There were Giants in the Earth in Those Days

A one-ton “fossil rat” has been discovered in South America, scientists announced today, according to National Geographic.

The prehistoric, bull-size creature—the world’s largest recorded rodent—has been identified from a well-preserved skull. The rodent weighed about 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms), based on an analysis of its 21-inch-long (53-centimeter-long) skull, according to the study, published in the new issue of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society: B.

So once again I’m puzzled about why we’re all supposed to laugh about the Bible verse that states “There Were Giants in Those Days.”

This from Time Magazine in 1944.

Genesis and many a folk tale notwithstanding, most anthropologists have pictured primitive man as a little fellow somewhere between an ape and a monkey in size. But last week evidence was offered to prove Genesis correct. A Java geologist had dug up bones of prehistoric men bigger than the largest known apes.

The discoverer was Dr. R. von Koenigswald of The Netherlands Indies Geological Survey. No word has come from or of him since the Japanese took Java in 1942. But Dr. Franz Weidenreich of Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History, piecing together what he had learned of Koenigswald’s findings, reported them in Science.

Koenigswald first found a big jawbone which looked more human than Pithecanthropus’, but was so massive that he thought it could not possibly be a man’s.

Then he found a still larger jaw, the biggest ever discovered, which was unmistakably human. It was apparently the most primitive truly human fossil ever discovered. Koenigswald named it Meganthropus palaeojavanicus (Big Man of Ancient Java). Meganthropus seemed to have been about the size of a big male gorilla.

Koenigswald’s crowning find dwarfed even Meganthropus. Prowling in South China apothecaries’ shops, whose drawers are often full of fossils, he found three astounding fossil teeth. They were six times as big as a modern man’s molars, twice as big as a gorilla’s. Koenigswald thought they were an ape’s. But Weidenreich is sure, from the pattern of their “biting surfaces, that they are definitely human. He has named this man monster, who was certainly much larger than a gorilla, Gigantanthropus.

The Java giants, Weidenreich thinks, were not freaks. Taking a fresh look at the thick-boned fossils of such other primitive human beings as Heidelberg Man, Weidenreich now believes that “gigantism and massiveness may have been a general or at least a widespread character of early mankind.”

Now many scientists believe that the large fossils belong to apes but since, according to their argument, we descend from apes, then what is the big leap in logic to believe that some humans were much larger.

Many species seem to have gone through a gigantic period. Archaeologists have unearthed tiny humans which were nicknamed “hobbits” a few years ago.

I am not a Bible literalist. But every year we see things said in the Bible proved true by science. I’m just saying I have no problem believing that “There were Giants in the Earth in Those Days.”