Did giants once roam the earth?

April 8, 2005 12:39 AM

Calling all mefi archaeologists or egyptologists! Could someone identify this picture? Is this photoshopped?

If not photoshopped, I beg to ask the obvious question: Did giants once roam the earth?

o_0

posted by ruelle to science & nature (14 comments total)

I think it's just the angles, ruelle. Look through the other pix in the directory, like this one. The camera is much closer to the skeletons, methinks, creating an unintended optical illusion. Neat pix though.
posted by trinarian at 12:45 AM on April 8, 2005

yup, i'm right
posted by trinarian at 12:47 AM on April 8, 2005

I'd think so. It looks a lot like one that came from Worth1000. Snopes here.
posted by stoneegg21 at 12:49 AM on April 8, 2005

Giants once roamed these very pixels.
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 1:26 AM on April 8, 2005

No giants, just that current Egyptians are hobbit-like in stature.
posted by Dagobert at 1:30 AM on April 8, 2005

Wide angle lens + large depth of field = enormous-looking foreground objects.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 3:34 AM on April 8, 2005

Civil_Disobedient is correct. The colour and brightness of the sand alslo helps to mask the fact that the two men are behind a ridge and a couple of metres away from the skeletons.
posted by fire&wings at 7:58 AM on April 8, 2005

In 10 years, when Worth1000 is a dim memory, all of these photoshopped images are going to pop up, like bloated mafia victims, and get emailed as fact by every rube in the world. Wait and see.
posted by crunchland at 8:25 AM on April 8, 2005

A giant femur was found. Is it real?
posted by thomcatspike at 9:22 AM on April 8, 2005

A giant femur was found. Is it real?

Well, it's actually a sculpture based on what a fundementalist said was an actual human femur. Since fundamentalists believe in talking snakes and a guy more unkillable than Jason Voohees, I would say that the giants were 100% real, even though the actual fossil that the sculpture is based on was conveniently destroyed.
posted by Mayor Curley at 9:33 AM on April 8, 2005

Depending on your beliefs, you could always say that they were Nephilim, the "giant" offspring of men and angels spoken of in the Bible.
posted by robbie01 at 9:45 AM on April 8, 2005

The giant femur, sculpture or not, is an obvious fake since it is in the same proportions as a normally-sized human femur. Since weight increases as a power of height, a biped femur of that size would more closely resemble a dinosaur bone - it would have to be much thicker in proportion to its length in order to support the creature.
posted by Rumple at 10:05 AM on April 8, 2005

the actual fossil that the sculpture is based on was conveniently destroyed.
Thanks.
posted by thomcatspike at 10:24 AM on April 8, 2005

The New York Times once ran an apology for a photograph: it was of a person walking near an unexploded bomb in the Middle East; the apology was that the wide angle lens the photo was taken with caused the person (in the background) to appear much smaller than the bomb. The correction ran with a photo from a slightly different angle, taken with a different lens. I wish I could find that correction; it was quite interesting: a picture worth a thousand words? Maybe, but they might all be lies.
posted by Tuwa at 3:59 PM on April 8, 2005