If you spend an afternoon scrolling through social media, you’re almost certain to encounter one or two wacky conspiracy theories.
But one of the strangest ideas out there is that the Earth was once home to an ancient race of giant people.
TikTok theorists claim that giants, many times taller than a normal human, have existed since pre-historic times, probably built the pyramids, and may even walk among us today.
As strange as it sounds, scientists say that there might be an element of truth to some of these claims – apart from the nonsense about the pyramids.
Giants, like the current world’s tallest man Sultan Kosen who stands at 8 feet 1 inch (236.5cm), are a very real scientific phenomenon.
Likewise, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of an ancient culture that would have towered over their contemporaries.
The genetic traces of these huge people can still be found in the abnormal heights of groups scattered around the world.
However, experts say that the origin of Earth’s real-life ‘giants’ is found in medicine rather than magic.
A bizarre online conspiracy theory claims that Earth used to be home to a now-extinct race of giants who may have built the pyramids. Strangely, science says there might be some truth to these wild claims
Are giants real?
Very simply put: yes, giants are in fact real.
However, the longer answer to this question isn’t quite as world-shattering as TikTok would like you to believe.
Giantism or gigantism, is simply a rare medical condition which causes people to grow abnormally.
Professor Márta Korbonits, an endocrinologist from Queen Mary University London, told MailOnline: ‘In my medical vocabulary, a giant has a disease.’
This is the difference between an ethnic group like the Dinka people of South Sudan, who reach about 6ft (1.83m) on average, and a genuine giant like actor Matthew McGrory (7ft 6in).
While the condition giantism can be caused by a number of different diseases, one that produces the tallest giants is a pituitary gland tumour.
The pituitary gland makes lots of different hormones but two are the most important when it comes to giantism.
Giantism is a medical condition which causes people to grow to extreme heights. The world’s tallest man Sultan Kosen (pictured) who stands at 8 feet 1 inch (236.5cm) is an example of someone with this condition
Professor Korbonits says: ‘The first is growth hormone, which obviously makes you grow. The other is actually a combination of two hormones called LH and FSH and these regulate the testes and the ovaries.’
When people reach puberty, their bodies start to produce lots of growth hormone which tells the bones and cartilage to start growing longer – causing the familiar teenage growth spurts.
When the pituitary gland is damaged by a tumour there’s nothing to turn off the production of growth hormone, so this growth spurt simply keeps going.
However, that alone is not enough to make somebody a giant.
‘If I gave you an enormous amount of growth hormone I would make you taller than your dad, but I would never make you two and a half metres tall,’ says Professor Korbonits.
That is because LH and FSH trigger the sex organs to produce testosterone which eventually builds up to the point that it tells the body to fuse the bones and stop growing.
Professor Korbonits says: ‘Because you would have a normal amount of puberty going on and a normal amount of testosterone, sooner or later you would stop growing.
‘To be a supergiant you need to have both too much growth hormone and a lack of a hormone which stops you growing.’
Scientists say that the enormous size of giants like the French Hugo Brothers (pictured) is due to a condition affecting the pituitary gland. In some cases, a tumour on this gland means that there is nothing to stop the production of human growth hormone
It is this reason that the ‘castrato’, singers who had their testes removed before puberty to preserve their voices, were known to grow to such large heights.
In someone with a pituitary gland tumour, the damage to the gland causes both of these effects leading to extreme cases of gigantism.
Is there a ‘race’ of giants?
However, online theories don’t just claim that there are giants in the world, they go further and argue that there is a distinct ‘race’ of giants.
Again, although their claims are totally unfounded, there is a slim element of truth to this claim that giantism is genetic.
Researchers have identified a gene called AIP which is strongly associated with the kinds of pituitary tumours which lead to giantism.
This gene is particularly common in the West of the British Isles and Northern Ireland where myths of giants have existed for thousands of years.
