- Remains of ancient humans in Nevada cave reportedly belonged to giant people
- Native Americans’ oral history offers clues to a red-haired barbarian race of men
- These invaders were supposedly trapped in a cave where they were all killed off
Archaeologists have long been baffled about claims that a long-lost group of giant humans who stood up to 10 feet tall once lived in the southwestern US.
Supersized human skulls, 15-inch sandals, and massive handprints have been uncovered in excavations inside a cave in Lovelock, Nevada over the last century, which have continued to spark the curiosity of scientists and the public.
The claims about these ‘Giants of Lovelock’ originated from Native Americans who told stories about a brutal tribe of pale-skinned, red-haired invaders who waged war on the local groups, before finally being trapped in a cave and exterminated.
While the first artifacts linked to the Giants of Lovelock were uncovered in the early 1900s, stories about the giants continue to surface as experts and average people hope to finally uncover the truth.
But it all started when a pair of miners first discovered the gigantic remains in 1911.
They were there searching for guano, the excrement of birds or bats, which has long been a valuable source of fertilizer and an ingredient in gunpowder.
But as they dug deep down into the guano, these prospectors found more than they bargained for: more than 60 human skeletons.
And some of them were reportedly extraordinarily large – between seven and eight feet tall.
‘One of his great finds was a skeleton, found about twenty miles southerly of Lovelock, Nevada, showing that the body of which it was a framework, was exactly seven feet, seven inches tall,’ according to the 1935 biography of John T. Reid, a mining engineer who worked in Lovelock.
‘It is one of the ‘giant men’ of an ancient race of which skeletons were unearthed in Central Nevada.’
There is no evidence of this find, but excavating the cave in 1912 and 1924 revealed thousands of artifacts.
Many of these finds were as expected: baskets, duck calls, arrowheads, and ceremonial objects carved into the shapes of animals.
But there were also some extremely odd findings, including gigantic sandals that appeared to have been worn.
These shoes, about 15 inches long, would translate roughly to a US size 29 shoe.
Radiocarbon dating later showed that human remains and plant material in the cave ranged from between 2030 BC and 1218 BC.
