A Case Study in Misunderstanding: An 1860 Report of Prehistoric "Giants" Found in Europe

Yesterday I ran across an interesting article in an old magazine, and it provides an unusual look at how the myth of antediluvian giants cast a shadow over the popular and scholarly understanding of paleontology in the years before the acceptance of the theory of evolution. Our article comes from Ballou’s Monthly Dollar Magazine, which its founder, Maturin M. Ballou, billed as “the cheapest magazine in the world,” for August 1860. It appeared in a column devoted to curiosities and records what the anonymous author claims to be the discovery of Bible giants:

“There were Giants in Those Days.”
 
The theory that humanity of the antediluvian period existed in forms which would now be considered colossal, has found many adherents among scientific men. A fossil skeleton of enormous size, recently discovered near Abbeville, France, was regarded as a proof of this theory. A Dr. Fullratt, of Berlin, has more recently found other remains of some antediluvian giant in the village of Guiten, near the junction of the Rhine and Dussal. The discovery has created quite a flutter among the wise men of Germany, and a commission has been formed for digging in divers places of the same geological formation as that wherein the giant skeleton was found.

This is a strangely confused account of the scientific debate occurring in Europe at the time, as filtered through the popular press. I am not entirely certain of all of the references in the article, but as best I can tell, the discussion of the Abbeville “giant” refers to the discovery of fossil mammoth bones alongside flint tools. These finds, which Jacques Boucher de Crevecoeur de Perthes had made over more than a decade before the Dollar Magazine wrote about them, attracted interest in 1859 when Joseph Prestwich viewed the discoveries and sent word back to England. The Royal Society began debating whether they were evidence of a deeper antiquity for humanity, while Boucher, who originally thought the tools to be post-diluvian, revised his view and argued they were antediluvian. (“These hatchets are called antediluvian because they are found in a virgin soil formed by its waters,” the Abbé Cochet explained at the end of 1860 in reporting on Boucher de Perthes’s finds to the French government.) It seems that someone, in trying to explain the story, had confused the gigantic mammoth skeleton found there for the skeleton of a humanoid giant, since there is no other reference I can find to a “giant” there.
 
The fossil beds at Abbeville would eventually yield the famous Abbeville jaw, found by Boucher de Perthes in 1863, which excited great controversy because it seemed too primitive and implied a more ancient species that had occupied France before the “Prussian” Neanderthals. The jaw was later discovered to be a forgery, planted by a worker hoping to earn a 200 franc prize for finding the bones of the people who made the flint tools Boucher de Perthes had previously found.
 
On the other hand, Neanderthals seem to lie behind the second reference in the Dollar Magazine article. The area where the Düssel River feeds into the Rhine is the area of the famous Neanderthal, or Neander Valley, where in August 1856 the first Neanderthal skeleton had been discovered. The cranium of said Neanderthal was found (well, obtained from workmen) and described by Johann Karl Fuhlrott, who must be the Fullratt of the Dollar Magazine. Fuhlrott said that he was the first to recognize the bones as human, for the workmen who discovered it thought it belonged to an animal. It was instead the second scholar to examine the bones, Hermann Schaaffhausen, who helped create the idea that the bones were those of a brutish monster. In his presentation, following that of Fuhlrott, to the Natural History Society of the Prussian Rhineland and Westphalia on February 4, 1857, Schaaffhausen compared the bones to the legendary monsters of medieval German folklore and myth (specifically the Classically described creatures said to live at the world’s ends), and he suggested that the bones belonged to the prehistoric antecedent of such tales, perhaps dating back before the Flood. He noted that the bones were thicker and more robust than those of human beings, suggesting an ogre-like appearance.

Medieval monsters inspired by Pliny the Elder's accounts, as they appear in Mandeville's "Travels."

It appears that popular writers, either not understanding the issues involved or interpreting them through the lens of the familiar, took these claims to be referring to the monstrous Nephilim of Genesis.
 
What’s interesting in this is that we have a clear case where a news report about the “discovery” of the bones of a “giant” by “scientific men” can be traced back to specific individuals and their known claims. We then see that the media misunderstood and misrepresented the claims. This helps to cast doubt on other news accounts from the time, and should remind gigantologists, who rely on old newspapers for their evidence, that uncritical acceptance of news stories is bad history and worse science. The “giant” Neanderthal, that antediluvian monster, stood all of about five and a half feet tall.