The 70 Million-Year-Old History of the Mississippi River
In 1758, the French ethnographer Antoine-Simon Le Page du Pratz published The History of Louisiana, in which he wrote that the Mississippi River’s name meant “the ancient father of rivers.” Though his etymology was off—the Ojibwe words that gave us Mississippi (Misi-ziibi) actually mean “long river”—the idea has proven durable. “Ol’ Man River” buoyed Show Boat, the 1927 musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II.
The Mississippi Delta, seen from space in 2001.
During the 1937 flood, Raymond Daniell wrote in the New York Times about frantic efforts to raise barriers “faster than old man river could rise.”
Now it appears that the Mississippi is far older than Le Page thought, and it used to be far bigger than the Ojibwe could have imagined. And it might even become that big again in the future.
These are the extraordinary new findings unearthed by geologists including Sally Potter-McIntyre at Southern Illinois University, Michael Blum at the University of Kansas and Randel Cox at the University of Memphis, whose work is helping us better understand the monumental events, beginning in late Cretaceous North America, that gave rise to the Mississippi, swelling it to gargantuan proportions.
An 1832 expedition led by Henry Schoolcraft identified the Mississippi’s source as Lake Itasca in Minnesota.
In the late Cretaceous, around 80 million years ago, a mountain chain spanned the southern portion of the continent, blocking southbound water flows, so most North American rivers flowed to the Western Interior Sea or north to Canada’s Hudson Bay.
Eventually, a gap in those mountains formed, opening a path for the river we now know as the Mississippi to flow to the Gulf of Mexico. Scientists call that gap the Mississippi Embayment, but the rest of us know it as the Mississippi Delta, the vast flood plain that stretches from southern Missouri to northern Louisiana.
As recently as 2014, geological consensus held that the Mississippi began flowing through the embayment around 20 million years ago. But in 2018, Potter-McIntyre and her team concluded, based on the age of zircon fragments they excavated from sandstone in southern Illinois, that the river began flowing much earlier—some 70 million years ago.
The Mississippi was thus born when dinosaurs still roamed the planet; one can almost picture an alamosaurus bending its prodigious neck to drink from its waters. By contrast, the Missouri River, in its current form, dates back a mere two million years. Old Man River, indeed.
Still, 70 million years ago the Mississippi was nowhere near as large as it would become. Blum has detailed how the waterway grew as it added tributaries: the Platte, Arkansas and Tennessee rivers by the late Paleocene, then the Red River by the Oligocene.
Around 60 million years ago, the Mississippi was collecting water from the Rockies to the Appalachians; by four million years ago, its watershed had extended into Canada, and the Mississippi had grown to an enormous size, carrying four to eight times as much water as it does today, Cox and colleagues have found. “This was a giant river, on the order of the Amazon,” said Cox.
So the river’s larger-than-life role in culture was perhaps inevitable. Until the early 19th century, the Mississippi marked the western border between Spanish and American territory, and it continues to give life to the cities that sprang up along its route.
After Union forces captured Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln saw the emancipated river as a symbol of a nation unified: “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea,” he wrote.
Mark Twain, the best publicist a river ever had, inspired 150 years’ worth of dreams about floating away from our troubles. And among members of the Ojibwe, Dakota and Chitimacha tribes, who still live on portions of ancestral lands in the Mississippi Valley, a spiritual connection to the river remains strong.
In 2013, Nibi Walk, a group of Indigenous women walked 1,500 miles along the Mississippi to advocate for clean water—an issue of vital importance to the 18 million Americans who get their drinking water from the river.
The river’s famed fluctuations have shaped American urbanization, too. The Great Flood of 1927 accelerated the Great Migration, as African Americans, disproportionately displaced, sought economic opportunity in cities such as Chicago and Detroit.
“Old Mississippi River, what a fix you left me in,” Bessie Smith sings in “Homeless Blues,” one of many songs about the 1927 flood. That disaster also ushered in an era of unprecedented public works, as the federal government sought to remake the river into a predictable route for moving bulk necessities like corn and coal.
