Speaker 1: Tonight's classic is a personal favorite. We set out to
Speaker 1: we set out to do a folklore episode about a
Speaker 1: legendary race of giants in North America, and we don't
Speaker 1: always get to say this, but we figured this one out.
Speaker 1: I'm convinced we actually found the answer.
Speaker 2: Matt poop Oh, Yes, indeed, it's venturea in Nature calls.
Speaker 1: Everything we know.
Speaker 2: About this came from that film directly. That's not true, Ben,
Speaker 2: You've always been such a fan of giants, just in
Speaker 2: your writing. It's such a cool thing, especially the idea
Speaker 2: of like a secret race of them.
Speaker 1: You know, it's really weird because you know, folklore is
Speaker 1: a historical snapshot, right, It's a way to learn about history,
Speaker 1: and a lot of times folklore comes to us through
Speaker 1: a long telephone game, and it's often communicated through symbolism
Speaker 1: or metaphor. But these were actually giants, Like, there is
Speaker 1: not a metaphor here in the surviving folklore. The people
Speaker 1: and communities that we're talking about. The Sete Caw were
Speaker 1: very blunt and very emphatically saying, yes, giants are real.
Speaker 1: They eat people, and we had to wipe them out,
Speaker 1: grind our bones to make their bread.
Speaker 3: Here we go from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies.
Speaker 3: History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back
Speaker 3: now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome back to the show. My name is Noel,
Speaker 1: and our compatriot Matt is on vacation. I think we
Speaker 1: could say he's on vacation. Is that where he is? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's I just knew he wasn't here. Yeah, he and
Speaker 1: his family have I don't know how much he wants
Speaker 1: me to say about this, but they're on a nice
Speaker 1: holiday vacation. That's lovely. He deserves it. If anyone deserves
Speaker 1: a vacation, it's our boy, Matt. Agreed. Agreed. And in
Speaker 1: the meantime they call me Ben. We were joined with
Speaker 1: our super producer Paul Mission controlled decadt. Most importantly, you
Speaker 1: are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff
Speaker 1: they don't want you to know. Now. How familiar were
Speaker 1: you growing up with Native American mythology or oral tradition.
Speaker 2: Just Native American tradition in general, or.
Speaker 1: Specifically folklore, folklore, or the legends of gods and monsters.
Speaker 2: You know, I think I probably grew up with more
Speaker 2: of a grasp of like Greek mythology than Native American mythology,
Speaker 2: for sure. I remember, you know, reading stories about like Hiawatha,
Speaker 2: for example, that was a real, real historical figure.
Speaker 1: Right, the founder of the Iroquois Confederacy, or a co
Speaker 1: founder rather, it's right. It's interesting because often depending on
Speaker 1: where you are in the world or where you are
Speaker 1: in the US, you will not learn an extensive amount
Speaker 1: of info about Native American folkloric or spiritual or mythological traditions.
Speaker 1: But the truth of the matter is that thousands of
Speaker 1: years before the first Europeans ever reached the continents that
Speaker 1: would become known as North and South America, native civilizations
Speaker 1: rose and fell, creating rich traditions of architecture, agriculture, and
Speaker 1: of course cultural beliefs. While each of these spiritual or
Speaker 1: historical traditions was unique, their stories shared many of the
Speaker 1: same traits that other cultures shared. You know, the lands
Speaker 1: were filled with gods or monsters and spirits, both good
Speaker 1: and evil. Animals often represented some certain moral compass or
Speaker 1: you know, perspective on life, and there were legendary heroes.
Speaker 1: There were sacred days that were of course origin stories
Speaker 1: of the people creating the traditions and their enemies and more.
Speaker 1: And there were also stories of other tribes or communities
Speaker 1: or civilizations. Like one thing that's strange is it doesn't
Speaker 1: happen all the time. But in many ancient cultures, the
Speaker 1: word that the people used to describe themselves translates directly
Speaker 1: to just the people, or the real people or the
Speaker 1: true people. Yeah, and everyone else is somehow othered, yes,
Speaker 1: exactly othered. And in a lot of cases, these stories
Speaker 1: that concern other tribes or communities might be stories explaining
Speaker 1: the animosity between a neighboring tribe or how they got
Speaker 1: a weird name, like the fish eater people or something.