Scientists have analysed bone samples taken from the ‘Irish Giant’ Charles Byrne, who lived in London during the 1780s and was 7ft 7in (2.31m).
The Irish Giant, Charles Byrne, was found to have a gene called AIP which causes tumors on the pituitary gland. This explains why his skeleton (pictured) to such an extreme height
Our late Queen, Elizabeth II, visits the skeleton of the Irish Giant at the Hunterian Museum in central London in November 1962. Everyone in Northern Ireland with the same giantism gene can trace their ancestry back to a single individual who lived about 2,500 years ago
This revealed that Byrne was one of the roughly one in 1,000 people who carry the AIP gene.
Since this gene is passed on from parents to their offspring, there is a sense in which modern giants share a common lineage.
In fact, a study conducted by geneticists from Belfast City Hospital found that every modern carrier of the AIP gene in Northern Ireland can trace their lineage back to a single relative who lived about 2,500 years ago.
We also have evidence of the existence of giantism stretching back thousands of years.
The oldest proven example is Sa-Nakht, an ancient Egyptian pharaoh from 2700 BC, who is believed to have been 6ft 1.6in (1.987m).
Similarly, researchers have confirmed that a 6ft 8in tall (2.02m) skeleton from the third century AD Rome suffered from gigantism.
Dating from even further back, the existence of genetic endocrine conditions could explain some accounts of famous ‘giants’ from history.
‘Goliath from the Bible likely had this endocrine condition,’ says Professor Korbonits.
Experts believe that the biblical giant Goliath (illustrated) would likely have had the same endocrine condition as modern giants
The earliest confirmed case of giantism is Sa-Nakht (pictured), an ancient Egyptian pharaoh from 2700 BC, who is believed to have been 6 feet 1.6 inches (1.987m)
However, this is as far as the social media theories can be said to be true.
Firstly, there is no sense in which people with giantism could be said to be a separate ‘race’ like the Nephilim described in the bible.
Having the AIP gene no more makes someone a different race than having the genes for cystic fibrosis or any other genetic disease.
Additionally, giantism isn’t 100 per cent heritable, which means members of the same family don’t all have giantism even if they all have the gene.
The AIP gene is only passed down 50 per cent of the time and only one in 20 people with the gene will go on to develop a pituitary gland tumour.
Likewise, Professor Korbonits adds that there is no evidence or reason to believe in an ancient race of giant people.
Were there ancient giants?
If there really isn’t any evidence for the existence of a giant race, we might question where these theories come from.
The ancient Gravettian people lived about 33,000 years ago in Europe. When their remains were found, 19th-century scientists were shocked to discover that they were about 5ft 11in (1.8m) on average. Pictured: An artist’s impression of a Gravettian man
On social media, theorists often base their ideas on fake images of giant bones, misinterpretation of archaeology, and a literal interpretation of religious texts.
However, there is a more scientific explanation for the origins of giant myths.
Dr Pavel Grasgruber, an expert on the biology of height from Masaryk University, Czechia, told MailOnline: ‘The idea that human giants existed in prehistoric times was mainly inspired by the findings of male skeletons in the Grimaldi cave system.’
When these caves, located on the Mediterranean coast near the French-Italian border, were first excavated in the late 1880s, scientists were shocked by the size of the human remains they found.
Seven of the ‘Gravettian’ people found there were about 5ft 11in (1.8m) on average but the tallest were up to 6ft 5in (1.96m) in height.
Dr Grasgruber says: ‘The standard for male height in Europe was under 170cm! No wonder these people must have seemed like “giants” to the scientists of the time.’
Thanks to ‘the work of people with vivid imaginations’, these findings slowly became part of a myth that the world was once populated by giants.
However, the main reason for the abnormal size of the Gravettian people was actually their relatively healthy conditions.