The mighty river has inspired more than a thousand songs since 1900, including “Big River” by Johnny Cash and “Proud Mary,” in which John Fogerty (echoed later by Tina Turner) observes that “people on the river are happy to give.” That truism is confirmed every year when people who live along the Mississippi offer a meal and a shower to the dozens of strangers who test themselves against Old Man River by paddling small boats from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.
This Gorgeous Ice Cavern Has An Ancient Forest Underneath
Mendenhall Glacier is one of the most picturesque places that is situated in Southeast Alaska. It is whoppingly 13.6 miles long. There is a number of ice caves that can be located in this Glacier. Also, an ancient forest was revealed beneath the glacier in the last decade due to rapidly melting ice.
Basically, a glacier is a very large amount of snow piled up together and then turned into ice. Sadly, global warming is causing glaciers around the globe to melt at a speed that has never been seen before, and Mendenhall Glacier is a victim too.
Mendenhall Glacier has shrunk 1.75 miles since 1929 and will continue to do so unless there is a proper solution implemented for global warming.
As the glacier is continuously retreating, remains of an ancient forest have been revealed underneath the glacier.
Well, preserved stumps and trunks can be now seen clearly after more than 2000 years.
Some of those trees still have their roots intact to the ground. The preservation is that good! Some of those still have the bark with them. It is quite possible to determine the age of those trees because most of them are in a growth position.
The research team that worked on these trees are calling them spruce or hemlock based on their diameter of the trunk and the trees growing in the region present day.
The Earth has passed different ice ages since its beginning. In those ice ages, glaciers have grown, advanced, and also shrunken and retreated. During those different periods, they send out liquefied ice streams that push aprons of gravel beyond the edge of glaciers.
A similar thing happened with this uncovered ancient forest; it was sealed in what can be called the Tomb of Gravel.
This melting of ice is something that we should be highly concerned about. But at the same time, we can also spend our time learning about the climate of the old ages thanks to these kinds of events.
Maya Farmers May Have Planned for Population Growth
For years, experts in climate science and ecology have held up the agricultural practices of the ancient Maya as prime examples of what not to do.
The research team surveyed a small area in the Western Maya Lowlands situated at today’s border between Mexico and Guatemala, shown in context here.
“There’s a narrative that depicts the Maya as people who engaged in unchecked agricultural development,” said Andrew Scherer, an associate professor of anthropology at Brown University. “The narrative goes: The population grew too large, the agriculture scaled up, and then everything fell apart.”
But a new study, authored by Scherer, students at Brown and scholars at other institutions, suggests that that narrative doesn’t tell the full story. Using drones and lidar, a remote sensing technology, a team led by Scherer and Charles Golden of Brandeis University surveyed a small area in the Western Maya Lowlands situated at today’s border between Mexico and Guatemala.
Scherer’s lidar survey — and, later, boots-on-the-ground surveying — revealed extensive systems of sophisticated irrigation and terracing in and outside the region’s towns, but no huge population booms to match.
The findings demonstrate that between 350 and 900 A.D., some Maya kingdoms were living comfortably, with sustainable agricultural systems and no demonstrated food insecurity. “It’s exciting to talk about the really large populations that the Maya maintained in some places; to survive for so long with such density was a testament to their technological accomplishments,” Scherer said.
“But it’s important to understand that that narrative doesn’t translate across the whole of the Maya region. People weren’t always living cheek to jowl. Some areas that had the potential for agricultural development were never even occupied.”
The research group’s findings were published in the journal Remote Sensing. When Scherer’s team embarked on the lidar survey, they weren’t necessarily attempting to debunk long-held assumptions about Maya agricultural practices. Rather, their primary motivation was to learn more about the infrastructure of a relatively understudied region.
While some parts of the western Maya area are well studied, such as the well-known site of Palenque, others are less understood, owing to the dense tropical canopy that has long hidden ancient communities from view. It wasn’t until 2019, in fact, that Scherer and colleagues uncovered the kingdom of Sak T’zi’, which archaeologists had been trying to find for decades.
