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Australian Professor Claims Myth of Giants Emerged from Ancient Efforts to Explain the Effects of Climate Change

8/17/2018

18 Comments

 
​I’m not one for just-so stories. There is a place for speculative explanations of history when those speculations can be used to help us explain evidence and, more importantly, look for new evidence that can help to prove the claim right or wrong. But in many cases, these just-so stories are simply modern assumptions and guesses projected into the past and asserted to be true. Such is the case with Australian professor Patrick Nunn, who teaches geography at the University of the Sunshine Coast. In a blog post for The Conversation later picked up by Cosmos magazine, Nunn tried to explain why world mythologies feature a widespread myth of gigantic humans. 
​His explanation makes just about zero sense to me, but it forms part of his new book The Edge of Memory: Ancient Stories, Oral Tradition and the Post-Glacial World, due out in two weeks’ time in Australia and in January here in the United States.
 
Let’s start by outlining his argument. He believes that the myth of giants originates after the melting that ended the last Ice Age, when sea levels were lower and humans spread out across the globe by walking across areas that soon after sank beneath the waves, isolating populations with barriers of water, which he describes as aqueous gaps in the continuity of land. 
As sea level rose at the end of the last ice age, crossing these gaps became increasingly difficult; the routes taken would have been more circuitous, perhaps possible only through a combination of wading and walking. As sea level continued rising, the gaps eventually became impassable for people on foot – and perhaps eventually too lengthy to readily cross with watercraft – but the memories of when things were otherwise lingered on in the stories of the peoples on either side of the water gap.
 
Given that these memories were first shaped around 6,000 years ago in most parts of the world, the stories were told only orally. At first, no one would have questioned the authenticity of these stories – there were many people to corroborate their veracity. Yet as time wore on, listeners would inevitably have grown more and more sceptical. So at some point, storytellers decided that to overcome such scepticism, the people who once crossed these gaps would posthumously become long-limbed giants.
​To make the argument a little clear: Nunn believes that old stories talked about heroes and gods walking between locations now separated by water, so storytellers turned the heroes into giants to explain how they could step across the bodies of water. This change was apparently more plausible and conservative than either imagining that they had boats or admitting that water filled what once was land.
 
This explanation has very little to recommend it. First, it predicates the discussion of giants on it being restricted to peoples who lived in a coastal environment or in areas now made up of islands. This explanation would not work in many of the areas where stories of giants were found in historic times. For example, the Spanish recorded legends of giants among the peoples of the Andes, which were never under water. Tales of giants are also found in the southern and western United States among the Native peoples of that region, where again Ice Age sea level changes did not impact the area. Nor does the explanation account for the fact that “giants” come in many sizes, from the completely mythical creatures the size of mountains (or, actual mountains, as Sanchuniathon reported) to only a foot or two taller than normal humans.
 
The most famous giants of all, the Nephilim of the Bible and their kin, have no association with coastlines or water passages, though they were, according to later legend (though not, strictly speaking, the Biblical text), the cause of Noah’s Flood, often associated in modern lore with the end of the Ice Age. Indeed, according to the book description for Edge of Memory, Nunn looks at Noah’s Flood in light of “verifiable facts” and “geologic evidence.”
 
Beyond this, the explanation assumes that storytellers would create stories of giants but not of a more obvious solution—boats. Why is it more logical to remodel a traditional story to insert giants tall enough to straddle bodies of water but not to insert a boat? The oldest boat in existence dates back to 8000 BCE, and there is circumstantial evidence that some type of boat was in use for hundreds of thousands of years, to judge by the peopling of areas that have not been connected to Eurasia by land during the human experience, such as Australia, Flores, and Crete.
 
Nunn specifically cites the Polynesian stories of giants that could uproot islands as evidence of his theory, but this is absurd for two reasons: First, because Polynesia has always been made of islands and always required boats, rendering the “bridging the gap” hypothesis unnecessary, and second, because Polynesia was only populated in relatively recent times, with stories that date back only to around 900 BCE, outgrowths, scholars suspect, of the older faiths of the Southeast Asian peoples who gave rise to the Polynesians around 3000-1000 BCE. Some parts of the Pacific weren’t settled until around 1300 CE.
 
