Skeletons and folklore reveal mind-blowing details about the existence of giants near Nevada

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the tallest person in the world was Robert Wadlow who stood at an astonishing 8 feet 11 inches. But there used to be a time when almost 10-foot-tall people lived in the caves of Nevada and their history was revealed by folklore and fossils, as opposed to record books. According to Archaeology World, an ancient race of humans dubbed the "giants of lovelock," lived around the area located 90 miles northeast of Reno, Nevada.

The native people in the region known as the Paiute have lores that were passed down generations telling stories of the ferocious giant race. According to their lore, those giants used to have red hair and pale skin and they arrived from Central America by boat after which they attacked the local tribes of Nevada. The Paiute people and the giants were engaged in war for years of war before the latter were chased into caves where they were slaughtered.

However, experts do not believe that the giant people met a violent end. In 1911, it was believed that a pair of miners first went searching for guano or bat excrement in the Lovelock caves to be used as fertilizers when they allegedly stumbled upon 60 human skeletons. Some of those skeletal remains measured between 7 to 8 feet tall. Mining engineer John T. Reid wrote about those discoveries in his 1935 memoir but no further evidence to prove the existence of the giant humans was found back then.

In 1912 and 1924, two excavations of the site helped archaeologists retrieve some ancient artifacts including bits and pieces of sandals measuring 15 inches in length. Human bone fragments were also dug out of the area and the radiocarbon dating results revealed that they were from between 2030 BC and 1218 BC. Archaeologists also discovered an astonishing handprint in the Lovelock cave that measured twice the size of an average human palm.

According to the New York Post, an article published in Nevada Review-Miner in 1931 mentioned the discovery of two mummified skeletons in a dry lake bed outside Lovelock. They were reportedly measured at 8.5 to 10 feet and had red hair but some experts believe that the hair strands might have turned red due to the environmental exposure. But many others found similarities with the description in the lore of the giant barbarians known as Si-Te-Cah provided by the Paiute tribe.

The tale of these giants was also recorded by Spanish conquistador Pedro Cieza de Leon in the 16th century where he retold a story about an ancient Peruvian race of giants who came by sea in rafts. "Some of the men were so tall that from the knee down they were as big as the length of an ordinary fair-sized man,” de Leon wrote in “Cronicas del Peru.”

According to Ancient Origins, the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California published a paper on Lovelock Cave in 2005. “The site has been extensively pot-hunted and many materials remain in private collections. Lovelock Cave, despite years of destruction, is one of the most important sites in the history of North American archaeology.” the study read. The Lovelock Cave was officially designated a historical site in 1984.