Lidar scans of the research area revealed the relative density of structures in Piedras Negras, La Mar and Lacanjá Tzeltal, providing hints at these cities’ respective populations and food needs.
The team chose to survey a rectangle of land connecting three Maya kingdoms: Piedras Negras, La Mar and Sak Tz’i’, whose political capital was centred on the archaeological site of Lacanjá Tzeltal. Despite being roughly 15 miles away from one another as the crow flies, these three urban centres had very different population sizes and governing power, Scherer said.
“Today, the world has hundreds of different nation-states, but they’re not really each other’s equals in terms of the leverage they have in the geopolitical landscape,” Scherer said. “This is what we see in the Maya empire as well.”
Scherer explained that all three kingdoms were governed by an ajaw, or a lord — positioning them as equals, in theory. But Piedras Negras, the largest kingdom, was led by a k’uhul ajaw, a “holy lord,” a special honorific not claimed by the lords of La Mar and Sak Tz’i’. La Mar and Sak Tz’i’ weren’t exactly equal peers, either: While La Mar was much more populous than the Sak T’zi’ capital Lacanjá Tzeltal, the latter was more independent, often switching alliances and never appearing to be subordinate to other kingdoms, suggesting it had greater political autonomy.
The lidar survey showed that, despite their differences, these three kingdoms boasted one major similarity: agriculture that yielded a food surplus.
“What we found in the lidar survey points to strategic thinking on the Maya’s part in this area,” Scherer said.
“We saw evidence of long-term agricultural infrastructure in an area with relatively low population density — suggesting that they didn’t create some crop fields late in the game as a last-ditch attempt to increase yields, but rather that they thought a few steps ahead.”
The lidar — along with boots-on-the-ground surveying (left) and aerial photography (right) — showed evidence of expansive irrigation channels across the region. The depression with dark soil at the left shows the remains of an ancient channel.
In all three kingdoms, the lidar revealed signs of what the researchers call “agricultural intensification” — the modification of land to increase the volume and predictability of crop yields. Agricultural intensification methods in these Maya kingdoms, where the primary crop was maize, included building terraces and creating water management systems with dams and channelled fields. Penetrating through the often-dense jungle, the lidar showed evidence of extensive terracing and expansive irrigation channels across the region, suggesting that these kingdoms were not only prepared for population growth but also likely saw food surpluses every year.
“It suggests that by the Late Classic Period, around 600 to 800 A.D., the area’s farmers were producing more food than they were consuming,” Scherer said. “It’s likely that much of the surplus food was sold at urban marketplaces, both as producer and as part of prepared foods like tamales and gruel, and used to pay tribute, a tax of sorts, to local lords.”
Scherer said he hopes the study provides scholars with a more nuanced view of the ancient Maya — and perhaps even offers inspiration for members of the modern-day agricultural sector who are looking for sustainable ways to grow food for an ever-growing global population. Today, he said, significant parts of the region are being cleared for cattle ranching and palm oil plantations. But in areas where people still raise corn and other crops, they report that they have three harvests a year — and it’s likely that those high yields may be due in part to the channelling and other modifications that the ancient Maya made to the landscape.
“In conversations about contemporary climate or ecological crises, the Maya are often brought up as a cautionary tale: ‘They screwed up; we don’t want to repeat their mistakes,’” Scherer said. “But maybe the Maya were more forward-thinking than we give them credit for. Our survey shows there’s a good argument to be made that their agricultural practices were very much sustainable.”
Aside from Scherer and Golden, study authors include Brown PhD students Mark Agostini, Morgan Clark, Joshua Schnell and Bethany Whitlock; recent Brown PhD graduates Mallory Matsumoto, now an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and Alejandra Roche Recinos, now a visiting assistant professor at Reed College; and researchers from McMaster University and the University of Florida. The research was funded in part by the Alphawood Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Denver museum to return looted relics to Cambodia after the U.S. moves to seize them
Decades after they were hacked from temples and other historical sites, four ancient statues from the Denver Museum of Art are finally heading home.