Speaker 1: Or there might be stories that feature a single member
Speaker 1: of a distant tribe a stranger coming to town. But
Speaker 1: in some other cases, more cases than they might think,
Speaker 1: there were stories of intelligent beings that interacted with us
Speaker 1: that were not gods, but we're not quite human. And
Speaker 1: today's episode is about one of these groups. The how
Speaker 1: best to say this, the allegedly legendary Sea te Ka.
Speaker 1: Oh I like that good alliteration, man, thanks no, thanks no,
Speaker 1: so see Teka see Teka. So the story of the
Speaker 1: Sea Teka. They have several other names comes from allegedly
Speaker 1: the oral history of the Northern Paiute people. They're a
Speaker 1: numic tribe that traditionally that happened to live in what
Speaker 1: we would now call western California, western Nevada, and southeast Oregon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right.
Speaker 2: They lived in lands centered on a lake or in wetlands.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: And they existed and roved in bands who would team
Speaker 2: up and have these communal hunts, and members would move
Speaker 2: freely between these bands of hunters, and they would share
Speaker 2: this super rich and fascinating.
Speaker 1: Oral tradition m h. And in this tradition, according to
Speaker 1: the story, the Paiute told tales of a nearby ancient
Speaker 1: antagonistic tribe known as the se tech Ka, the Saiduca,
Speaker 1: or the Sae. And according to these legends, the sea
Speaker 1: Teka were a tribe of cannibalistic giants. It's weird because
Speaker 1: the name se Tekka doesn't mean anything. It doesn't signify
Speaker 1: anything about gigantism, nor does it signify anything about consuming
Speaker 1: human flesh. Instead, the phrase literally means tool eaters t
Speaker 1: ul e in the language of the Paiute, and tool
Speaker 1: is a fibrous water plant. We'll explain how this comes
Speaker 1: into play later. But what's the gist of this legend?
Speaker 1: How do they show up in this story?
Speaker 2: Well, I'll tell you ben. The gist of this legend
Speaker 2: is as follows. After being terrorized by these terrifying, cannibalistic
Speaker 2: ten foot tall, redheaded giants, the Paiute had enough and
Speaker 2: they went to war. And this battle was incredibly long
Speaker 2: and incredibly bloody, but eventually, by pitching in and throwing
Speaker 2: their lot in together, the Piute prevailed. The Sea Tecon
Speaker 2: attempted to make a getaway very cleverly from the Payute
Speaker 2: by living on rafts that seems a little bit misinformed,
Speaker 2: just that couldn't swim, But this was also related to
Speaker 2: a legend that had they had crossed the ocean to
Speaker 2: the Americas on these rafts as well, before ending up
Speaker 2: in the desert area of western Nevada.
Speaker 1: Eventually, a coalition of tribes, possibly with communities other than
Speaker 1: the Payout bands joining in, trapped the remaining Sea Techa
Speaker 1: in a nearby cave, and when these giants refused to
Speaker 1: come outside, the Paiute piled brush before the cave mouth
Speaker 1: and set it on fire. The entire population of Sea
Speaker 1: Techa ended up dying inside. You'll hear people say that
Speaker 1: some of them made a run for it and ran
Speaker 1: through the fire, only to be speared or shot with
Speaker 1: arrows or murdered by the people waiting outside. And this
Speaker 1: is pretty gruesome stuff, right, I mean, according to the story,
Speaker 1: the tribes didn't just seal off the cave and bury
Speaker 1: these folks alive. They also raised any traces of Setechkas
Speaker 1: settlements to the ground, and they wanted to erase them
Speaker 1: from history. Right except for this story, right, And ordinarily
Speaker 1: this story would just stay that a story, startling, fascinating,
Speaker 1: ultimately unprovable. I mean, ten foot cannibals, right, Come on,
Speaker 1: I like it. I like it as a story for sure. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But wouldn't they have left some traces? Where's the proof?
Speaker 1: Here's the thing? What if someone else found the cave?
