Re: Kris Hirst's page on Why Don't We Call Them Cro-Magnon Anymore? updated

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:50:33 -0800 (PST), in sci.archaeology, J.LyonLayden
wrote:

snip

I believe you.  I know Kris and I knew that if she looked at the article
again she would update it. So, yes, I wrote to her explaining that her
post was being used to support the idea of giants (right?).

How fair. You have her email and can frame the "reasons" for your
insistance any way you like, whereas I do not have the opportunitty to
present my case. She probably doesn't really care one way or the
other. After all, it's POSSIBLE that cro-magnon wasn't as tall as it
looks like he was from the evidence before 26,000 BC. It is
CONCEIVABLE that all those tall skeletons we found were not the norm
and due to lack of enough bones we cannot safely make the assertation
that they were any taller than we are now...

I have her email not just because it's on About.com but because we are in
touch fairly regularly.
I sent her an url to the thread as I know context is important and I
didn't want her to only see a bit of it that I chose.
I asked her where she got the 6'4" figure pointing out that the ones I
found were different.
And in particular, I said I wasn't happy about her having an article with
the title saying we don't use the word Cro Magnon anymore and then she
continues to use it in the article to describe anatomically modern humans.

I tried very hard to be fair. If I wasn't trying to be fair I wouldn't
have sent her the url to the thread.

But c'mon Doug you know it is most probable that cro-magnon was taller
and more robust than us. You also know that we are taller and more
robust than we have been in perhaps 1000 years due to modern medicine
finally compensating for the malnutrition resultant of agriculture and
civilization.

Certainly you acknowledge some difference in stature between the first
malnutritioned agriculturalists and the last of the robust
huntergatherers, long before the hunter gatherers were pushed into the
less fertile lands and hence suffered from malnutrition as well?

Is that what this argument is about? Since I agree than why are we
arguing?



It really isn't a conspiracy.  I was unhappy with the way she had a title
that said Why we don't call them Cro-Magnon any more and yet continued to
refer to Cro-Magnon, and pointed out that she needed to check on more
current information about height.

Which she prolly didn't do and instead took your "It takes a Village"
policing for granted and did the ol' delete/copy/paste.
She certainly didn't go out and remeasure specimens in a days time.

Now you are being unfair to her without any evidence. What did she copy
and paste from?
In a 2nd post (and last before her revised article) I sent her this:
"

Early investigators were impressed by the stature of Cro-Magnon man,
as some reconstructions suggest that the Old Man of Cro-Magnon may
have been as much as 190 centimetres (six feet three inches) tall. A
restudy, however, suggests that the stature of the original Cro-Magnon
remains varied from 166 to 171 centimetres (five feet five inches to
five feet seven inches). The stature of several skeletons from the
Grimaldi Caves (in Italy, near the French frontier), which show clear
affinities to those of Cro-Magnon, was noticeably greater, with an
average height of 177 centimetres. It is thus reasonable to conclude
that, on the whole, the Cro-Magnon peoples were relatively tall.

http://clanrossi.com/Cromagnon.htm
which is from the Britannica.

No references though, but the author was Henri J. Delporte
Préhistorien french born in Tourcoing in 1920 and died in Lesigneux
(Loire) in 2002. Instituteur à dix-neuf ans, Henri Delporte devient
professeur d'histoire et géographie à Arras, puis à Montbrison.
Instituteur nineteen years, Henri Delporte became a professor of
history and geography at Arras, then in Montbrison. Devoir expliquer
marquera toutes ses activités. Duty will explain all its activities.
Sur ses différents chantiers de fouilles, il recrute couramment trente
ou quarante participants. On its various excavation, it recruits
commonly thirty or forty participants. Il les forme patiemment,
sévèrement parfois.Lorsqu'il devient directeur du musée des Antiquités
nationales de Saint-Germain-en-Laye en 1966, il modifie profondément
les rapports entre le musée et la recherche.(...) He patiently form,
severely parfois.Lorsqu he became director of the National Museum of
Antiquities in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1966, it profoundly changed
the relationship between the museum and research ."

OK? Still tall, right?

In her article, she writes this:
"The physical characteristics of Early Modern Human are quite similar to
modern humans, although perhaps a bit more robust, particularly seen in
femora--the leg bones. The differences, which are slight, have been
attributed to the shift away from long distance hunting strategies to
sedentism and agriculture.

A recent study by Trent Holliday comparing early and late Upper
Paleolithic skeletal materials provided an average male height of 170
centimeters (early) and 168 centimeters (late), and average female height
of 157.6 cm (early) and 158.4 (late). However, Formicola and
Giannecchini's data revealed that "EUP males are much taller (176.2 cm)
and LUP shorter (165.6 cm), with an average difference of 10.6 cm.
Similarly EUP females (162.9 cm) largely exceed LUP females (153.5 cm)." I
think the jury is still out. "

Which is not what I sent her.