The museum has agreed to turn over the relics to the U.S. government, which plans to return them to their native Cambodia, according to a forfeiture complaint filed Monday in the Southern District of New York’s federal court.
The items include a likeness of the goddess of transcendent wisdom called the Prajnaparamita and another of the sun god Surya
The repatriation announcement comes amid mounting pressure by U.S. and Cambodian authorities on prominent art institutions to reexamine their collections of Khmer art, especially pieces acquired over decades of unrest in the country when looters stole vast numbers of culturally significant antiquities.
“I am delighted by the upcoming return of these four highly significant cultural objects to Cambodia,” said Phoeurng Sackona, the Cambodian Minister of Culture and Fine Arts. “Each one has a fascinating story and priceless value to our nation.”
In recent years, the Cambodian government has launched a vigorous effort to gather information on hundreds of valuable cultural artefacts the country says were stolen.
Many of these pieces now reside in the U.S., Western Europe and Australia.
Federal authorities said that the four pieces in Denver were identified as stolen by the former leader of a major Cambodian looting team that removed ancient artefacts when the country was governed by the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s.
The museum acquired the relics from Latchford between 2000 and 2005, according to the forfeiture filing.
Latchford was indicted in 2019 for allegedly looting Cambodia’s cultural heritage on a grand scale. The case against Latchford was dropped last year after he died.
Over his decades of trading antiquities, Latchford amassed one of the world’s largest private collections of Khmer treasures, mostly Hindu and Buddhist sculptures.
Why this 300 million-year-old fossil discovered in Utah has the palaeontology world buzzing
A 300-million-year-old fossil discovered deep in Canyonlands National Park in Utah could belong to an entirely new species, reports Amy Joi O’Donoghue for the Deseret News.
The fossilized critter is an amniote—a land-dwelling vertebrate that lays eggs— and has four legs. It’s most likely an ancient ancestor of reptiles or mammals, though more testing is needed before scientists can definitively label it as a new species, reports Sherry Liang for CNN.
“It’s roughly the size of an iguana and (the fossil) preserves at least the vertebrae, top of the skull, and some of the shoulder girdle and forelimb,” Adam Marsh, the lead palaeontologist at Petrified Forest National Park, tells Mark Price for the Sacramento Bee.
The fossilized remains of a 300 million-year-old specimen were recently unearthed in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park and transferred to the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, where they will be documented and further examined. Such a finding of a fossil from this period are particularly rare, especially in North America, so scientists are excited to learn more.
Around a year ago, a Canyonlands park ranger stumbled across the fossil and reported it to the park. Then, scientists from the Natural History Museum of Utah, Petrified Forest National Park and the University of Southern California teamed up to dig into this discovery.
They filed for a research permit and excavated the fossil last month, reports CNN.
“This is cool because it’s 50 million years older than the oldest dinosaur fossil,” Marsh tells the Deseret. “So it’s kind of cool that it’s from a period in Earth’s history where we just don’t have a lot of fossils from in North America especially.”
This creature existed between the Pennsylvanian Period (323.2 to 298.9 million years ago) and the Permian (298.9 to 251.9 million years ago).
During the Pennsylvanian era, plants started to colonize dry land by way of more evolved seeds; animals did so through the evolution of the amniotic egg, in which the embryo develops inside a shell, like with birds and reptiles.
In the Permian, the planet’s continents started to squish together to form the supercontinent Pangea, and the era ended with the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history.
“It’s a phenomenal specimen. You do not see something like that very often, so it’s really significant for that in itself,” Marsh tells CNN. “But what it indicates is that there’s probably more fossils out there, especially at Canyonlands, in this really important time interval.”
Adding to the excitement, Adam Huttenlocker, a biologist at the University of Southern California, tells CNN that finding fossils of aquatic creatures is common at Canyonlands, but this is the first time he’s heard of the discovery of a land-dwelling vertebrate in the park.
