Who were the red-haired giants of North America?

“On the earth there once were giants.”

- Greek poet Homer, 400 B.C.E.

  Few Americans alive today are aware that once real giants roamed this land – giant red-haired humans. Most Americans believe that the Native Americans were the first to inhabit the North American continent. Yet there were others – a much more ancient race that walked the hills and valleys, the plains and deserts of the pre-Colombian Americas.

  Evidence of giant humans – people seven to ten feet tall – exists in the fossil records, tools and other artifacts recovered from archaeological digs. Giant skeletal remains have awed and sometimes frightened researchers and explorers as far back as the Sixteenth Century.

  Some present day Native American tribes still recite the legends of the giants and how their ancestors fought wars against them when they arrived in North America 15,000 years ago only to find the giants already here. Others, like the Aztecs and Mayans recorded their encounters with a race of giants to the north when they ventured out on expeditions.

European explorers meet living giants

  The earliest Western explorers who wrote about the giants of North America included Magellan, Sir Francis Drake, Spanish explorer Desoto, and Commodore Byron the grandfather of the famous poet, Lord Byron. Not all encounters with giants were post-mortems. A well-documented sighting by Magellan occurred in 1520 near the harbor of San Julian, Mexico. There, Magellan and his crew came upon a red-haired giant that stood nearly ten feet tall and whom Magellan described as having a “voice like a bull.” Later, Magellan learned from normal-sized natives that the giant belonged to a neighboring tribe. Remarkably, Magellan’s logs show that he and his crew captured two of these living giants and brought them aboard his ship intending to bring them back to Europe. Unfortunately the giants grew ill and they both died during the return voyage. Magellan had their remains buried at sea.
Fifty-eight years later giants still roamed San Julian. None other than Sir Francis Drake recorded encountering several red-haired men who stood over nine feet tall. In the years that followed many more explorers and seafarers also reported seeing giants roaming that area.

  Two lesser known explorers, Jacob le Maire and Wilhelm Schouten, discovered an intact skeleton of a pair of nine-foot humans. They each entered meticulous descriptions of the skeletons in their journals. If a race of mostly red-haired giants dwelled in the Americas for many centuries, wouldn’t their remains and artifacts – not to mention the sites where they lived – still remain? They do! And many are found in the “mounds.”

The mysterious mounds and mound builders

  The mounds (some are flattened pyramidal structures) are ceremonial and religious sites that have been covered over with earth as the centuries marched forward. Most mounds resemble small, flattened hills.

The mounds are scattered throughout the Midwest from as far south as Tennessee stretching northwards into Wisconsin, westwards to Oklahoma, and eastwards into West Virginia. Excavation of most mounds has unearthed many artifacts and the remains of average-sized humans. But older mounds have been discovered containing the skeletal remains of giants . . . giants with red hair. Yet, in relation to the number of the mounds that exist barely any have been investigated. The few gigantic skeletons found in some have been derisively dismissed or suppressed as aberrations. Ten and twelve foot humans do not fit dogmatic theories. Usually when giant skeletons are found they’re laughed off as hoaxes. Unfortunately orthodox science has too much to lose by investigating the mounds thoroughly.
Archaeologists cannot deny that the mound builders are real. What they deny are the things sometimes discovered inside the mounds. Over the past century and a half it’s been revealed again and again that some of the mounds – and the small pyramids – are the burial grounds of huge men often eight feet or taller that had a very sophisticated culture. Some of the giants have been found wearing intricate leather armor and have been buried with swords. One such giant was found near Spiro Mound in Oklahoma during the 1930s.

A Smithsonian conspiracy?

  Sadly, there is evidence to suggest that the preeminent Smithsonian Institute has itself acquired artifacts and the remains of giants and then quietly suppressed knowledge of their acquisition. An odd story from the late Ivan T. Sanderson, a popular author of many books and respected zoologist, supports the allegation some make that the Smithsonian has had a penchant for burying inconvenient artifacts since the 1800s.