Estimates based on Gravettian remains (pictured) suggest that the tallest individuals might have been up to 6ft 5in (1.96m) in height. Compared to the average height of a male in the 1890s of 5ft 7in (1.7m) they would have seemed like giants
Similar average heights are found among the Early Upper Palaeolithic populations of France and Moravia around 32,000 years ago.
Dr Grasgruber says: ‘The reason for this good physical condition of Early Upper Palaeolithic hunters was the low population density and plenty of game in the form of mammoths and other large mammals.’
A comparable example was the much-exaggerated height of the indigenous Native Americans who often towered over the European arrivals thanks to the abundance of wild food.
‘The harsh period of the last Ice Age which peaked 22,000 years ago, the extinction of megafauna 12,000 years ago, and later the transition to agriculture contributed to a rapid decline in body size,’ says Dr Grasgruber.
‘For most of the Holocene, statures around 165cm were the norm in Europe, especially in the Mediterranean. We can only thank the Industrial Revolution for the dramatic increase in body height in the last 150 years.’
Yet Dr Grasgruber points out that there is also a genetic element to the extreme height of some ancient people.
Scientists believe that about 90 per cent of our height is determined by our DNA, thanks to variations in around 1,000 specific genes.
Particularly strong genetic dispositions to extreme height have survived since the stone age and have made their way into modern people.
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For example, strong traces of the very tall Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers of the Villabruna genetic cluster, also known as the Western Hunter-Gathers, can be found in the modern people of the Baltic regions.
The very tall populations of Norway and Iceland can also be traced back to Neolithic times into the Pit Grave or Yamnaya culture which flourished in the 3rd millennium BC.
Likewise, Dr Grasgruber points out that young men in the Široki Brijeg region in Herzegovina are over 6ft (1.85m) tall on average.
Thanks to their ‘extraordinary conditions for growth’, Dr Grasgruber thinks that men from Herzegovina, southern Dalmatia and northwestern Montenegro have a real chance of reaching averages of around 6ft 3 inches (1.9m).
However, although this does show that there is an ancient genetic lineage of extremely tall people this does not prove the existence of a race of giants.
Even the tallest people in the Balkans are not ‘giants’ in the medical sense and do not grow to the extreme heights proposed by conspiracy theorists.
Nor are these modern people or the stone age groups they descend from a genetically distinct ‘race’ of people.
Dr Grasgruber says: ‘There was repeated contact and mixing between the various groups of people inhabiting western Eurasia, so we cannot speak of an isolated evolution in the manner of an evolutionary tree. It was more like an evolutionary bush.’
WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE HISTORY OF THE STONE AGE?
The Stone Age is a period in human prehistory distinguished by the original development of stone tools that covers more than 95 per cent of human technological prehistory.
It begins with the earliest known use of stone tools by hominins, ancient ancestors to humans, during the Old Stone Age – beginning around 3.3million years ago.
Between roughly 400,000 and 200,000 years ago, the pace of innovation in stone technology began to accelerate very slightly, a period known as the Middle Stone Age.
By the beginning of this time, handaxes were made with exquisite craftsmanship. This eventually gave way to smaller, more diverse toolkits, with an emphasis on flake tools rather than larger core tools.
The Stone Age is a period in human prehistory distinguished by the original development of stone tools that covers more than 95 per cent of human technological prehistory. This image shows neolithic jadeitite axes from the Museum of Toulouse
These toolkits were established by at least 285,000 years in some parts of Africa, and by 250,000 to 200,000 years in Europe and parts of western Asia. These toolkits last until at least 50,000 to 28,000 years ago.
During the Later Stone Age the pace of innovations rose and the level of craftsmanship increased.
Groups of Homo sapiens experimented with diverse raw materials, including bone, ivory, and antler, as well as stone.
The period, between 50,000 and 39,000 years ago, is also associated with the advent of modern human behaviour in Africa.
Different groups sought their own distinct cultural identity and adopted their own ways of making things.
Later Stone Age peoples and their technologies spread out of Africa over the next several thousand years.