Speaker 1: Will answer that question? After a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 1: Here's where it gets crazy.
Speaker 2: In nineteen eleven, a few people did think they discovered
Speaker 2: the actual resting place of the see Teka in western Nevada,
Speaker 2: on the outskirts of the Humboldt Sink is this small cave.
Speaker 2: It's hot and it's dry, and it's isolated. But it
Speaker 2: wasn't always that way right.
Speaker 1: This was once part of an enormous lake called Lake Lahontan.
Speaker 1: It's applies to Senerra Lake that was round maybe thirteen
Speaker 1: thousand years ago, and at the time it was one
Speaker 1: of the largest lakes on this continent. But it eventually
Speaker 1: dried up and it left a number of smaller lakes.
Speaker 1: Among these was Humboldt Lake, and this cave was on
Speaker 1: the shore or is on the shore of this lake. Today,
Speaker 1: as you're listening to this episode, you can reach the
Speaker 1: cave yourself. You just drive down a dirt road from
Speaker 1: the small town of nearby Lovelock, Nevada. This cave takes
Speaker 1: its name from the town, and most people today also
Speaker 1: call it Lovelock Cave. It has a couple of other names,
Speaker 1: but Lovelock is its go to moniker. In nineteen eleven,
Speaker 1: there was a pair of guano miners from the town
Speaker 1: of Lovelock who were hunting guano deposits, which was quite
Speaker 1: a profitable thing to sell at the time. They discovered
Speaker 1: that the cave, as a result of being sealed off
Speaker 1: to a great extent, had accumulated a huge population of bats,
Speaker 1: which leads to over time vast deposits of guano. So
Speaker 1: they spent a year digging out this guano and shipping
Speaker 1: it to a buyer in San Francisco. And at first
Speaker 1: they were thinking, wow, we struck it rich. There's this
Speaker 1: huge pile of guano. But as they started to dig
Speaker 1: the stuff out, they found more and more ancient artifacts
Speaker 1: that were mixed in the batpoop. And eventually, most of
Speaker 1: the time when they were doing when they were mining
Speaker 1: this stuff, they would just find like a shard of
Speaker 1: pottery or a sandal or something, just throw it outside
Speaker 1: the cave in a little pile of rubbish. But they
Speaker 1: got to the point where there were they were finding
Speaker 1: more artifacts than they were finding guano, and it became
Speaker 1: less profitable. So in nineteen twelve they said, you know
Speaker 1: what are we doing. This is we've gone like a
Speaker 1: meter or so down into the ground and there's more
Speaker 1: stuff from this unknown ancient civilization. Then there is bat poop.
Speaker 1: And let's be honest, dude, we're here for the poop.
Speaker 1: So let's get some professional help. And they contacted the
Speaker 1: University of California. The university sent an anthropologist named Llewellyn L. Loud.
Speaker 1: I thought you'd like that name. I love the name Lluellen.
Speaker 1: Did you know that about me? I know a lot
Speaker 1: and Loud and.
Speaker 2: Just paired that's first of all ticks, all my alliteration boxes.
Speaker 2: You've got Llewellen, l Loud, Loud is an amazing last name. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Llewellen is a man's name, right.
Speaker 1: Wasn't that the name of the dude in the country Davis?
Speaker 2: That's Lewin Davis. I think, as was leu Allen, the
Speaker 2: main dude in No Country for old Man. I think
Speaker 2: his name was Lewellen injury.
Speaker 1: I think you might be right. Yeah, it's been a
Speaker 1: while since I saw that, but that's a great, great film.
Speaker 1: So they said this guy, this anthropologist, doctor Loud, also
Speaker 1: a great nickname. To check it out. And what does
Speaker 1: he ended up finding.
Speaker 2: We found a lot of things, about ten thousand individual
Speaker 2: artifacts from that rubbish sheep in different parts of the caves.
Speaker 2: It was mostly along the walls where miners had kind
Speaker 2: of ignored and not cut into. And Loud's workload was
Speaker 2: such that it took him like seventeen years before he
Speaker 2: was finally able to publish an account of all of
Speaker 2: these findings.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, it may sound like it took
Speaker 1: him forever. But this was a herculean task. What we
Speaker 1: now know is that the earliest evidence of human habitation
Speaker 1: in this cave goes back about four thousand years, and
Speaker 1: that's according to the radiocarbon dating of the oldest artifacts.