  Sanderson received a letter from a former Navy Seabee who’d been posted at a base on one of the Aleutian Islands southeast of mainland Alaska during the Second World War. The Seabee was an engineer and had overseen a crew building a new airstrip. During the construction a small group of hills (possibly mounds) had been razed by a bulldozer. To their astonishment the crew discovered human remains. The unsuspecting Seabees uncovered the rest of the “hills” and revealed an ancient graveyard containing the bones of giants. Most of the surviving bones were skulls and the remains of thigh bones.

  The Seabee’s letter described the site in some detail and then went on to mention that the skulls measured an incredible two feet from their bases to their crowns, much larger than normal human skulls. By extrapolation the engineer concluded that the actual men had stood as high as twelve to fourteen feet.

  Always the intrepid investigator at heart, Sanderson sought confirmation and corroboration. He contacted other members of that military unit and received another reply. The second letter from one of the crew members basically reiterated the engineer’s story.
Both letters Sanderson had received asserted that the Smithsonian Institute had been sent the giants’ remains. Each man also mentioned that they had never heard anything further about the matter. When Sanderson contacted the Smithsonian they replied that they had no record of ever receiving any such skeletal remains.

  Convinced that the Smithsonian had obtained the shipment from the Navy men in the Aleutians, Sanderson puzzled over the reason why the Institute lied, “Is it that these people [the Smithsonian Institute] cannot face rewriting all the text books?”

Giants in Marion County, West Virginia

  Researcher and crypto-archaeologist Dave Cain has studied the records concerning discoveries of ancient giants that have been excavated in and around Marion County, West Virginia: “Of the many archaeological mysteries, one of the most enigmatic has been discoveries of giant prehistoric human skeletons.

  “Marion County was home to part of the ancient civilization which historical accounts and artifacts indicate existed in this region. What mysterious people constructed earthen forts, burial mounds, macadamized roadways? Who left pictographs, inscribed stones and giant skeletons to be discovered?

  “In the 1850s while excavating a root cellar in Palatine (East Fairmont), workers uncovered two very large human skeletons. Measuring the bones, people were amazed to find the entombed humans had been more than eight feet tall.

“It was reported that hundreds of ancient pieces of pottery, flint weapons, stone carvings and skeletons were peddled at the Valley Falls railroad station. Some of the finest specimens were purchased by visiting German royalty and taken to Europe as curios.

  “In 1875 workmen were constructing a bridge near the mouth of Paw Paw Creek at Rivesville. While digging through heavy clay soil they were astonished to uncover three giant skeletons [with] strands of reddish hair clinging to the skulls. A local doctor was called to examine the remains. The doctor was able to ascertain after careful measurement that the skeletons were approximately eight feet in length. “There have been many historical references to a mystic race of giant red-haired humans inhabiting this continent in the distant past.”

Report by the San Diego Union

  According to the San Diego Union, August 5, 1947, the mummified remains of giants were discovered buried near the Arizona-Nevada-California wasteland. The giants’ remains were still clothed in strange garments. The team of explorers tentatively dated the remains as nearly 18,000 years old.

  The year was 1931 and a retired Cincinnati doctor, F. Bruce Russell, accidentally found several tunnels located near Death Valley. Unable to return to the area until 1947, he solicited the assistance of Dr. Daniel S. Bovee – the man who had revealed New Mexico’s cliff dwellings to the world via several lengthy articles appearing in National Geographic Magazine. With Dr. Bovee’s help, Dr. Russell recovered the remains of several giants with heights ranging from eight to nine feet.

  “These giants,” said Hill, “are clothed in garments consisting of a medium length jacket and trouser extending slightly below the knees. The texture of the material is said to resemble gray dyed sheepskin, but obviously it was taken from an animal unknown [to us] today.”

  Who were these mysterious people that roamed America long before the Woolly Mammoths became extinct? Were they our ancestors or another race of humans like the Neanderthals? Some researchers notice strong similarities with large brained Cro-magnon man.

  Not much more is known about these giants of North America beyond what I’ve shared here except for one more interesting fact. About twenty years ago in northern China a university’s archaeological dig stumbled upon the burial grounds of twenty-two strange, gigantic men. Each giant had once stood over ten feet high and each was garbed in strange leather armor; around their skulls hung long strands of hair. . . Red hair.

