<![CDATA[British anthropologist Russell Dement and his team have unearthed six skeletons belonging to unusually tall people, between seven and eight foot tall, in Ecuador and Peru. Dement, who has been studying the local communities for over two decades, told Ecuadorian website Cuenca High Life that the locals have legends about very tall, pale-faced people, and it is possible that the skeletons belong to these legendary giants. The skeletons are now undergoing analysis in Freie Universitaet in Germany, which funded the research. So far this analysis has established that one of them, a woman who died in her 60s, lived around 600 years ago and that all of them were proportionate and apparently healthy. Interestingly, the bones have so far not yielded evidence of any hormonal diseases which are a common cause of gigantism. The bodies, which came to light because of a flood, were found in two ancient settlements in the Ecuadorian part of the Amazon. The researchers discovered that they had been elaborately buried, covered in leaves and then laid in thick clay, which helped preserve them. Exciting as this find is, Dement pointed out to Cuenca High Life that the study is at an early stage and due to its potentially sensationalist nature, he would not make any definite conclusions. However, he did tell the newspaper that in his 25 years studying the Ecuadorian communities of the Shuar and the Achuar he had heard numerous accounts from the elders about their tall, pale neighbours who were peaceful and welcome guests to the Amazonian villages. What was fascinating was that these legends referred to these people as belonging to “the spirit world”, which is why the discovery of actual skeletons was so exciting. Dement added that he suspected the legends were based on actual events because of the frequency with which they were being told in different parts of a large area of the Amazon. At the first site, a settlement dating back to the sixteenth century where the first skeleton was found, the team later uncovered three complete sets of human remains and parts of another two, the Ecuadorian daily reports. 20 miles from it, at another settlement from around the same period, two other remarkably tall skeletons were unearthed. The second site also yielded some artefacts, and the research team has now suggested that these “giants” lived there for at least a century and a half, which means they were there when the Europeans came. There is no evidence of interactions between them and the European colonists, however. The first definitive results from the study will be made public within twelve months. Due to the sensationalist factor; Dement said the team wanted to be extremely diligent in their work. Currently, the anthropologist is collecting a database of DNA material from the local communities in order to try and establish whether they interbred with their tall, pale-faced neighbours. Historical records of gigantism are not too uncommon. Two of the most famous modern-day giants were American Robert Pershing Wadlow, who stood at eight feet and 11 inches, the tallest man to date, and Irishman Charles Byrne, who lived in the eighteenth century and whose skeleton, now on display in the Royal College of Surgeons in London, measures seven feet and seven inches.]]>
Legendary Giants Found in Ecuador
