Giant human skeletons

During the nineteenth century, there was widespread belief in North America of a prehistoric lost race. European settlers embraced myths of pre-Columbian settlements from the Old World, which reframed colonization as the continuation of a primordial past in which the roles of native peoples were diminished or dismissed. Through a process that historian Douglas Hunter described as "White Tribism", the settlers interpreted signs of "intellectual and cultural capabilities" in North American ruins, as signs of whiteness in their creators. Based on the legendary voyages of the Welsh prince Madoc, the earliest English settlers sought and failed to uncover evidence of a civilizing Welsh influence in native peoples like the Mandan. By the late eighteenth century, this paternalistic narrative had become strained, due in part to violence against the native peoples on the western frontier. White Americans developed the myth of the mound builder race, which provided a rationale for the colonization of the American Midwest. The various versions of the myth held that the massive earthworks of the Mississippi Valley, like Grave Creek Mound and the Great Serpent Mound, were not built by the ancestors of Native Americans, as is now widely believed. According to the myth, the Indians had exterminated a prehistoric, white race of mound builders. This cast genocidal violence towards the Native Americans as defensive or retributive. Josiah Priest's American Antiquities, released in 1833, crystallized the idea of a lost race—mentioned in the Book of Genesis—that created the monuments of North America before being exterminated by savages. Sarah Josepha Hale accompanied her The Genius of Oblivion with end notes that claim "the ancient inhabitants [buried in the mounds] were of a different race from the Indians." Preachers taught a biblical basis for the primordial race, including connections to the lost tribes or the Nephilim, giants from the Book of Genesis. In New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America (1798), naturalist Benjamin Smith Barton who was familiar with the legends of giants across North America and discoveries of mastodon bones, warned against interpreting the "discovery of bones, sculls, and entire skeletons of prodigious size" as evidence of prehistoric giants. PT Barnum commissioned a copy of the hoaxed giant, after a plan to have an 18-foot tall "skeleton prepared from various bones" failed. For example, a massive skeleton unearthed in Tennessee toured the state as a specimen of this lost race. The reconstructed skeleton was mounted to a timber frame in a standing position with missing bones recreated from wood and rawhide. The mastodon ceased to be exhibited as a person, but soon other purported giants were unearthed, exhibited, reported, or sold for profit. '' in 1900. Comparing the heights of various alleged giants (from 7 to 9 feet tall), it labels "Indian" as a separate people from "Mound Builder" or "Prehistoric". Throughout the 19th century, some scholars expressed doubt about the excavations of purported giants but had little impact on public perception. and republished the entire story including implausible details like the researcher who, upon drinking from the skeleton's fountain, described the water as "very sweet and nice". Ethnologist Cyrus Thomas spent years compiling his Report on the Mound Explorations for the Smithsonian Institution. The 1894 in-depth study on North America's earthworks provided over seven hundred pages of conclusive evidence that they were built by native peoples. Paxson's claims were repeated in Frank Scully's 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers and the writings of Meade Layne. ==Debunking claims==