Studies Contradict View That Race Doesn’t Exist

  Racial differences among people are real, new studies suggest, contradicting claims by some of the world’s leading scientists and scientific institutions that race doesn’t exist. These experts had said race is merely a “social construct,” or a creation of society’s collective imagination. But the new studies from Stanford University in Stanford, California suggest that the way people classify themselves by race reflects real and clear genetic differences among them. 

  But they added that it’s important to define race correctly, since dangerous misconceptions, such as the notion that some races are superior to others, persist and can serve to excuse racism. What is true, researchers said in light of the new studies, is that people of different races have different ancestries. This means different genes, since genes are inherited from ancestors. “The public in general is much more honest” about race than many academics are, “because the general public knows it signifies something rather than nothing,” said Jon Entine, a journalist and author.

  The latest research to challenge the race-as-social-construct theory is a study of 3,636 people from across America and Taiwan, led by Neil Risch, then of the Stanford University School of Medicine and now at the University of California at San Francisco. It found that people’s self-identified race is a nearly perfect indicator of their genetic background, contradicting the race-as-social-construct view, Risch said. The study’s authors said it was the largest study of its kind. The participants identified themselves as either white, African-American, East Asian or Hispanic. For each participant, the researchers examined 326 DNA regions that tend to vary between people. These regions are not necessarily within functioning genes—some regions of the genome have no known use—but are simply genetic signposts that come in a variety.

Without knowing how the participants had identified themselves, Risch and his team ran the results through a computer program that grouped individuals according to patterns of the 326 signposts. This analysis could have resulted in any number of different clusters, but only four clear groups turned up. And in each case the individuals within those clusters all fell within the same self-identified racial group.

“This work comes on the heels of several contradictory studies about the genetic basis of race. Some found that race is a social construct with no genetic basis while others suggested that clear genetic differences exist between people of different races,” a press release from Stanford said.

“What makes the current study, published in the February issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, more conclusive is its size. The study is by far the largest, consisting of 3,636 people who all identified themselves as either white, African-American, East Asian or Hispanic. Of these, only five individuals had DNA that matched an ethnic group different than the box they checked at the beginning of the study.”

Although it was reported as the largest study to find genetic differences between races, Risch’s study is not the first. Previous studies have found that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically more susceptible than average for Tay-Sachs disease, a fatal nervous system disorder, for instance. Black populations have been found to carry higher levels of a mutation that leads to sickle-cell anemia. The education gap is another reality that shows up repeatedly regardless of socioeconomic conditions.
Risch’s study is not only the largest study but also the first to find that these genetic differences are not isolated cases involving a handful of genes, but are spread throughout the genome. These differences should be of more than passing interest to the medical community, Risch added, because recognizing them can help tailor treatments and prevention programs to better serve specific ethnic groups.

It can also help geneticists avoid skewed results in epedemiological studies, he wrote. For instance, failing to account for the gene-race relationship could make researchers think a particular difference between populations results from genes when in fact it stems from different cultural conditions. Several scientists who have supported the view of race as a social construct did not respond to requests for comment on the new studies, including officials from the American Anthropological Association and the author of the New England Journal editorial.

However, some other scientists reacted without surprise to the new findings. “As an ordinary citizen educated in biology, it is self-evident that there are genetic differences between people who have been geographically segregated into mating populations, just as there are genetic differences for all species and subspecies,” wrote Michael Wigler, a professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in an email.

New Human Race/Species Discovered

  The ancient humans have been dubbed “Denisovans” after the caves in Siberia where their remains were found. There is also evidence that this population was widespread in Eurasia. A study in Nature journal shows that Denisovans co-existed with Neanderthals and interbred with other ancestors of the human species – perhaps around 50,000 years ago.

  An international group of researchers sequenced a complete genome from one of the ancient hominins (human-like creatures), based on nuclear DNA extracted from a finger bone.   Professor Chris Stringer: “It’s nothing short of sensational – we didn’t know know how ancient people in China related to these other humans”. Scientists say an entirely separate type of human identified from bones in Siberia co-existed and interbred with Neanderthal, Cro Magnon, and others.