Speaker 1: Today's anthropologist call these people whomever they may have been,
Speaker 1: the Lovelock Culture, and the time in which they lived
Speaker 1: was referred to as the Lovelock Period. It lasted three
Speaker 1: thousand years, during which they left us all these artifacts
Speaker 1: that you mentioned, nol. We're talking about baskets crafted with
Speaker 1: a pretty impressive degree of sophistication, these ancient duck decoys
Speaker 1: made from fibers of that same plant, tool and sagebrush,
Speaker 1: sandals and so on. They think the cave was experiencing
Speaker 1: its heydays somewhere between fifteen hundred BCE until four forty,
Speaker 1: when a collapse cut off the easiest access to most
Speaker 1: of the cave. And by the time that collapse had occurred,
Speaker 1: this group we call the Lovelock Culture had been supplanted
Speaker 1: by the Paiute, and the Piute's name for these predecessors
Speaker 1: was Saidaku, literally translated to tool matt house dwellers. I
Speaker 1: mean they lived in those they lived in huts made
Speaker 1: of that stuff. I have a good literal descriptive translation
Speaker 1: like that. A lot of the names that they have
Speaker 1: for different bands or communities are descriptions of what they eat,
Speaker 1: like the fish eaters. There's the brine fly ears. Really,
Speaker 1: I don't know what that is. They sound like they
Speaker 1: were living the roughest.
Speaker 2: Like yeah, it does sound like a brine flies.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So the PIU, once they take over this cave,
Speaker 1: they continue using it until eighteen twenty nine when Europeans
Speaker 1: and European descended people begin populating the region and they
Speaker 1: are all killed off or driven away the PIUT that
Speaker 1: is in eighteen thirty three, when an expedition led by
Speaker 1: a guy named Joseph Walker explores the area.
Speaker 2: So there is a real cave and the civilization or
Speaker 2: a civilization existed in the area before the PIU. But
Speaker 2: how does the rest of the story a checkout? Like
Speaker 2: the whole you know, redheaded cannibalistic giants, sitch.
Speaker 1: That's the thing. Yeah, there are a few issues. The
Speaker 1: first and the biggest issue is that, according to more
Speaker 1: skeptical researchers like Brian Dunning over at Skeptoid, there is
Speaker 1: no actual piut story about this group. There are he
Speaker 1: notes stories about lone giants that pop up, but there's
Speaker 1: nothing actually about some group of people called the Sea Techca. However,
Speaker 1: there is one account from eighteen eighty three by an
Speaker 1: author named Sarah Winnemuka Hopkins. She's the daughter of a
Speaker 1: Piot chief named Winnemuka, and in her book Life among
Speaker 1: the Piot's Wrongs and Claims, she tells the story. We
Speaker 1: have an extensive excerpt of this, so I'll just paraphrase
Speaker 1: it here. She tells a story of a among the
Speaker 1: traditions of our people is one of a small tribe
Speaker 1: of barbarians who used to live along the Humboldt River.
Speaker 1: This is many hundred years ago. She says, they used
Speaker 1: to waylay my people and kill them and eat them,
Speaker 1: and they would even eat their own dead. They would
Speaker 1: come and dig up our dead after they were buried,
Speaker 1: carry them off and eat them. And now and then
Speaker 1: they would come and make war on my people. They
Speaker 1: would fight, and as fast as they killed one another
Speaker 1: on either side, the women from their tribe would carry
Speaker 1: off the dead to consume them. So at last the
Speaker 1: Piot make war on them. There were about twenty six
Speaker 1: hundred of these Sea Teca and the war lasted three years.
