Giants in Antiquity
21 Aug 2014, 12:21 am
Kraichgauer wrote:
ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo wrote:
Now here's another interesting though far fetched idea...the liger is a hybrid of lion and tiger. A liger is much bigger than either a lion or tiger because a gene is triggered in the Liger that causes the pituitary gland in the brain to produce more growth hormone that does not cause the same affect when it is just present in the lion or tiger. It seems odd but these two can and do produce offspring that are MUCH larger than either parent.
Lion and tiger are close enough related to produce offspring yet it isn't viable, it cannot produce more ligers, yet still, it can exist.
So let's just say at one time there were humans and another species closely related, kinda like how lions and tigers are, and there were cases when they produced offspring that were much larger for the same reason the ligers are, because of the genetic effect on the pituitary gland causing it to produce more growth hormone and thus giants were the result.
Lion and tiger are close enough related to produce offspring yet it isn't viable, it cannot produce more ligers, yet still, it can exist.
So let's just say at one time there were humans and another species closely related, kinda like how lions and tigers are, and there were cases when they produced offspring that were much larger for the same reason the ligers are, because of the genetic effect on the pituitary gland causing it to produce more growth hormone and thus giants were the result.
But what related species are we talking about?
One that most likely suffered a genocide which I suspect happened a lot at the time. That might be why it is so difficult finding evidence. People got angry and burned everything to the ground so nothing was left that was their policy a lot of the time. No telling how many little villages or cities were wiped off the map along with their inhabitants. It is entirely possible considering what we have read about history.
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21 Aug 2014, 12:26 am
ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo wrote:
DentArthurDent wrote:
So what size are you suggesting these giants to be. BTW I am surprised you have not brought up megafauna yet.
In the Bible they are something like 420 feet tall. Hehe. I doubt that, naturally. They could have been something like eight foot tall and very well built, muscular. That seems like it could happen.
Ok so now you should be able to see the wisdom in Bills posts. You do not find the idea that someone who is around six feet tall to be all that fantastic, but someone eight foot wow they are a giant. Can you see that this is relative to your experience. . Imagine you had lived a life where you had only experienced the tallest people to be just over five foot, and all of a sudden you come across a whole society who average 5'7 5'8 with even taller among them. You are familiar with people 7 foot tall, but add 12 inches and you are seeing giants..
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21 Aug 2014, 12:30 am
I just don't buy it. Five feet seven will never be giant to me but if I saw a guy who was between eight and nine feet tall with a lot of muscles and well built. yeah, I might be tempted to describe him as a giant.
Five foot seven is merely tall. To me, giant implies something larger than merely tall.
And on the topic of destruction, another compelling bit of info are cities or dwellings built in such a way they became stone fortresses. That tells you how dangerous an environment it was. People were so desperate for safety, they decided to live in caves and stone dwellings with limited access. Shows that people often burnt other materials to the ground. Stone cannot be easily burned, can it? If you dwell in stone, your life might be a bit longer and your house will be around a greater length of time.
21 Aug 2014, 4:52 pm
ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo wrote:
I just don't buy it. Five feet seven will never be giant to me but if I saw a guy who was between eight and nine feet tall with a lot of muscles and well built. yeah, I might be tempted to describe him as a giant.
Five foot seven is merely tall. To me, giant implies something larger than merely tall.
And on the topic of destruction, another compelling bit of info are cities or dwellings built in such a way they became stone fortresses. That tells you how dangerous an environment it was. People were so desperate for safety, they decided to live in caves and stone dwellings with limited access. Shows that people often burnt other materials to the ground. Stone cannot be easily burned, can it? If you dwell in stone, your life might be a bit longer and your house will be around a greater length of time.
Five foot seven is merely tall. To me, giant implies something larger than merely tall.
And on the topic of destruction, another compelling bit of info are cities or dwellings built in such a way they became stone fortresses. That tells you how dangerous an environment it was. People were so desperate for safety, they decided to live in caves and stone dwellings with limited access. Shows that people often burnt other materials to the ground. Stone cannot be easily burned, can it? If you dwell in stone, your life might be a bit longer and your house will be around a greater length of time.
If you were 8 feet tall I doubt you would care about building fortifications.