  According to the researchers, this provides confirmation there were at least four distinct types of human in existence with other races of anatomically modern humans in their African homeland. Along with modern humans, scientists knew about the Neanderthals and a dwarf human species found on the Indonesian island of Flores nicknamed “The Hobbit”. To this list, experts must now add the Denisovans.

The implications of the finding have been described by Professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London as “nothing short of sensational”.
Scientists were able to analyse DNA from a tooth and from a finger bone excavated in the Denisova cave in southern Siberia. The individuals belong to a genetically distinct group of humans that were distantly related to Neanderthals but even more distantly related to the ancestors of Cro Magnon, universally considered the first fully "modern" human.

  The finding adds weight to the theory that a different kind of human could have existed in Eurasia at the same time as other races or species of humo sapiens.  Researchers have had enigmatic fossil evidence to support this view but now they have some firm evidence from the genetic study carried out by Professor Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany. “A species of early human living in Europe evolved,” according to Professor Paabo. “There was a western form that was the Neanderthal and an eastern form, the Denisovans.”

The Cloud People of Peru

  Shoulder to shoulder and nearly naked, gnome-like statues have stood for centuries at Los Pinchudos, a stone-and-plaster complex of nine tombs built into a high rock cleft in one of Peru’s northern cloud forests. The two-foot-tall (half-meter-tall) mahogany carvings bore silent witness as waves of looters hiked up to ransack the burial chambers. Vandals even hacked down one of the six unusual statues, whose robust male anatomy inspired the name Los Pinchudos (slang for “the big penises”).

  By the time locals led researchers to the site in 1980, the tombs were nearly empty. Yet the initial absence of mummies didn’t deter archaeologist Warren Church, who’s worked for 19 years to save Los Pinchudos and learn its secrets.

  Little is known about the hill tribes that in the tenth century began carving settlements out of the dense cloud forests in the mountains between the Marañón and Huallaga Rivers. Inca contemporaries called them Chachapoya, the Cloud People. Although they left no written language, they did leave scores of stone ruins in this vertical wilderness of orchids, butterflies, and jaguars, where thick brush and mists camouflage sheer drop-offs. “You can literally find your legs dangling over empty space, your armpits supported by tree branches,” says Church.

  For more than 500 years the Chachapoya cut farm terraces and villages into these steep slopes, raised llamas and guinea pigs—and fought each other. Around 1470 the Inca conquered the region. When Spaniards arrived in 1535, the surviving Chachapoya joined them to rout the Inca, impressing the Europeans with their battle prowess.
By 1700 smallpox and other diseases had killed most of the Chachapoya.

  Los Pinchudos is a vital link to this lost people. Researchers don’t know who was buried here but think the tombs relate to Chachapoya ruins nearby at Gran Pajatén. Even in its looted state the site has yielded tantalizing artifacts such as shell jewelry, which suggests contact with coastal people. Most surprising are the statues. Wood artifacts rarely survive the cloud forests’ extreme humidity. Scientists attribute the figures’ preservation to the site’s location in an arid microclimate.

  The tombs might have been lost without Church and Peruvian conservator Ricardo Morales Gamarra, who, with World Monuments Fund support, restored the eroding foundations. Church believes Los Pinchudos and its surroundings will teach volumes about this extinct culture: “My mind races, thinking of what the forests still hold.” Now a team of archaeologists, working on a tip-off from a local farmer, have uncovered a burial site in a 820ft-deep cave. The researchers have so far found five mummies, two of which are intact, as well as ceramics, textiles and wall paintings.

“This is a discovery of transcendental importance. We have found these five mummies but there could be many more,” Mr Corbera said. “We think this is the first time any kind of underground burial site this size has been found belonging to Chachapoyas or other cultures in the region.”