Speaker 1: And then Hopkins goes on to say, we did kill
Speaker 1: them in great numbers. We saw that they fled to
Speaker 1: the bush. We set the bush on fire. Then they
Speaker 1: tried to make boats to live on the lake or
Speaker 1: rafts to live on the lake. And her people would
Speaker 1: ring around the lake and would kill anyone who came
Speaker 1: on land. And then finally they all managed to get
Speaker 1: to land on the east side of the lake. They
Speaker 1: went to a cave and then they got cornered and
Speaker 1: the payout, according to Hopkins, again came to them and said, look,
Speaker 1: will you be cool? Will you not eat people like
Speaker 1: coyotes or beast or scavengers? Please righte that'd be super swell.
Speaker 1: And they said no, we're not going to give it up.
Speaker 1: This is what we do.
Speaker 2: And then once you get a taste for human meat, ben,
Speaker 2: we all know that you can't go back.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Always stunning Philadelphia talks about it. That's what the
Speaker 1: Weddigo legends about. But apparently they started to gather wood
Speaker 1: to fill up the mouth of the cave, and then
Speaker 1: they came back to the Seteka and gave them one
Speaker 1: more chance they said, will you give up and be
Speaker 1: like men and not eat people like beast? Say it quickly,
Speaker 1: and we will put out this fire. But they had
Speaker 1: either refused to talk to them, or they had gone
Speaker 1: too deep in the cavern to hear people talking at
Speaker 1: the entrance. So no answer came, and the fire burned.
Speaker 1: And in ten days some people went back to see
Speaker 1: if the fire had gone out. They said they must
Speaker 1: all be dead. There was a horrible smell. This tribe
Speaker 1: was called people eaters. And after that.
Speaker 2: Were they what's the thing, the one eyed, three toad
Speaker 2: flying purple people eaters.
Speaker 1: Yeah, one eyed, one horn, one horn. That's that's it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they called them people eaters. And they say, according to Hopkins,
Speaker 1: that the tribe they exterminated had reddish hair. And she
Speaker 1: said that she has some of this hair. It's been
Speaker 1: passed down from father to son. But she has it
Speaker 1: in a dress, a dress that is ringed with red hair,
Speaker 1: that was a morning dress. But no, the trail goes
Speaker 1: dead there. We don't know. There's no picture of the dress.
Speaker 1: We don't know if anyone's seen it. And that's not
Speaker 1: the only issue with the story. No, it's definitely not.
Speaker 2: We will get to some more of those holes after
Speaker 2: one more quick sponsor break.
Speaker 1: So first.
Speaker 2: As often happens with stories like this, there are no
Speaker 2: actual giant humanoid bones available for viewing today, which I find.
Speaker 1: To be a shame.
Speaker 2: According to one of the miners, the best specimens were
Speaker 2: taken by a local fraternal order Amazons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right, who.
Speaker 2: Boiled them clean to use in and misonic initiation rituals.
Speaker 1: Right right. And according to the reports of what doctor
Speaker 1: Loud actually found, there were sixty mummies that were onearthed,
Speaker 1: but they were of average height, some of the world's
Speaker 1: oldest duck decoys. One of the big things they found
Speaker 1: was a sandal that was over fifteen inches long, so
Speaker 1: someone with really really big feet, right. They found doughnut
Speaker 1: shaped stone with three hundred and sixty five notches carved
Speaker 1: along the outside fifty two carved inside. Some people think
Speaker 1: that's a calendar. They also found a human femur dating
Speaker 1: back to fourteen fifty BC, human muscle dating to fourteen
Speaker 1: twenty BC, and basketry dating back to twelve eighteen. They
Speaker 1: found a bunch of stuff, and during the initial excavations
Speaker 1: there were these reports of mummified remains being found of
Speaker 1: two red haired giants. One they said was a female
Speaker 1: skeleton six and a half feet tall, and the other
Speaker 1: was a male over eight feet tall. However, not only
Speaker 1: is as you said, not only is there no evidence
Speaker 1: we can find about this today physical evidence at least,
Speaker 1: but no one mentions giants in those original tales or
Speaker 1: the original discoveries, or even Hopkins recollection, because again she
Speaker 1: tells that story that sounds pretty familiar to us, but
Speaker 1: she calls them barbarians and cannibals, not giants. The first
Speaker 1: mention of giants doesn't occur until a nineteen thirty one
Speaker 1: newspaper article, not some ancient legend, and then there are
Speaker 1: some other authors. As you say, it's possible that because
Speaker 1: of the because of the amount of large megafauna fossils
Speaker 1: that could be around that area, they could have just
Speaker 1: found the bone of a large or ancient animal and
Speaker 1: thought this is the leg of a giant person.