Nunn suggests that he believes that Ice Age legends were shaped around 4000 BCE—some six thousand years after the fact, an impossibility. I don’t know where he got the date from—the Neolithic perhaps? Or the Indo-European migration? If he has the number wrong and meant 9700 BCE, when the Younger Dryas ended, then his analysis would be controversial, since little of Ice Age beliefs remains, though some believe that Aboriginal Australians maintain memories of the Ice Age coastlines of that continent, including the presence of former islands now beneath the waters. I’m going to assume that this is what is in the back of Nunn’s mind since he was instrumental in making this claim back a few years ago. And wouldn’t you know it, he said at the time that Australia’s coastlines reached their present state around 4000 BCE, some 6,000 years after the melting began.
 
This is one of those cases where I feel like the claimant has overstepped possibility after becoming convinced of an idea. He believes that Aboriginal Australians preserve Ice Age landscape memories, and therefore he has begun to interpret everything through that lens. An equally plausible claim could be made that everywhere giants are found in myth, they originated in the discovery of large animal bones, particularly Ice Age animal bones, that were misinterpreted as those of giant humans, as continued to happen from Antiquity down to the present. The truth is probably something else entirely, and that things which are big and which are small are simply part of the human imagination, and originated in fantasy (or even visions in altered states of consciousness) rather than rational inquiry.
18 Comments
A Buddhist
8/17/2018 09:59:14 am

There very often seems to be a tendency to create overly elaborate explanations rather than defaulting to either simpler explanations or agnosticism. These stories about giants reveal both trends in action.

1. Discover remains of strange bones? Rather than concluding that they represent some unknown species, conclude that they represent giants!

2. Discover stories about giants? Rather than concluding that they represent mere stories, try to find evidence of giants!

3. Discover that people had stories about giants and lived near lands that had once been water? Rather than recognizing that the factors may be independent and that people are generally smart enough to talk about land turning into water (wherefore the flood myths), conclude that people are explaining settlement of present island that were settled through dry lands by telling stories about giants!

Reply
V
8/17/2018 11:34:37 am

I personally suspect there are multiple reasons behind myths of giants, ranging from actual "giants" in the sense of modern basketball player heights, to the "big fish story" effect (ie, growing over time), to "those mountains/big rocks kinda look like a person from this distance," to "this looks like some giant version of a human made it, look, I can make a miniature one this way" (ie, Giant's Causeway types of things). It possible that SOME stories of giants may even have BEEN formed in the way this guy says, where there were old myths of people "walking here from there" and a need to explain how they made it when there is no associated flood myth. (A slow flood often doesn't seem like one.) But to think that ALL myths of a similar type from all over the world MUST have come from a single source is rather imbecilic, honestly, unless you can actually show the literary spread.

Reply
Machala
8/17/2018 12:45:53 pm

There have always, in written and oral memory been tales of giants and races of giants - whether it was the Anakim and Nephilim of the "Old Testement", the Cyclopes of the Greeks, or the Fomorians of the Celts - the stories of these larger than life peoples captured the imagination of the listeners and later readers.
Be it Goliath, Atlas, Fionn mac Cumhaill ( Finn Mac Cool ), or Paul Bunyan, we have always been fascinated by the 'gigantic' legends and myths surrounded these characters.

I have always felt that man has an inner need to create, in his imagination, beings greater and more fantastical than himself, that are beyond comprehension or control. Gods, giants, dragons, and extraterrestrial beings all fall within the desire of man to explain and cope with his mundane existence.

Reply
Americanegro
8/17/2018 01:40:20 pm

Except all the 7'4" American Indians of the present day. They're real.

Reply
Doc Rock
8/17/2018 01:31:36 pm

I believe it is pretty common to draw people who are powerful or important as larger than life. Somebody sees a cave drawing of a guy who seems to have been as tall as the mammoth that he was trying to spear and thinks to themselves, "oh there must have been giants back then."