21 Aug 2014, 4:57 pm
ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo wrote:
Now here's another interesting though far fetched idea...the liger is a hybrid of lion and tiger. A liger is much bigger than either a lion or tiger because a gene is triggered in the Liger that causes the pituitary gland in the brain to produce more growth hormone that does not cause the same affect when it is just present in the lion or tiger. It seems odd but these two can and do produce offspring that are MUCH larger than either parent.
Lion and tiger are close enough related to produce offspring yet it isn't viable, it cannot produce more ligers, yet still, it can exist.
So let's just say at one time there were humans and another species closely related, kinda like how lions and tigers are, and there were cases when they produced offspring that were much larger for the same reason the ligers are, because of the genetic effect on the pituitary gland causing it to produce more growth hormone and thus giants were the result.
Lion and tiger are close enough related to produce offspring yet it isn't viable, it cannot produce more ligers, yet still, it can exist.
So let's just say at one time there were humans and another species closely related, kinda like how lions and tigers are, and there were cases when they produced offspring that were much larger for the same reason the ligers are, because of the genetic effect on the pituitary gland causing it to produce more growth hormone and thus giants were the result.
I already posted about ligers and tigons in this thread. Tigons get a double dose of growth inhibition (become dwarves smaller than either adult lions, or adult tigers), and ligers get the opposite-giantism.
As a put-on I suggested that the Nephilim (the hybrid human-angels) were hominid ligers.
But if you're not a believer in angels then what humanlike species existed in the last five thousand years for humans to hybrdize with? The Neanderthals died out 35 thousand years ago (and they probably were close enough to produce fertile offspring with us anyway) which was long before anything in the Bible happened.
Besides one ruined city with big rocks (which oversized humans would have the same amount of trouble moving as normal sized humans) what evidence do you have?
And you're forgetting about the word of mouth time lag between the actual experience and the writing down of the experience. Your five foot tall tribe encounters six foot tall warriors. Then ten generations later when the story actually gets written down the six foot tall guys have morphed into 60 foot tall guys.
The word "dragon" comes from the greek word "draco" which means simply "snake". The knowledge that some snakes have a poisonous bite got exaggerated over time into the meme of "dragons" whose very breath was "fire". Fear of poisonous snakes also took a different mythical path and evolved into the "baselisk" - a mythical snake whose very gaze would turn you into stone (Harry Potter had to escape one of those).
21 Aug 2014, 6:18 pm
How to move giant stones without giants (not that they would be any help) or modern technology. Use technology of the time and good old human ingenuity.
http://gilgamesh42.wordpress.com/2013/0 ... gineering/
Basically, rollers underneath the stone and capstans (a sort of leverage system that can be made with wood and rope) for force. Plus manpower. But the thing about manpower is you don't need to be gigantic to wield it. You do need to be strong but mostly what you need is coordinated teams working with rope-and-pulley systems.
If there really was a race of giants, skeletal remains would have been found. No genocide is so overwhelming as to be able to destroy all skeletal evidence.
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21 Aug 2014, 6:33 pm
In later ancient history, the Romans - who averaged just over five feet tall - spoke of the ancient Germans, who they had both peaceful and warlike relations with, as - not giants - but as the tallest people they had ever encountered. In fact, the average Germanic tribesman stood around five seven, five eight. That difference in height might not seem extreme to us modern people, but in the ancient world where poorer nutrition and low abundance of food was not conducive to modern standards of body mass and height, those extra inches would have seemed positively gigantic.
As a side note, the elderly Lutheran minister who had confirmed me had once recounted how, in his younger years, he had attended a Harlem Globe Trotters basket ball game where the tallest players stood at six feet - and that was pretty tall in the earlier half of the 20th century. And that was in the modern era!
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21 Aug 2014, 6:52 pm
Janissy wrote:
How to move giant stones without giants (not that they would be any help) or modern technology. Use technology of the time and good old human ingenuity.
http://gilgamesh42.wordpress.com/2013/0 ... gineering/
Basically, rollers underneath the stone and capstans (a sort of leverage system that can be made with wood and rope) for force. Plus manpower. But the thing about manpower is you don't need to be gigantic to wield it. You do need to be strong but mostly what you need is coordinated teams working with rope-and-pulley systems.