Speaker 2: I mean, a femur bone doesn't look that different between
Speaker 2: like say, some sort of giant cat and a human.
Speaker 1: Right exactly exactly. But then we get to the question
Speaker 1: of the hair, because the red hair thing seems to
Speaker 1: be pretty consistent. Is it a red hairing. It's you
Speaker 1: know what it is, It exactly is, and that's a
Speaker 1: great way to put it. So Naturally, dark hair over
Speaker 1: time has a tendency to fade to red in certain conditions,
Speaker 1: and that's part of the reason why you will see
Speaker 1: so many stories of red haired mummies being found in
Speaker 1: ancient burial grounds around the world. It's because the amount
Speaker 1: of time that they are interred can affect the rate
Speaker 1: of decay or appearance of the color of their hair.
Speaker 1: So they very well may be red haired now, but
Speaker 1: most of the red haired mummies you hear about originally
Speaker 1: had very dark hair.
Speaker 2: So is it about like getting bleached and discolored by
Speaker 2: exposure to the sun or are there other factors at play?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it appears to be a chemical reaction as the
Speaker 1: hair d natures. This means that exposure to certain temperatures
Speaker 1: or certain chemicals present in soil can change the chemical
Speaker 1: composition of the hair and change the way at which
Speaker 1: it would decay. I see. So it removes some of
Speaker 1: that pigment or it alters it. So it's a fascinating thing.
Speaker 1: But the key element here is that these people don't
Speaker 1: art off with red hair, which is relatively rare throughout
Speaker 1: our species, right. I guess you and I both have
Speaker 1: a little bit of red hair. Matt probably has the
Speaker 1: most of us.
Speaker 2: I only have a little bit. It's in my beard
Speaker 2: and in the parts that used to be red are
Speaker 2: now turning gray. So I guess they're becoming denatured themselves
Speaker 2: a different way. I don't know, in a different way, right,
Speaker 2: So there you have it. Today, many of those original
Speaker 2: artifacts found at the Lovelock Cave can be viewed at
Speaker 2: a small natural history museum located in winnim Muca, Nevada.
Speaker 2: And then some of the other objects are at the Smithsonian,
Speaker 2: like there's ancient duck decoys and the basketry and bones,
Speaker 2: or in the Nevada State Museum. One thing you will
Speaker 2: not find in any museum, at least that we have
Speaker 2: been able to as so far as we've been able
Speaker 2: to ascertain, are any trace of giant humans or a
Speaker 2: race of giant humans, a tribe, a species, a community
Speaker 2: or band of giant humans.
Speaker 1: But we do have one more thing. We had to
Speaker 1: save it for last. You see, the myth of the
Speaker 1: se Tekka is not completely busted. Miners and archaeologists did
Speaker 1: find something else in Lovelock Cave, human bones that have
Speaker 1: been split to allow for the extraction of marrow, Human
Speaker 1: bones that have been processed the same way the bones
Speaker 1: of an animal would have been processed. They may not
Speaker 1: have been giants who ever lived here in this Lovelock culture,
Speaker 1: but these people did. It turns out practice cannibalism at
Speaker 1: the very least in times of famine, and who knows
Speaker 1: nol Perhaps it was a situation where at first they
Speaker 1: ate human flesh because they had to, and then later
Speaker 1: they developed a taste for it. Either way, at least
Speaker 1: according to one source, Sarah Hopkins, the payute objected and
Speaker 1: drove them to extinction.
Speaker 2: It's definitely a fascinating legend. I love the idea of giants,
Speaker 2: as I know you do.
Speaker 1: Ben.
Speaker 2: It's something that I think you're fond of in fiction,
Speaker 2: and this idea of some sort of proto man that
Speaker 2: roamed the earth that was some kind of species of giant.