  The tribe’s own name is unknown. The word Chachapoyas is thought to come from the Quechua for “cloud people”, and is the name by which they were known to the Incas, because of the cloud forests they inhabited in what is now northern Peru. A white-skinned people who were famed as ferocious fighters, the Chachapoyas held out against the Incans, who ruled an empire stretching from southern Chile to northern Ecuador until their conquest by the Spanish.

  “The remote site for this cemetery tells us that the Chachapoyas had enormous respect for their ancestors because they hid them away for protection,” Mr Corbera said. “Locals call the cave Iyacyecuj, or Enchanted Water in Quechua, because of its spiritual importance and its underground rivers. The tribe had white skin and blonde hair – features which intrigue historians, as there is no known European ancestry in the region, where most (other) inhabitants are darker skinned. Archaeologists found an underground burial vault inside a cave with five mummies, two intact with skin and hair. ‘The women and their husbands always dressed in woollen clothes and in their heads they wear their llautos [a woollen turban], which are a sign they wear to be known everywhere.’

  Chachapoyas chronicler Pedro Cieza de Leon wrote of the tribe: ‘They are the whitest and most handsome of all the people that I have seen, and their wives were so beautiful that because of their gentleness, many of them deserved to be the Incas’ wives and to also be taken to the Sun Temple.

Royal Mummies of Ancient Egypt

  The mummy which Egyptologists have identified as Queen Hatshepsut, wife of Pharaoh Thutmosis II, is displayed at the Egyptian museum in Cairo. She ruled Egypt after Thutmosis’ death in 1520 BC. Her long hair and facial structure has been well preserved by the embalming process of the time. American Egyptologist Donald P. Ryan excavated her tomb, in the Valley of the Kings, during the course of 1989. Ryan describes the mummy as follows: “The mummy was mostly unwrapped and on its back. Strands of reddish-blond hair lay on the floor beneath the head.”

  The myths and legends of Greece, India and South America describe the rule of Osiris and Isis.” The Mighty Osiris and Isis walked into the Egyptian Valley out of nowhere and assumed command.’ They were taller and more imposing than the men of the time, with long blond hair, marblelike white skin and remarkable powers that enabled miracles”.

  Yuya-(Joseph II) Biblical Joseph Egyptian Prime Minister during 1400 BC. Father of Tiy. Yuya’s blonde hair and Caucasian facial struture have been well preserved by the embalming process. He was married to Tjuyu, an Egyptian noblewoman associated with the royal family, who held high offices in the governmental and religious hierarchies. Their daughter, Tiye, the Great Royal Wife of Amenhotep III.
 
The tomb of Yuya and Tjuyu was, until the discovery of Tutankhamun’s, one of the most spectacular ever found in the Valley of the Kings despite Yuya not even being a pharaoh. Although the burial site was robbed in antiquity, many objects not considered valuable by the robbers still remained. Both the mummies were largely intact and were in an amazing state of preservation.

  The mummy of the red haired Egyptian King, Ramses II, is on public display at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. Forensics tests were done on Ramses, proving that his red hair was ‘natural’. Microscopic examinations showed that the hair roots contained natural red pigments, and that these red pigments did not result from the hair somehow fading, or otherwise being altered after death, but did represent Ramesses’ natural hair color.

  Egypt’s last display of national vigor came with the red haired Pharaoh Ramses II (1292 – 1225 BC). Ramses II managed to re-establish the already decaying Egyptian Empire by re-capturing much land in Nubia. After this king, Egypt entered into a steady period of decay, caused directly by the elimination of the original Egyptians, and their replacement with a mixed population. This racially divergent nation was never again to reach the heights achieved by the First, Second or the first part of the Third Kingdoms. In these later years there were competing claimants to the pharaohs throne, many of whom, racially speaking, bore no resemblance to the original pharaohs at all.

  The ‘Elder Lady’ (discovered in KV35, lying next to the the badly damaged Younger Lady) is well-mumified, with curly hair and must have been about 50 years old when she died. She was discovered in KV35 and many scholars believe that she may be Queen Tiye, the mother of Akhenaten.