If there really was a race of giants, skeletal remains would have been found. No genocide is so overwhelming as to be able to destroy all skeletal evidence.
http://gilgamesh42.wordpress.com/2013/0 ... gineering/
Basically, rollers underneath the stone and capstans (a sort of leverage system that can be made with wood and rope) for force. Plus manpower. But the thing about manpower is you don't need to be gigantic to wield it. You do need to be strong but mostly what you need is coordinated teams working with rope-and-pulley systems.
If there really was a race of giants, skeletal remains would have been found. No genocide is so overwhelming as to be able to destroy all skeletal evidence.
That's not necessarily true, about the skeletal remains. for instance what if there was one small group that routinely cremated their dead? Would you say skeletal remains are a 100% certainty. Are you telling me that you are 100% you can produce skeletal remains for every creature that ever existed in the history of the world?
People always want to say, "if it existed there MUST be skeletal remains otherwise impossible!" Well, don't count on that.
As for the system of moving enormous stones, I figured there would be such a way unless these men really were 420 feet tall. Even a man who is between eight and nine feet would need a way to move such stones. They couldn't hoist them on their backs and carry them. Being eight to nine foot tall could be why they chose such large stones in the first place. Giant stones for giant men.
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21 Aug 2014, 7:11 pm
ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo wrote:
Janissy wrote:
How to move giant stones without giants (not that they would be any help) or modern technology. Use technology of the time and good old human ingenuity.
http://gilgamesh42.wordpress.com/2013/0 ... gineering/
Basically, rollers underneath the stone and capstans (a sort of leverage system that can be made with wood and rope) for force. Plus manpower. But the thing about manpower is you don't need to be gigantic to wield it. You do need to be strong but mostly what you need is coordinated teams working with rope-and-pulley systems.
If there really was a race of giants, skeletal remains would have been found. No genocide is so overwhelming as to be able to destroy all skeletal evidence.
http://gilgamesh42.wordpress.com/2013/0 ... gineering/
Basically, rollers underneath the stone and capstans (a sort of leverage system that can be made with wood and rope) for force. Plus manpower. But the thing about manpower is you don't need to be gigantic to wield it. You do need to be strong but mostly what you need is coordinated teams working with rope-and-pulley systems.
If there really was a race of giants, skeletal remains would have been found. No genocide is so overwhelming as to be able to destroy all skeletal evidence.
That's not necessarily true, about the skeletal remains. for instance what if there was one small group that routinely cremated their dead? Would you say skeletal remains are a 100% certainty. Are you telling me that you are 100% you can produce skeletal remains for every creature that ever existed in the history of the world?
People always want to say, "if it existed there MUST be skeletal remains otherwise impossible!" Well, don't count on that.
As for the system of moving enormous stones, I figured there would be such a way unless these men really were 420 feet tall. Even a man who is between eight and nine feet would need a way to move such stones. They couldn't hoist them on their backs and carry them. Being eight to nine foot tall could be why they chose such large stones in the first place. Giant stones for giant men.
Even in ancient cultures that had practiced cremation, the occasional skeletal remains are discovered. Most common of these are bog bodies in northern Europe, who had either been human sacrifices or condemned criminals, both of which after execution had been thrown into ancient lakes or ponds, that in later times turned into bogs. In other cases, people just died away from home due to accidents or in battles, and their bodies were never cremated.
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21 Aug 2014, 7:34 pm
ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo wrote:
Janissy wrote:
How to move giant stones without giants (not that they would be any help) or modern technology. Use technology of the time and good old human ingenuity.
http://gilgamesh42.wordpress.com/2013/0 ... gineering/
Basically, rollers underneath the stone and capstans (a sort of leverage system that can be made with wood and rope) for force. Plus manpower. But the thing about manpower is you don't need to be gigantic to wield it. You do need to be strong but mostly what you need is coordinated teams working with rope-and-pulley systems.
If there really was a race of giants, skeletal remains would have been found. No genocide is so overwhelming as to be able to destroy all skeletal evidence.
http://gilgamesh42.wordpress.com/2013/0 ... gineering/
Basically, rollers underneath the stone and capstans (a sort of leverage system that can be made with wood and rope) for force. Plus manpower. But the thing about manpower is you don't need to be gigantic to wield it. You do need to be strong but mostly what you need is coordinated teams working with rope-and-pulley systems.
