www.sciencenews.org/archive_giant
Measure Your
Giant Carefully
And His Size Will
Shrink
The American public may scoff a bit at
fairies, but it would like very much to
believe in giants.
At least, so it appears from the thin
but steady stream of letters received at
the Smithsonian Institution.
Every month in the year brings these
letters. They come from people eager to
tell that they have found the bones of a
race of seven or eight foot giants that
stalked about the countryside in the
ancient times.
If you come across something that
looks mightily like a giant, therefore,
pause and consider these points on the
anatomy of giants vs. ordinary mor-
tals, as explained by Dr. Ales Hrdlicka,
the Smithsonian’s curator of physical
anthropology:
“The estimate of stature,” he explains,
“is usually based on the thigh bone of a
man of ordinary size. But the person
unfamiliar with human anatomy does
not know that the upper joint of the
femur is several inches higher in the
sacral region than would appear from
superficial examination of the living
body. The finder makes a hurried com-
parison of the length of the fossil thigh
bone with his own, applying the speci-
men usually to the front of his body, and
from this calculates roughly the size of
his hypothetical ‘ancient giant.’ ”
The Smithsonian will tell you, at any
rate, that there was no prehistoric race
of giants — or pygmies either — among
the wonders of America’s past.
The femur of a species dubbed Homo floresiensis (bottom) is much smaller than the same bone in Homo sapiens.
UPDATE
Ancient oddballs in Indonesia
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