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Cahokia: City of the Mound Builders


Tyger

Paranormal Adept
A mysterious fire transformed North America's greatest city in 1170
LINK: A mysterious fire transformed North America's greatest city in 1170

I love this stuff concerning evidence for greater social and cultural complexity in the past than here-to-fore acknowledged - to me it's far more interesting than the idea of alien visitation (though the latter is a fun, exotic idea for sure). The former, however, plays to my life-long hunch (wish) that there existed a world-wide civilization at one time - and that the past is far more layered and complex than we currently know.

In fact, I think it is because our narrative of the past has been so simplistic that 'alien visitation' emerged to explain all the apparent 'anomalies'.
 
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... The former, however, plays to my life-long hunch (wish) that there existed a world-wide civilization at one time - and that the past is far more layered and complex than we currently know.
In fact, I think it is because our narrative of the past has been so simplistic that 'alien visitation' emerged to explain all the apparent 'anomalies'.

I'm with you there. I have long been haunted by the idea that pre-modern cultures, many in any case, were civilizations far more complex and sophisticated than we give them credit for, and that there is a certain sort of insulting mindset that causes we modern Westerners to often run to extraterrestrial explanations to explain things that seem anomalous to us because they violate our image of these cultures as simple and primitive. It's a persistent bias in our culture. And maybe it stems from hubris, the idea that only our ancestors were clever enough to figure out what was needed to get us to this point. Everyone else, the reasoning would go, had to have had help from others.

I think it blinds us all from understanding many marvels and mysteries of the past.
 
I'm with you there. I have long been haunted by the idea that pre-modern cultures, many in any case, were civilizations far more complex and sophisticated than we give them credit for, and that there is a certain sort of insulting mindset that causes we modern Westerners to often run to extraterrestrial explanations to explain things that seem anomalous to us because they violate our image of these cultures as simple and primitive. It's a persistent bias in our culture. And maybe it stems from hubris, the idea that only our ancestors were clever enough to figure out what was needed to get us to this point. Everyone else, the reasoning would go, had to have had help from others.

I think it blinds us all from understanding many marvels and mysteries of the past.


What do you make of giants?

I have noticed that they are very popular now, but I am not convinced.
 
Hi Han!
Me, personally? I think that our species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, has a lot of phenotype variety, from dwarfs and pygmies to Giants. I think that there probably were communities in which giantism was more common. Especially if you think the average of humanity was probably 5'4" for most of history.

I've read Arab travelogues claiming that Northerners, Scandinavians and Slavs were giants with heights like palm-trees. Ibn Fadlan, whose exploits Michael Crition's novel Eaters of the Dead (and the Movie the 13th Warrior) is based on said that the Scandinavian Rus he met were as tall as Date Palms. It seems like an exaggeration until you put yourself in the shoes of someone probably 5'2" meeting communities of people 6'1" or taller. Someone that tall, if you are very short, could very well seem almost as tall as trees. He wouldn't have been lying if that was his actual perception. If everyone around you is 5' or a bit higher, and you travel to a land in which everyone is between 5'7" and 6' (which was average based on exhumed remains of Vikings) then they seem like giants

I'm a short guy, and when I'm around very tall people they seem like giants to me.

Now what if these people with medieval nutrition, during a mini-Ice age in the Middle Ages, were the descendants of people who also - given proper nutrition - were capable of growing to even great heights in warmer less ecologically demanding eras? When there was less travel in the world, and the populations were all heavily isolated and less likely to mate with outsiders. Before the construction of Imperial Roads (Roman in Europe and Asia Minor, or the earlier Celtic roads which preceded them. Persian, or Assyrian, etc in the Middle East) or advances in ship-making.

The thing about being large and being small is that if you are very small you can survive with less food, if you are larger you need more calories to sustain you. In times of catyclism this could be a problem. If you are too small then you're easy prey for people who are bigger than you, or animals.

So I believe giants probably really did exist, maybe races or sub-races of giants or people for whom giantism was a norm or frequent occurrences. Just like we have pygmies in Africa and the Nigrito people in the Philippines. IF either mated with non-pygmies or non-giants their traits would become recessive, accounting for occasional massive shortness and massive tallness. Which has happened in historic times, you have in South East Asia and the Philippines, or Africa, cases in which pygmies people married or mated with non-pygmies. For example. The same would have happened in ancient times for giants and dwarf or hobbit like people.

Even in today's developed world you see people with access to the same amount of nutrition sometimes growing no higher than 4'5" or sometimes 6'8" or taller. For non-pathological reasons. Sometimes extreme tallness runs in families as does extreme shortness.

Perhaps in the past there were entire communities of giants, who depended on specific environmental conditions, and died out in parts of the world where those conditions were less common. But their genetic lineages still remain in places. We have spread-out communities around the world of people for whom extreme tallness is a near norm. Like the Woloof in West Africa/Senegal and Mauritania, and Scandinavians and Dutch in Northern Europe.

If we go back to pre-historic or early-historic times, say 4000 or 5000 years ago, when humanity was much smaller, and lived closer together, I could easily imagine small nations and cities of giants. Or dwarfs. I think that's a really possible, even likely, scenario.
 
Hi Tobias thak you for your reply, I can imagine 7, 8 or 9 foot tall people, but I have heard of 'suppressed/covered up' skeletons being found that were 15 feet tall, but I haven't seen any tangible evidence, which makes me suspicious because surely they can't all have been found and hidden/destroyed?

But maybe there was a giant hominid running about with all the mega fauna?

I like the idea anyway :)
 
Hi Han,
It's a fun idea to think about and it's possible. I've also read about suppressed skeletons popping up here and there.

Since no tangible evidence beyond stories can be found I feel like we hit a certain limit. But where there is smoke there's fire, I can easily believe in 9 or even 10 foot tall people, 15 is stretching it but once there were giant tree sloths, giant dragon flies, gian cave bears, all sorts of mega fauna. Why couldn't there once have been human mega fauna as well?

Just like we have extremely short humans, maybe extremely tall ones who died out over the ages. There are few ancient remains of humans anyway, out of all of the people who have lived very few remains survive the ages.

Maybe just maybe there are the remains of ancient giants from some long dead culture or civilization just waiting for us to re-discover them. And the legends and myths had some basis in truth. Perhaps the world 10,000 years ago more resembled a Tolkien novel in terms of the time of people running around than we would imagine. Giants and dwarves and hobbits. I like imagining it.
 
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