“It really goes to show what kind of fossil resources are hidden in our national parks waiting to be discovered and shared with the public,” Marsh tells the Sacramento Bee.
Archeological dig in Newfoundland unearths what could be Canada’s oldest English coin
Archaeologists in Newfoundland have unearthed what may be the oldest English coin ever found in Canada—and perhaps North America. Working at the site of a former English colony, the team dug up a rare two-penny piece that was minted more than 520 years ago, between 1493 and 1499, reports Chris O’Neill-Yates for CBC News.
Minted in Canterbury between 1493 and 1499, the silver half groat dates to the middle of Henry VII’s reign, when a rebellion led by pretender Perkin Warbeck threatened to unseat the nascent Tudor dynasty.
Known as a half groat, the coin dates to the reign of England’s first Tudor king, Henry VII, who ruled from 1485 to 1509. It was uncovered at Cupids Cove Plantation Provincial Historic Site, where English merchant John Guy established a colony in 1610.
Researchers found the object near what would have been a bastion in the fortified settlement.
“Some artefacts are important for what they tell us about a site, while others are important because they spark the imagination,” says archaeologist William Gilbert, who discovered the site in 1995 and continues to lead excavations there today, in a statement.
“This coin is definitely one of the latter. One can’t help but wonder at the journey it made, and how many hands it must have passed through from the time it was minted … until it was lost in Cupids sometime early in the 17th century.”
A better-preserved example of a Henry VII half-groat.
Gilbert showed the newly unearthed, nickel-sized coin to Paul Berry, a former curator at the Bank of Canada Museum who helped authenticate the piece reports the Canadian Press.
The silver coin was minted in Canterbury around the middle of Henry’s reign when a rebellion led by pretender Perkin Warbeck threatened to unseat the nascent Tudor dynasty.
Previously, the oldest known English coin found in the country was a silver groat minted during the reign of Henry’s granddaughter Elizabeth I, in 1560 or 1561, and discovered at Cupids Cove in 2001.
Other centuries-old English coins found on the continent include a circa 1558 groat buried on Richmond Island in Maine around 1628 and a 1560 silver coin unearthed in Jamestown, Virginia.
Guy, accompanied by a group of 39 English settlers, founded what was then called Cuper’s Cove on Conception Bay in Newfoundland. Within a few years of the settlement’s establishment in 1610, the colonists had built numerous structures, including a fort, sawmill, gristmill and brewhouse, reports Bill Gilbert for BBC News. But the winter of 1612 proved “punishing,” according to the CBC, and most of the settlers—including Guy—eventually abandoned the site. The company that funded the venture went bankrupt in 1631.
Exactly who left the half-groat at the settlement is open to interpretation. Gilbert posits that one of the Cuper’s Cove settlers dropped it when the fort’s bastion was under construction. The half-goat was found within a few feet of a post that was part of the fortification’s foundation.
“My best guess is that it was probably dropped by either John Guy or one of the early colonists when they were building … in the fall of 1610,” the archaeologist tells CBC News. “That’s what I think is most likely.”
Given that the coin is about 60 years older than the Elizabethan groat found on the cove in 2001, it’s also possible that it was lost before the colonists arrived, perhaps by an early explorer of Canada.
“[The] coin was minted around the time John Cabot arrived in England in 1495,” Gilbert tells CBC News. “It’s during the period that Cabot would have been active in England and setting out on his early explorations of the new world.” (Per Royal Museums Greenwich, the Italian explorer landed on Newfoundland—literally a “newfound land”—in 1497, one month after setting sail from Bristol in hopes of discovering a shorter route to Asia.)
Analysis of the coin is ongoing, but researchers hope to display it at the Cupids Cove historical site in time for the 2022 tourist season.
Over the millennia, people in many places across the globe have reported the existence of giants. Some of these alleged giants were supposedly six or seven feet tall, while others were considerably taller – 10 feet or more. However, many of these accounts are considered mythical or legendary. But even if such giants existed, were they simply the result of disease or genetic abnormalities? And were there just a few of them?