Speaker 2: I'm also a big fan of Andre the Giant.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's true that giganticism does occur in the
Speaker 1: human species throughout the world as a result of genetic mutation.
Speaker 1: It's also true that some parts of the in some
Speaker 1: regions of the world people on average will tend to
Speaker 1: be much taller. I think the Netherlands are somewhere in
Speaker 1: northern Europe that's the place where people on average are
Speaker 1: the tallest, and the Philippines, I believe, is where people
Speaker 1: on average are the shortest. But again those averages can
Speaker 1: be deceiving. There are also some fascinating reports from early
Speaker 1: Spanish explorers in South America who swear up and down
Speaker 1: that they've met first or second hand actual giants, like
Speaker 1: people so large that an average person of let's say
Speaker 1: five ten to six feet tall would have only come
Speaker 1: up to their waists.
Speaker 2: What's the cutoff here though, because Andre the giant was
Speaker 2: I want to say seven something. And we had some
Speaker 2: stats talking about the couple that was found supposedly in
Speaker 2: this story where the female was only six and a
Speaker 2: half feet tall and the male was like eight something,
Speaker 2: which isn't super giant. That's a little taller than Andre,
Speaker 2: but it's not, you know, so tall that an average
Speaker 2: height man would be like knee high to a bed
Speaker 2: bugs by exactly.
Speaker 1: And also, if they were giants, how did this war
Speaker 1: go on for three years? And how were the seed
Speaker 1: Teka always on the run. It sounds like maybe they were,
Speaker 1: if there is truth to Again, the only primary source
Speaker 1: we have for this is Era Winnimuka Hopkins. If they existed,
Speaker 1: they were probably just practicing objectionable cannibalism. So for now,
Speaker 1: as today's episode ends, we can say with confidence only
Speaker 1: that the tallest record the tallest person in recorded history
Speaker 1: is Robert Wadlow, at eight feet eleven inches tall, and
Speaker 1: he was not a fierce warrior. He suffered from a
Speaker 1: medical condition that made it incredibly painful for him to
Speaker 1: walk around, at least for now. Because you know, there
Speaker 1: are people out there who believe that various museums and
Speaker 1: secret institutions have been suppressing knowledge of giants since time immemorial.
Speaker 1: And this is not the first time we've investigated historical
Speaker 1: tales of lost civilizations or giants. Perhaps we will find
Speaker 1: some proof in another episode. I would love that, Ben,
Speaker 1: I would love that too, NOL. In the meantime, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for tuning in. As always, we hope
Speaker 1: you enjoyed this exploration of this seat tech. Let us
Speaker 1: know what other what other legends you've heard in your
Speaker 1: neck of the global woods that later came to have
Speaker 1: some sort of Seed of Truth. We are all Ears.
Speaker 2: You can find us on Twitter and Facebook where we
Speaker 2: are Conspiracy Stuff on Instagram or Conspiracy Stuff Show. You
Speaker 2: can join our pretty cool Facebook group discussion group called
Speaker 2: Here's where it Gets Crazy. All you have to do
Speaker 2: is name one of our names. We set the bar
Speaker 2: pretty surely you can do that. If you are familiar
Speaker 2: with the show. We say it at the top of
Speaker 2: every episode.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you. I don't know if we mentioned this
Speaker 1: on air, but sometimes I think our mods might get
Speaker 1: a little irritated with me because sometimes if the answer
Speaker 1: is funny enough, I'll just let someone in.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I applaud any amount of creativity when
Speaker 2: it comes to this, and if there is something that
Speaker 2: you put down that makes us unequivocally know that you're
Speaker 2: into the show, then we're gonna We're gonna let you in.
Speaker 1: That's true. It's not about it's about you.
Speaker 4: There we go, and that's the end of this classic episode.
Speaker 4: If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode,
Speaker 4: you can get into contact with us in a number
Speaker 4: of different ways. One of the best is to give
Speaker 4: us a call. Our number is one eight three three
Speaker 4: st d WYTK. If you don't want to do that,
Speaker 4: you can send us a good old fashioned email.
Speaker 1: We are conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 4: Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
Speaker 4: of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 4: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.