary disorders that sometimes cause gigantism in individuals (but not populations). New information displaces only the exact information that it is inconsistent with. DNA evidence of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans displaces the previous idea that the two populations never mixed. But it doesn't mean that other unconnected ideas should be embraced just because we were wrong about that.

Hahaha please! Taller people do not look like giants to shorter people unless perhaps you a dwarf. I am only five foot five and I wouldn't describe anyone as a giant unless they produced too much growth hormone that made then exceptionally large and tall then they would need to be really large for me to describe them as that. A giant implies a really physically big being of some kind. And why would we make fun of whomever described them as giants since we were not there and didn't see what they saw. Ever occur to anyone they might, just might, have good reason to call them giants? Question is, why? What was it about these people that stood out so much?

The obvious is they were large physically but why were they?

To Janissey: thats true that weve all been told this myth that "they thought Columbus was crazy but he was right".

His superstitious unlettered crewmen may have worried about falling off the edge of the earth, but the educated elite of Europe (like King Ferdinand, and Queen Isabella) knew the world was a sphere (atleast since Erasthones) so the question was size, and not shape.

Columbus insisted that Eurasia was longer than it really is, and that the whole planet is smaller than it really is. And concluded that the country of Japan was only 600 miles west of the Azores ( just a puddle jump away). In reality the Atlantic (3000 miles), the American continents (3000 miles wide), and the Pacific (another 6000 miles) lay between the Azores and east Asia. So he was actually wrong. Everyone else was right. BUT Columbus's error caused him to stumble upon the American continents. So Columbus does deserve credit: for being the first person in history to get a research grant ( ie to get the powers-at-be to gamble money to test a theory). Even though he was wrong-putting the theory to the test payed off.

To Anna: I think that youve gotten things backward. Even if people did "used to believe the world was flat"- you're forgetting that people ALSO used to believe in giants . The same trend away from flat earth believing also caused folks to stop believing in giants.

Science was open to human giants centuries before it became open to the idea of dinosaurs or trilobites. No holy book mentions trilobites. So early rockhounds had no reason to look for them. But giants were a common meme in folklore -so if evidence for giant humans were unearthed it would have been accepted as such. The total absence of evidence of human giants, and the omnipresence of trilobites in the rock strata convinced scientists long before Darwin that there were never any human giants, and that trilobites must have once lived.

A) Why did our ancestors talk about unicorns, griffins, Chimera, witches flying on broomsticks, and islands inhabited by men with no heads -but with faces in their chests? If you're gonna take giants seriously why stop there?

B) Okay. So we should take giants seriously. So where is the evidence? Where are the bones of these giant humans? Where are the stone, or bronze, or iron, tools, made for giant human users?

C) How big is 'big' anyway? How tall do you envision these giants being?

Now wait a second...people did not "believe" in giants. We are not talking about witches, warlocks or fairies that have nothing to back them up. We actually have the remnants of a mammoth sized ancient city to suggest it was built by something really incredibly large. These stones are much larger than the vast majority used to construct cities, even in ancient times. They had no cranes. We wouldn't even attempt to move stones this size with cranes today. They are just too large.

Nimod was described as an actual giant and he built that enormous city Baalbek. It's still there!