The Cardiff Giant
But these sightings have continued into the modern era. Many people in America, for instance, have reported seeing giants – or at least the bones of giants. Given these accounts, one may think there were many thousands, if not millions, of these giants roaming ancient America – a race of giants, in fact. However, most of the evidence is anecdotal rather than scientific. Mistakes could have been made too, especially by people who know little or nothing about science, particularly archaeology or anthropology. Also, there have been plenty of hoaxes through the ages. Some people love to fool others.
So, have giants ever existed in America? Let’s see if we can answer that question. First, this article will provide a recap of the existence of giants through the ages and then finish the investigation with more recent information.
David and Goliath
King Arthur squares off against a giant
Giants in Mythology and Legend
Over the centuries, the existence of giants has been reported in many parts of the world. The word giant comes from the Greek word Gigantes, and of course, in the old days, the Greeks wrote about the existence of giants in much of Greek mythology. For instance, the Olympian gods fought a war with the Gigantomachy, and they weren’t victorious until Heracles decided to join the Olympians. According to Hindu mythology, the Daityas were a race of giants who fought against the Devas, because they were jealous of their Deva half-brothers. Power-hungry people, the Daityas often allied themselves with other races. Supposedly, female Daityas wore jewels as large as boulders.
The Old Testament of the Bible includes tales of giants too. The Book of Genesis mentions the Nephilim, who existed before and after the biblical deluge. And David battled the Philistine giant Goliath, who reportedly was about ten feet tall. Goliath’s brothers were also considered giants.
European Giants
In Norse mythology, most of their various monsters were giants. In the eventual battle of Ragnarök, a kind of end-of-the-world tale, the giants will lay siege to Asgard, which will bring about the destruction of the world. Moreover, the Norse gods are related to giants. The chief god Odin was the great-grandson of the first giant, Ymir.
In medieval folklore, people believed giants were responsible for many ancient civilizations. Their reasoning was that only giants could have built the immense walls, fortifications, temples and statues now attributed to the Greeks, Romans, Celts or Druids. Giants are also mentioned frequently in fairy tales, particularly Jack the Giant Killer, Robin Hood and the Prince of Aragon and Young Ronald. In 1890, bone fragments discovered by an anthropologist in France, and dating from the Neolithic period to the Bronze Age, came to be known as the Giant of Castelnau. Judging from the size of these leg and arm bones, it’s been estimated this “giant” was anywhere from 10 to 15 feet tall!
Paul Bunyan
Bigfoot
Skulls found at Lovelock Cave
Artist’s depiction of Cahokia
Monk’s Mound
Creek Mound
Miamisburg Mound
The Case for Giants in America
Most Americans have heard of Paul Bunyan, who, according to American folklore, was a giant lumberjack who was so big and strong he could bat cannonballs with his huge hands. In more recent times, Paul Bunyan has become a cartoon character of note. And then there’s Bigfoot, aka Sasquatch, a hominid-like, ape-man that purportedly lurks in the woods of North America.
But these giants are just silliness, right?
Well, many authors have written about the possible existence of giants in America. Certainly, one of the better books in this genre was penned by Richard J. Dewhurst, who wrote The Ancient Giants Who Ruled America, published in 2014. The following text will pertain to the discoveries Dewhurst writes about in this very interesting book.
Red-Haired Giants Found in Nevada
According to Paiute oral history, red-haired giants known as the Si-Te-Cah (the “tule eaters”) cannibalized people in what is now central Nevada. Eventually, the Paiute tribes rebelled against these giants and eradicated them. Then, in 1911, a group of bat guano miners discovered the remains and artefacts of some of these giants in Lovelock Cave. Certainly, the greatest of these discoveries were some mummies of the Si-Te-Cah, which had been wrapped in elaborate textiles. During subsequent excavations by scientists in Lovelock Cave, numerous artefacts and some human remains were collected, but experts dispute the claim that giants once lived in the cave. Interestingly, archaeological samples taken from some duck decoys found in the cave showed that using a dating technique known as Accelerator Mass Spectrometry, the decoys were from 2,000 to 2,500 years old.
