For thousands of years, people have been telling stories about giants, from the Cyclopes of Greek mythology to the biblical Goliath. But are these just tall tales, or have giant people actually walked this earth?
If you consider a person nearly 9 feet tall to be a giant, then yes. Robert Wadlow, the tallest person of all time, grew to 9 feet 8 inches (2.72 meters) by the time of his death at age 22 in 1940. Guinness World Records.
Wadlow was well above the current Average height of men in the USA of about 5 feet, 9 inches (1.75 m) and even taller than some interpretations of the Biblical descriptions of Goliath. Yet there was nothing magical about Wadlow. Like most real-life giants, his stature was the result of disease.
“The majority of [giant] Patients have a growth hormone problem,” Márta KorbonitsProfessor of Endocrinology at Queen Mary University of London, told Live Science. “Robert Wadlow had that.”
Korbonits found that the main cause of gigantism is an elevated level of a growth hormone produced by the pituitary gland in the brain. Most often, these high levels are caused by a benign tumor. One reason we will probably never see another person as tall as Wadlow is that doctors now remove the tumor and to stop the growth with medication, since gigantism and tumors endanger health.
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Other conditions can also lead to unusual height, including Marfan syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes bones to grow longer, Korbonits explained.
However, there are people who grow to be extremely tall without any known disease. These include the formerly tallest man in the worldBao Xishun, who is 2.36 m tall – a giant without gigantism. They probably have a number of genetic variants that predispose them to a large stature, Korbonits said.
While it is easier for researchers to study living giants today, extremely tall people have probably always existed. oldest known case of gigantism comes from the alleged remains of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh who was about 1.87 m tall, while Korbonit’s Research has found that many real Irish giants inherited a genetic mutation from a person who lived 2,500 years ago.
“These diseases have existed since the dawn of humanity. So there is no reason why these giants should not have existed in ancient Egypt or at other times in human history,” said Korbonits.
Genetics and environmental factors such as nutrition in early life lead to Determine heightPopulation numbers often increase as time passes and civilization advances. However, this is not always a linear trend.
Pavel Grasgrubera researcher at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, told Live Science that some male skeletons from the late phase of the mammoth-hunting Gravettian culture about 29,000 years ago are notable for their extraordinary size and may even have helped Myths about giants inspireThe largest of these seven skeletons, excavated at the turn of the century in the Grimaldi cave system in Italy, is estimated He was 1.96 m (6 feet and 5 inches) tall.
“Remember that at the time these skeletons were discovered, the standard height for men in Europe was under 170 cm. [5 feet, 7 inches]!” Grasgruber said in an email. “No wonder these people must have seemed like ‘giants’ to the scientists of the time.”
Researchers do not know whether the large remains were representative of the Gravettian population, but Grasgruber noted that tall men were typical of early Upper Paleolithic populations in France and the historical region of Moravia (now the Czech Republic), reaching heights that modern industrial nations did not reach until the mid-20th century.
“The reason for the good physical condition of the hunters of the early Upper Paleolithic was the low population density and the abundant supply of game in the form of mammoths and other large mammals,” says Grasgruber.