Giants on Earth: Why Every Ancient Culture Remembered Them

The giants of mythology are not the problem. Every culture produces legendary beings of extraordinary size — the Titans who preceded the Olympians, the Jotunn of Norse cosmology, the Rephaim of Canaan, the giants that Heracles and David and Gilgamesh killed in their heroic careers. That widespread pattern is interesting but explicable. What is harder to explain is the specificity with which ancient texts describe giants not as symbolic or cosmological abstractions but as physical beings who lived in historical time, interacted with ordinary humans, built monuments, waged wars, and left physical remains. The Book of Genesis does not say the Nephilim were metaphors. It says they were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, and that they were the offspring of the sons of God and the daughters of men.

The word Nephilim appears in Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33, where the Israelite spies sent into Canaan report encountering beings before whom they felt like grasshoppers. Mainstream biblical scholarship treats the Nephilim as mythological — a narrative device borrowed from earlier Mesopotamian traditions to explain the origins of the heroic age. But the text does not read that way. It reads as a historical claim, embedded in a genealogical and chronological framework that the compilers of the Hebrew Bible clearly intended to be taken as literal. Whatever the Nephilim actually were, the people who wrote about them believed they had existed.

The Archaeological Claims

Alongside the textual evidence, there is a long history of claimed archaeological discoveries — oversized skeletal remains, elongated skulls, and unusual bone structures — that have generated intense popular interest and equally intense scepticism. Most of the famous giant skeleton photographs circulating online are confirmed digital manipulations. The Cardiff Giant of 1869 was a deliberate commercial hoax. De Loys’ ape photograph from 1920 was a misrepresented spider monkey. The history of giant claims includes a great deal of wishful thinking and outright fabrication, and mainstream archaeology is right to treat them with scepticism.

But the category is not entirely empty. Reports of oversized skeletal remains from 19th-century American excavations — primarily from burial mounds in Ohio, Indiana, and the Great Lakes region — appear in contemporary newspaper accounts, county histories, and the early records of the Smithsonian Institution. Some researchers, including Jim Vieira and the late Richard Dewhurst, have catalogued hundreds of such reports and argued that the skeletal remains were systematically collected and subsequently disappeared from the institutional record. The Smithsonian has denied having oversized remains in its collections. The argument turns on whether absence of evidence in institutional archives constitutes evidence of absence, or evidence of something else.

The Ancient Astronaut Reading

Within the ancient astronaut framework, the giants of scripture and mythology are most commonly identified with the Anunnaki — the Sumerian divine beings whose genetic intervention in human evolution Zecharia Sitchin and others have argued produced a hybrid population. The Nephilim, on this reading, are the offspring of Anunnaki males and human females: beings of extraordinary physical stature and capability who appear in the historical record as the heroes and demigods of the ancient world. The elongated skulls found in Peru, Bolivia, Egypt, and elsewhere are interpreted as evidence of this hybrid lineage, with cranial deformation practices in later populations understood as imitation of a physical trait that was originally genetic.

Whether any of this is correct depends on questions of evidence that remain genuinely open. What is not open is the question of whether ancient people believed in giants — they clearly and consistently did, across every documented culture on earth. The ubiquity of that belief, the specificity with which it appears in texts intended as history rather than mythology, and the physical evidence that mainstream institutions have not yet fully accounted for together constitute a case that deserves more serious treatment than it has received. The giants of the ancient world may be myth. They may be memory. The difference matters.