DISPELLING THE GIANT HUMAN SKELETON MYTHS

The idea of giant humans first appeared in Biblical stories of The Nephilim /ˈnɛfɪˌlɪm/ (Hebrew: נְפִילִים, nefilim) who were said to be the offspring of the "sons of God" and the "daughters of men" before the Deluge (Noah’s flood), according to Genesis 6:1–4. And in Islam we have the stories of Ad and Thamud whom incorrect interpretations of some verses made them Giants of huge proportions. Likewise in the Hindu religion we have a similar mention of giants in the Mahabharata, a Hindu epic poem from about 200 B.C. I think that is why such fakeries appealed to the connotations of the leading world’s religions

The skeletal remains of such giants began to appear on the internet, some even dated as far back as the one attributed to be found in India in the 1930s. But the truth is they are all myths that were faked using Photoshop technology. The Hoax all began in 2002 with the competition titled "Archaeological Anomalies 2," which asked contestants to create a hoax “Archaeological anomalies”.

Among the most popular of such pictures were from all over the world ranging from, as I mentioned, the 1930’s picture from India and others from Wisconsin, Spain, New Zealand, Peru, Ecuador, Egypt and the one someone mentioned in this forum from Saudi Arabia. If we may dwell on the Saudi Arabia’s find (because of its association with us as Muslims) it was said to be discovered way back in 2004 (fifteen years ago) due to an accidental find during a dig by ARAMCO in one of its gas field in an area called Empty quarter (Rab-ul-Khalee) in the Arabian desert. At the time the issue was hushed up in secrecy. But the particular picture being displayed as archeological discovery in Saudi Arabia was actually a Photoshop taken from the websiteWorth1000 (now DesignCrowd), a site devoted to hosting contests in which entrants show off their skills at manipulating photographs using digital editing programs. This particular picture was an entry from one of the site’s “Archaeological anomalies” competitions, in which entrants vied to create the most realistic archaeological hoaxes: “Your job is to show a picture of an archaeological discovery that looks so real, had it not appeared at Worth1000, people might have done a double take.”

The basis for the so called Saudi image was a real photograph of an excavation site near Hyde Park, New York, where scientists were working to uncover the skeleton of a mastodon. Someone then linked the altered version of the image used for the Worth1000 contest entry with a fictitious backstory based on the Islamic account of the Prophet Hud, creating the hoax quoted above — which spread especially far after being published as a seemingly real news article on the web site of The New Nation, described as “Bangladesh’s Independent News Source.”

A May 2007 blog entry entitled “Bhima’s son Gadotkach like skeleton found” (and attributed to a 22 April 2004 Times of India article) repeated the hoax, with the locale switched from Saudi Arabia to northern India and additional skeleton photos included. In early 2010, the same basic theme was recirculated with more hoax photos of a similar ilk, usually some version of a 1993 photograph of a University of Chicago dig for dinosaur bones in Niger Republic.

In any case, we don’t need to know the specific origins of these photos to definitively determine that they’re fakes. The square-cube law makes it a physical impossibility that humanoids of the size represented by these bones could ever have existed. In order to understand the workings of animals under the square-cube law, we have to think a little bit about the physics of those animals.  We don't live in a place where the laws of physics don't apply.  Animals have to respond to all manner of physical laws from gravity to thermodynamics.  The area of study that attempts to determine how form and function work together is called biomechanics.  Size is the most important factor in biomechanics.  Think about the ranges in size of adult animals.  Fishes range from about 8 mm to the 20 m whale shark.  Mammals range from shrews just a few centimeters long to the blue whale at about 30 m long.  Certainly what affects a small animal is different than what effects a large one.  To an ant, gravity is inconsequential.  There used to be a saying that you can drop an ant from a ten story building and it would be fine.  You could drop a mouse from the same height and it might be slightly hurt.  A human would be dead.  A horse would explode.  Clearly the effects of gravity are different relative to mass and the body has to change in order to accommodate different sizes. So, if you double the size of an organism, you increase the surface area only four times and you increase the volume it holds 8 times. Shape often changes as an organism grows and this shape change is called allometry.  All parts of the body are not growing at the same size.  If you look at a baby, they have really huge heads in proportion to the rest of their bodies.  As a child grows, the head grows at a different rate than the torso and limbs (the torso and limbs grow more quickly).