Reply
V
8/19/2018 01:27:55 am

It's a formal technique, in fact. Called "hierarchical scale." Prior to the Renaissance, it was accepted that this was how you drew these things--the most important person was the largest. We still use it today, in a more subtle fashion, often through forced perspective and low-angle shots. One of the most fantastic uses is in some of the Superman movies. You can almost always basically count Superman's nose hairs, but Clark Kent you can't even see them.

Reply
Doc Rock
8/20/2018 01:16:58 pm

Yep, based on the pictures of medieval tapestries that I have seen, circa-1200 European kings must have stood about 9.5 feet tall.

Bob Jase
8/17/2018 03:18:26 pm

Let's see, when babies are born their parents seem like giants and they continue to for years afterward.

Dja think that might be the cause of it? My son thinks his grandfather was huge because he remembers him from when he was a kid, he refuses to believe that my father was pretty much the same height as me.

Reply
Machala
8/17/2018 04:38:19 pm

Certainly, the Massai and the Tusi tribes in Africa were and are considered giants to their smaller neighboring tribes and certainly were intimidating to the smaller European colonialists.
At 6' and 220 lbs. I much larger than most of the people where I live but when I go to the U.S. or the Netherlands, I am about average, and if I happen to find myself in an elevator with several Dallas Cowboy football players,( as I did fairly recently ), I'm absolutely small and puny, by comparison.

Some people perhaps, appear to us "larger-than-life". Those athletes were BIG GUYS but perhaps made larger in my mind because of who they were.

Reply
Americanegro
8/17/2018 07:11:28 pm

So my post about being adopted got deleted? That's birthist, man!

My parents still never looked like giants.

Jason Colavito link
8/17/2018 08:03:01 pm

It wouldn't have made sense to leave a response to a post that was deleted, so responses to posts in violation go, too. It wasn't about your adoption.

Americanegro
8/17/2018 08:12:29 pm

Your site your rules of course, but a certain amount of free speech lets us know who the disagreeable people are.

Finn
8/24/2018 01:38:03 am

This does happen. Back in 2004, they released a special 20th anniversary Optimus Prime Transformer. Very accurate to the original cartoon, very detailed, about 18" tall.

And people claimed it was the same one as they had as when they were a kid in 1984 - a toy which was about 8" tall, and far less detailed and complex. But they all said it was the same size - something to be said for childhood memories and scale.

I know my grandparents' house *felt* like the ceiling was 20-30 feet high, even though now I know it was a 12' ceiling.

Reply
Americanegro
8/17/2018 09:04:31 pm

Putting this here because I don't know about replying to a 5 year old thread:

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/altering-an-ancient-chinese-text-to-create-a-ufo

余友人書齋在湖上,[The setting is] My friend's lakeside study
一夜忽見其珠 one night [I] suddenly saw this "pearl"
初微開其房,first [I] slightly opened the room ['s door]
光自吻中出。light was coming out from its center
如橫一金線。horizontally, like a wire [straight line]
俄頃忽張殼,suddenly its outer part opened
其大如半席,its size was like that of half a woven mat
殼中白光如銀 from inside the shell came a white light like silver
珠大如拳,the pearl was fist-sized
爛然不可正視 and I could not look directly at its brilliance.

So there's an outer and inner part of different sizes.

Reply
Shane Sullivan
8/17/2018 09:14:18 pm

Much appreciated!

Reply
IDAHO SPUD
8/17/2018 09:45:21 pm

Thank you Negro, excellent work as always!

Reply
Americanegro
8/18/2018 02:25:47 pm

Last line should be "It was so brilliant I couldn't look directly at it." Sorry, I was watching TV.

Reply
An Anonymous Nerd
8/17/2018 09:44:53 pm

I replied to the original article. I didn't link back here because I figure Jason has enough haters, but if he responds too harshly to me I likely will.

-An Anonymous Nerd

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