If there really was a race of giants, skeletal remains would have been found. No genocide is so overwhelming as to be able to destroy all skeletal evidence.
That's not necessarily true, about the skeletal remains. for instance what if there was one small group that routinely cremated their dead? Would you say skeletal remains are a 100% certainty. Are you telling me that you are 100% you can produce skeletal remains for every creature that ever existed in the history of the world?
People always want to say, "if it existed there MUST be skeletal remains otherwise impossible!" Well, don't count on that.
As for the system of moving enormous stones, I figured there would be such a way unless these men really were 420 feet tall. Even a man who is between eight and nine feet would need a way to move such stones. They couldn't hoist them on their backs and carry them. Being eight to nine foot tall could be why they chose such large stones in the first place. Giant stones for giant men.
Thats like saying "there's a little green man walking around who follows you around, but disappears everytime you turn to look at him". Its up to you to find evidence for this. Not for us to disprove it.
Second- if there were a culture of people in some small country (like what was Canaan, which is now Isreal-Palestine) who were both giants, and cremated their dead- the giant part would have predated the particular culture's particular mortuary practices. A race or subspecies of giants would have existed thousands of years prior to one tribe of giants adopting one particular set of mortuary practices- and we would see skeletal evidence of it this race going back into the stone age.
Also if these folks were- you dont specify how big they were supposed to be- say 10 feet tall then they would have to be more than just taller than us. They would have to be different in other ways to function as walking upright creatures. They would need thicker legs with leg bones wider in cross section to support the extra wieght. Their clothing and tools would look very different from those of regular humans. Where are the artifacts?
21 Aug 2014, 8:20 pm
ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo wrote:
As for the system of moving enormous stones, I figured there would be such a way unless these men really were 420 feet tall. Even a man who is between eight and nine feet would need a way to move such stones. They couldn't hoist them on their backs and carry them. Being eight to nine foot tall could be why they chose such large stones in the first place. Giant stones for giant men.
They had really, really big brains. That's how the pyramids were build, that's how Stonehenge was built, that's how they built Machu Pichu. Unless you think there were giants all over the planet?
21 Aug 2014, 8:50 pm
I am just saying there's a slight chance there will be evidence something existed due to unforeseen circumstances that would alter the evidence, turning it into something else. If a body is burned, it becomes ash, for instance. If a wooden structure is burnt, it becomes ash. Look at those Mayan villages without any inhabitants. No "evidence" of the inhabitants except for structures, utensils, pottery.
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21 Aug 2014, 11:36 pm
ooOoOoOAnaOoOoOoo wrote:
Not sure about that Dillogic. Not much could rattle the Roman legions although the Germans did massacre a lot of them in the Teutoburg forest where three legions disappeared. Still a Roman would never want to say anyone was a giant but Rome.
Actually, the Romans were in fact very aware of the size differential between them and their Barbarian enemies, and wrote about it quite a bit. But then again, the Romans thought it only emphasized how much better professional soldiers they were compared to the physically large, but undisciplined, often half naked northerners. Realizing a good thing when they saw it, they trained Barbarian warriors in the Roman military, combining their ferocity with Roman training and tactics. Such men were often Rome's best and most loyal, and devoted soldiers - though sometimes that situation blew up in the Roman's faces, such as with Romanized Germanic chiefs like Arminius who had destroyed three legions in the Teutoburg Forest, thereby liberating most of Germania, and later, Civilis (his native born name has been lost to history) who had led an uprising of Germans and Gauls against the Romans.
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22 Aug 2014, 8:29 am
naturalplastic wrote:
Also if these folks were- you dont specify how big they were supposed to be- say 10 feet tall then they would have to be more than just taller than us. They would have to be different in other ways to function as walking upright creatures. They would need thicker legs with leg bones wider in cross section to support the extra wieght. Their clothing and tools would look very different from those of regular humans. Where are the artifacts?
This is the main problem with giants. The square-cube law doesn?t allow hominids to grow arbitrarily large without becoming something else entirely.