  Supporting this theory are her age at death and the possibly ‘royal’ position of her hands (the left arm at the chest and the right down by her side). In addition, one study comparing a strand of the Elder Lady’s hair to a lock of hair found inside a tiny coffinette inscribed for Tiye from Tutankhamun’s tomb concluded that the samples matched. The fact of red-headed Egyptians has not only anthropological interest however, but also great symbolic importance. In ancient Egypt, the god Seth was said to have been red-haired, and redheads were said to worship the god devoutly.

  The Ramessides (the family of Ramesses II), believed themselves to be divine descendants of Seth, with their red hair as proof of their lineage. She speculated that Ramesses II may have been descended from a long line of redheads.
  The mummy of Pharaoh Seti I is the most lifelike of the great pharaohs of Egypt, and a tribute to the embalmer’s art. His caucasian features remain crystal clear and because of the excellent preservation process, Seti’s mummy can easily be compared with a relief of his face made in his lifetime at the Temple at Abydos. Seti was the son of the great Ramses I, and became pharaoh in 1320 BC. He reoccupied lands in Syria lost to earlier Syrian invasions, conquered Palestine and conducted campaigns against the Semitic Libyans and the Indo-European Hittites.

  Negroid hair doesn’t magically transform into typically Caucasian hair as a result of the mummification process, as is often claimed. ALL the anthropologists that examined the mummy hair have described the hair as Caucasian overall; you just might have to assume that a bunch of highly trained professionals might actually know what they are talking about, even if it does not fit the current politically correct afrocentric views endorsed by the UN.
  A well preserved body from the pre-dynastic period in Egypt, circa 3,300 BC. Buried in a sand grave, the natural dryness of the surroundings kept the body preserved. His red hair have been so well preserved that he has been given the nickname “Ginger” at the British Museum where he is kept on display.
After the Human Tissue Act 2004, the British Museum has developed policies for ethical treatment of human remains and no longer uses the nickname famously known as “Ginger”.

Despite the refusal of the Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, to release any DNA results which might indicate the racial ancestry of Pharaoh Tutankhamen, the leaked results reveal that King Tut’s DNA is a 99.6 percent match with Western European Y chromosomes.

The DNA test results were inadvertently revealed on a Discovery Channel TV documentary filmed with Hawass’s permission — but it seems as if the Egyptian failed to spot the giveaway part of the documentary which revealed the test results.
Hawass previously announced that he would not release the racial DNA results of Egyptian mummies — obviously because he feared the consequences of such a revelation.
Haplogroups are assigned letters of the alphabet, and refinements consist of additional number and letter combinations, for example R1b or R1b1. Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA haplogroups have different haplogroup designations. In essence, haplogroups give an inisight into ancestral origins dating back thousands of years. By entering all the STR data inadvertently shown on the Discovery video, a 99.6 percent fit with the R1b haplogroup is revealed. The significance is, of course, that R1b is the most common Y-chromosome haplogroup in Europe reaching its highest concentrations in Ireland, Scotland, western England and the European Atlantic seaboard — in other words, European through and through… refugees from Atlantis, and NOT “out-of-Africa”.

King Tut’s DNA and Ancestry

  Scientists at Zurich-based DNA genealogy center, iGENEA, claim they have reconstructed the DNA profile of King Tut, his father Akhenaten and grandfather Amenhotep III. The researchers say they believe King Tut belonged to a genetic profile group known as haplogroup R1b1a2. More than 50 per cent of all men in Western Europe belong to this genetic group as do up to 70 per cent of British men. But among modern-day Egyptians, less than 1 per cent of residents belong to this haplogroup, according to scientists. Researchers say it’s likely that King Tut and Europeans share a common ancestor who lived in the Caucasus region about 9,500 years ago. The geneticists were not sure how Tutankhamun’s paternal lineage came to Egypt from its region of origin, though it is clear that technology such as chariots and domesticated horses was introduced from a foreign source.

  Along with the discovery, iGENEA made another announcement this week: the company will conduct testing to find which modern-day European is the closest living relative of King Tut. “The offer has only been publicized for three days but we have already seen a lot of interest,” Roman Scholz, director of the iGENEA Centre.