We’ll count Andre, but only because he’s awesome.
(This is the third part of a series, start reading here: Giants, big men, and traveler’s tales)
Even with all the evidence against giants, I still kind of like the idea of a race of giants hidden out in an exotic jungle just waiting to be discovered. But unfortunately biologically it looks a little improbable, if not possible. The problem lies in scaling and was explored by no less a scientific master as Galileo himself in the treatise “Two New Sciences.”
He basically states that if two ships are identical and created out of the same materials, but one is much larger than the other, the larger one will need proportionately more support to keep it from breaking apart under its own weight. He goes on to say that the same thing applies to animals and plants as well.
“I am certain you both know that an oak two hundred cubits high would not be able to sustain its own branches if they were distributed as in a tree of ordinary size; and that nature cannot produce a horse as large as twenty ordinary horses or a giant ten times taller than an ordinary man unless by miracle or by greatly altering the proportions of his limbs and especially his bones, which would have to be considerably enlarged over the ordinary.”
Galileo looks grumpy in every one of his portraits.
Scaling is explained with much more skill than I could muster by Michael Fowler here, but suffice it to say that the taller a human gets the wider he has to get as well in order to support the height and thus the heavier they would have to be as well. But if we were to scale up our current bone structure our skeleton (even a much larger skeleton) wouldn’t be able to support that increase in weight. As the website continues “Or course, big creatures could get around this if they could evolve a stronger skeletal material, but so far this hasn’t happened.”
So right now the prognosis for giants, either historical or modern, isn’t looking all that good. Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t research any sightings or finds that occur. The world didn’t really think that the hobbit-like homo floresiensis could exist either before we found proof. Please, please research this. Track down stories, find evidence, prove the establishment wrong.
But, if all you have to go on are stories I’m going to remain dubious.