Quote:
If an animal were isometrically scaled up by a considerable amount, its relative muscular strength would be severely reduced, since the cross section of its muscles would increase by the square of the scaling factor while its mass would increase by the cube of the scaling factor. As a result of this, cardiovascular and respiratory functions would be severely burdened.
In the case of flying animals, the wing loading would be increased if they were isometrically scaled up, and they would therefore have to fly faster to gain the same amount of lift. Air resistance per unit mass is also higher for smaller animals, which is why a small animal like an ant cannot be seriously injured from impact with the ground after being dropped from any height.
As was elucidated by J. B. S. Haldane, large animals do not look like small animals: an elephant cannot be mistaken for a mouse scaled up in size. This is due to allometric scaling: the bones of an elephant are necessarily proportionately much larger than the bones of a mouse, because they must carry proportionately higher weight. To quote from Haldane's seminal essay On Being the Right Size, "...consider a man 60 feet high...Giant Pope and Giant Pagan in the illustrated Pilgrim's Progress.... These monsters...weighed 1000 times as much as Christian. Every square inch of a giant bone had to support 10 times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about 10 times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every time they took a step." Consequently, most animals show allometric scaling with increased size, both among species and within a species.
The giant monsters seen in horror movies (e.g., Godzilla or King Kong) are also unrealistic, as their sheer size would force them to collapse. However, the buoyancy of water negates to some extent the effects of gravity. Therefore, sea creatures can grow to very large sizes without the same musculoskeletal structures that would be required of similarly sized land creatures, and it is no coincidence that the largest animals to ever exist on earth are aquatic animals.
In the case of flying animals, the wing loading would be increased if they were isometrically scaled up, and they would therefore have to fly faster to gain the same amount of lift. Air resistance per unit mass is also higher for smaller animals, which is why a small animal like an ant cannot be seriously injured from impact with the ground after being dropped from any height.
As was elucidated by J. B. S. Haldane, large animals do not look like small animals: an elephant cannot be mistaken for a mouse scaled up in size. This is due to allometric scaling: the bones of an elephant are necessarily proportionately much larger than the bones of a mouse, because they must carry proportionately higher weight. To quote from Haldane's seminal essay On Being the Right Size, "...consider a man 60 feet high...Giant Pope and Giant Pagan in the illustrated Pilgrim's Progress.... These monsters...weighed 1000 times as much as Christian. Every square inch of a giant bone had to support 10 times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about 10 times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every time they took a step." Consequently, most animals show allometric scaling with increased size, both among species and within a species.
The giant monsters seen in horror movies (e.g., Godzilla or King Kong) are also unrealistic, as their sheer size would force them to collapse. However, the buoyancy of water negates to some extent the effects of gravity. Therefore, sea creatures can grow to very large sizes without the same musculoskeletal structures that would be required of similarly sized land creatures, and it is no coincidence that the largest animals to ever exist on earth are aquatic animals.
At some point, it ceases to be practical for an otherwise human-like creature to walk on two?ridiculously thick?legs: keeping balance becomes harder and harder (and requires extremely strong muscles simply to prevent the upper body from falling forward or backwards with each step, muscles which, in turn, increase the already massive weight the legs have to support), and a pair of arms becomes less and less useful, as they have to be proportionally tiny?à la T-Rex?so they don?t burden the legs too much; besides, very large human-like arms would have trouble simply lifting their own weight to flex themselves.
Once you?re on all fours, with four thick legs which can?t do much besides supporting your gigantic body, if you still want to be capable of interacting with your environment in complex and versatile ways, like humans do, you need something to replace your hands. Don?t even count on using your mouth to grasp things easily?you have a short neck with thick bones to keep your massive head in place, and flexing your pillar-like legs often is too taxing. What about a trunk? So, yeah, at this point, you resemble more an elephant than a human. An elephant is what you get when a land mammal adapts to being big, which is a daunting task in and of itself.
You can go further, like some dinosaurs, by getting proportionally even thicker legs, forgoing your trunk and having instead a proportionally much smaller head?with a much smaller brain?at the end of a long neck, and a huge tail to counterbalance it, but now any possibility to live in a remotely human-like way is gone.
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