Note the 'much taller'. Why do you have a problem with that?




Sorry if you weren't clear, that's why it says 'updated' in the subject
line, the article was updated.  

As you have probably guessed, it is rare to find a complete skeleton and
over time, for a species in a given time period, you will find different
figures for something like height which has to be estimated from the
material that is available.

So now you want the estimate to be over a WHOPPING 40,000 years
instead of even the first 10,000 so that no one will be able to use
the word giant anymore and you'll be finally, utterly vindicated for
your suppositions.

Ridiculous. And even with those estimates, look at what Kris has written
-- early taller than later.



I think the idea of giants comes from a variety of sources, some being
confusing fossils such as leg bones of other mammals with human fossils,
some being the fact that there are 'sports', extremely tall people, etc,
plus an explanation for giant ruins, etc.

That's what YOU think. Could we please be allowed to think as well
without having the information sifted to us through a grate so that we
won't get any ideas of our own?

A variety of sources. Are you really claiming only one source, which is
what you seem to be doing. Because one of my 'sources' above is tall
people. I still think that another origin of the idea of giants is as an
explanation of who did things like raised the stones for Stonehenge,
dolmens all over, etc. Evidently a large stone in Scandinavia was called
the 'throw of the giant's. But yes, tall people are undoubtedly a source.


 >But Nephilim? Nah, they aren't
any more real than those giants with double rows of teeth.

How do you have any idea? You don't even know what a nephelim IS, or
what the word meant to those ancient people.

No, but I don't think that something written down about 2500 years ago can
be used as 'real'.

Now I don't know how keen I am on oral legends lasting 10000 years, but
still, how about this scenario:

Your Natufians, averaging around 5'5", run into a group of people
averaging around 5'10" with of course some quite a bit taller -- over 6'6"
for a couple perhaps, who knows? Hell, Robert Pershing Wadlow never ever
stopped growing and when he died at 22 he was less than an inch to being 9
feet tall. He was called the Alton Giant and for good reason. But that
was a medical problem. It could have happened in the past and you'd not
only have had people who had seen such a person but for a while the whole
skeleton.

There's a guy 8' 6" in the Ukraine, again a medical problem.

Anyway, back to the Natufians. They run into these taller people and the
story lives on. Different labels are put on the people and they are
fitted into different tales at different times. And they, maybe, are the
source of the 'Nephilim'. But they weren't taller than people are today
in a number of Western countries.

But hold on -- look what I've done. And you've done.

The Nephilim giants?
Hm, let's look at the Bible.
I've got the New English Bible. Genesis Chapter 6. Oops, no giants.
'They were the heroes of old, men of renown'. But no comments on their
height.
From the web English Standard version:
"6:1 When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were
born to them, 2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were
attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. 3 Then the Lord
said, ?My Spirit shall not abide in [1] man forever, for he is flesh: his
days shall be 120 years.? 4 The Nephilim [2] were on the earth in those
days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of
man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of
old, the men of renown."

No giants there either although some Bible version do have them.

Don't despaire:
Numbers:
But Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, ?Let us go up at once
and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it.? 31 Then the men who
had gone up with him said, ?We are not able to go up against the people,
for they are stronger than we are.? 32 So they brought to the people of
Israel a bad report of the land that they had spied out, saying, ?The
land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its
inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. 33
And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the
Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed
to them.?

And thus you actually get Christians claiming they were 100 feet tall.

So, what do you mean by giants?




I hope to find time to report more on what Adrienne Mayor has to say about
giants at some point.

And I hope to one day find a scientist with balls. pretty hard when
you get canned for reporting early tool making sites in america,
utterly silenced for finding crib-bit on horses in the paleolithic,

Gotta go. Who was utterly silenced for this? Since I can find references
for this on Google, what do you mean by silenced? I'll come back to it.
Doug

and harassed for giving seperate heights for two different ages of cro-
magnon!!



from K. Kris Hirst
Doug Weller, moderator of Skeptical Views of Fringe Archaeology and one of
my favorite archaeology webmasters, told me last week that my article Why
Don't We Call Them Cro-Magnons Any More? was being used to support some
wild notion of there having been giants in prehistory--I suppose based
partly on the story in the book of Genesis in the Judeo-Christian
religious text known as the bible. I thought that was interesting, so I
did so more poking around, and updated my page accordingly.
--
Doug Weller --
A Director and Moderator of The Hall of Ma'athttp://www.hallofmaat.com
Doug's Archaeology Site:http://www.ramtops.co.uk
Amun - co-owner/co-moderatorhttp://groups.yahoo.com/group/Amun/- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -
--
Doug Weller --
A Director and Moderator of The Hall of Ma'at http://www.hallofmaat.com
Doug's Archaeology Site: http://www.ramtops.co.uk
Amun - co-owner/co-moderator http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Amun/

.

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