Unfortunately, the mummies of the Si-Te-Cah have been lost; only the skulls of these alleged giants have been kept at the Humboldt Museum in Winnemucca, Nevada.
Mound Builders of America
Throughout Dewhurst’s book, he writes about the discovery of giants interred in burial mounds in parts of the United States. These accounts, dozens of them, in fact, cover a time period from the late 1700s until well into the twentieth century. According to Dewhurst, thousands of these burial mounds were discovered over this time period and many still exist, particularly the larger ones. But the remains of the supposed giants discovered in the burial mounds disintegrated shortly after discovery, were lost, or stored away – without scientific investigation – and then forgotten. A typical account from the book goes like this:
GIANT EIGHT FEET, SEVEN INCHES TALL UNEARTHED
Ohio Science Annual, 1898
A rare archaeological discovery has been made near Reinersville in Morgan County, Ohio. A small knoll, which had always been supposed to be the result of an uprooted tree, was opened recently and discovered to be the work of the mound builders. Just below the surrounding surface, a layer of boulders and pebbles was found. Directly underneath this was found the skeleton of a giant 8 feet, 7 inches in height. Surrounding the skeleton were bones and stone implements, stone hatchets, and other characteristics of the mound builders. The discovery is considered by the scientists as one of the most important ever made in Ohio. The skeleton is now in the possession of a Reinersville collector.
Cahokia, One of America’s Greatest Mound Builder Sites
The Cahokia mound builder site is one of the largest in North America. Located in southwestern Illinois, near Collinsville (across the Mississippi River from St. Louis), the site is near the confluence of three rivers, so the ancient people of the area must have loved this place. About a thousand years ago, Cahokia was a city larger than London, and there were 120 earthen mounds, though only 40 remain today. But the largest still exists, and it’s called Monks Mound, which is comparable in height and surface area to the largest pyramids built by the Egyptians, Maya, Aztecs and Toltecs.
Interestingly, also located near the Cahokia site, is what’s called Woodhenge, a structure that includes 48 wooden posts arranged in a 410-foot diameter circle. Woodhenge has many geological and celestial alignments. At the Cahokia site, built by the Mississippian culture, hundreds of human skeletons have been found, including the bones of many sacrificial victims and, of course, the remains of giants.
Blond-haired Giants of Santa Catalina Island
During the 1920s on Santa Catalina Island, which is off the coast of Southern California (considered one of the Channel Islands), scientists dug up the skeletal remains of more than 3,700 people. Alleged to be from a race of blond-haired giants, one of the skeletons was over nine feet in length, though the average length of the skeletons was about seven feet. In those days, this discovery generated lots of excitement. The ruins of a temple were also found at the Catalina Island site, where the remains of many sacrificial victims were unearthed. Investigated by the Spanish as long ago as the middle 1500s, the people of this civilization worshipped the Sun God. Subsequent radiocarbon dating indicated that at least some of the skeletal remains found on the island were as old as 7,000 years.
Dewhurst claims that most of these skeletons were taken by the University of California and the Smithsonian Institute, though the Smithsonian denied it had the remains for 50 years. However, in 2011, the Smithsonian admitted they had the skeletons in a restricted-access room. Be that as it may, 200 skeletons from the site can be found at UCLA’s Fowler Museum.
Evidence for a Smithsonian Cover-up?
Throughout the book, Dewhurst asserts that the Smithsonian Institute has engaged in a cover-up regarding the existence of a race of giants in America, but he provides no proof in his aforementioned book and, of course, the Smithsonian hasn’t admitted there ever was – or is – such a cover-up. According to the online article, “Big Buried Secrets: Giant Skeletons and the Smithsonian” written by Micah Hanks, if the Smithsonian can be blamed for anything regarding the lost bones of giants, it’s that the Institute’s recordkeeping is not perfect. A quote from the article could summarize this issue:
Of course, the knowledge that such skeletons may indeed have been found at times, paired with the Smithsonian’s apparent inability to keep very good records about their discovery, no doubt helps to fuel the conspiratorial speculation. With all the unknown quantities present here (and whether they are largely fact, or merely fiction), at times it does become difficult to know whether the entire truth is really being told.