On land the main force that we have to deal with is gravity. Our systems have to be strong enough to withstand the effects of gravity and keep from falling apart. We all know a lot about the effects of gravity on our bodies.  In a quadrupedal animal, weight is distributed unequally on the four legs.  The back legs support the most of the weight while the front legs support very little.  The main thing we have to remember about gravity is that although all structures with mass are effected in the same way by gravity, the smaller an animal is, the less important gravity is.  The reason for this is that other factors come into play like friction and surface tension.  A small lizard can climb up a tree with ease because it has enough friction to counteract gravity.  A large lizard could never have a structure with enough friction to counteract gravity, and large climbing lizards have to use much more strength to climb.

Any modern man that lives up to 150 years will become imbecile and senile. Life span is one of the most distinguishing characteristics of specie. The limits of the life span of each species appear to be determined ultimately by heredity. Locked within the code of the genetic material are instructions that specify the age beyond which a species cannot live given even the most favorable conditions. And many environmental factors act to diminish that upper age limit. Every specie has its own average life span, small unicellular organisms lived for hours or days like the red blood cell that has a span of 12 hours. Higher animals such as monkeys have 40 years as average life span, Elephant 80 years etc. Like the life span so is the size of animals, beyond which limit they can never pass, the human genetic code forbid ever attaining giant sizes. Those are the scientific facts and now let us study the scripture and see whether they tallied.

The idea that the Ad’s people and the Thamud people were giants was a result of misunderstanding of some verses associated with them. It began with Q7:69 "Call in remembrance (that God) gave you a stature tall among the nations".  Among the benefits these people enjoyed is not only succeeding the extinct sub species of Noah after the flood, but they were also taller than any of their ancestors, they are about 1.5 meters tall. The first time any human stood that tall. Two species preceded them and none of them was as tall as they are or bulkier and stronger. So God is telling us before they came into the scene, no human being has ever reached their size. The Adawa were destroyed by one of the forces of nature in the form of strong storms that raged for 8 days and night. God says Q11:60 “Ah! Behold! For the Ad rejected their lord and cherisher! Ah! Behold removed (from sight) were ads the people of Hud”  As such they were overwhelmed by this catastrophe of nature. They did not only die but became extinct, far removed from sight. Q69:8 "Then seest you any of them left surviving?'  God asked, but no one has ever seen their type alive as they had become extinct long ago. But for the first time the Quran became the scripture that gave an idea of paleontology (and paleoanthropology) in saying Q29:38 "Remember also the Ad’s and Thamud people clearly will appear to you from the traces of their building"  Though we cannot see any of our extinct ancestors, using Paleontology and Paleoanthropology we can know their physical structures, technological development (clearly appear) etc. by examining their dwellings. This could be in form of caves inscriptions on the dwellings that had been buried and being excavated on purpose or by an act of nature, which reveals their fossilized bones. God has taught us in Q51:42 "The winds left nothing whatever it came up against but reduce it to ruin and rottenness"  The ecological disaster of that time perished them. The only evidence they ever existed was through what God says "Ruin and Rottenness" which is the fossil remains (Skeletal remains) found in the "Traces of their buildings" in 29:38. Through the fossil record a lot of data can be gathered about the extinct generations. And there has never been in history a single discovery of humanoid fossils that depicts giants, though Adawa and Thamudawa were the bulkiest and strongest people to have ever walked the earth. Their physical appearance, in terms of muscular and strong build up, can only be compared to that of big African gorillas. So it is true that they are the strongest and bulkiest species, they are nowhere as the giants depicted by the photoshop and not a single discovery was ever made of such giants.