Was a Cover-up Ever Needed?
Adrienne Mayor, in her book, Fossil Legends of the First Americans, published in 2007, writes that the existence of giants in America is little more than the subject of persistent rumours. She claims that the presence of bones of large extinct mammals such as mammoths, mastodons, cave bears, sabre-toothed cats and other Ice Age megafauna could have been mistaken as human bones. Moreover, she writes that hair pigment is not stable after death and that atmospheric conditions and different soil types can turn dark hair rusty red or orange.
Robert Wadlow and his father
Conclusion
There’s no incontrovertible evidence that any man or woman has ever been taller than eight feet 11 inches – the height of the world’s tallest human, Robert Wadlow. Other men and women have reached heights of above eight feet. Most, if not all of these people suffered from gigantism or acromegaly, that is, abnormal medical conditions. Moreover, some people, having no recognizable medical abnormality, have become taller than seven feet. (Many of these people play on basketball teams, in fact). Acromegaly affects about 60 out of every one million people, so over the ages there may have been thousands of so-called giants.
This begs the question: How tall is a giant? Is it anybody who suffers from gigantism – or anybody who’s taller than seven or eight feet? Who’s the authority to answer such a query?
Would he or she please step forward!
Anyway, in times past, there may have been quite a few giants, but what evidence is there that an entire race of giants – red-haired, blond-haired or otherwise – existed at some time and place on earth? Perhaps the Smithsonian Institute really has such evidence, but the organization insists that it does not. Without the bones of many such giants, people must assume that a race of giants has never existed on earth. But, in the coming months or years, that conclusion could change – by the author and many other people – so keep your mind open to all possibilities.
Chaco Canyon Polydactyly: A Thousand-Year-Old Foot Fetish?
If you’re a 12-toed guy struggling to make it in this ten-toed world, you may want to find a time machine and travel back about a thousand years to the Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.
According to new research, a group of people once lived there who respected, honoured and exalted those among them with an extra piggy on a foot.
We found that people with six toes, especially, were common and seemed to be associated with important ritual structures and high-status objects like turquoise.
Anthropologist Patricia Crown of the University of New Mexico co-authored a study, published this week in American Antiquity, about a high preponderance of six-toed people – the condition is known as polydactyly – among a prehistoric Pueblo culture in the Chaco Canyon.
Of the 96 skeletons of Chacoan people found at the canyon’s sacred Pueblo Bonito site, 3 of them had an extra toe on the right side of their right foot. That’s 15.5 times the average occurrence of polydactyly among modern Native Americans.
Six-toed imprint on a Pueblo wall
What gave the Chacoans another toenail to trim with a flint? Previous research on polydactyly shows it’s a dominant, non-recessive, hereditary trait that is not caused by inbreeding nor a genetic disease.
Study co-author Kerriann Marden suspects prenatal exposure to something hazardous, either environmental or possibly a food the pregnant mother ate. With the way the extra-toed were treated, perhaps the mothers may have even tried to have polydactyly babies.
The Mayans were known to worship six-toed people (and others with body anomalies) as gods, but the Chacoans weren’t that extreme. Handprints and footprints with extra digits appear on walls in rooms used for rituals and ceremonies.
One skeleton was buried with jewellery on the six-toed foot but nothing on the other one. Special extra-wide sandals were found with space for the extra toe.
Another six-toed wall imprint
The sandals and artwork may be the key to why the extra toes got respect.
The Chacoans art seemed to be focused on hands and feet and they appear to have paid special attention to sandals and footwear in general. Perhaps that fixation made those with two pinkie toes special.
Perhaps it was just because they could step on more ants.
