- IJ
202: Patagonian giants
Was there a tribe of giants down there?
So, we have seen that there is conflicting evidence. Some explorers saw men of gigantic proportions; others saw tall and well built men, but not giants. What can we make out out of this?
There is no doubt that the Tehuelche people are of a great height, comparable to that of the Sudanese Dinka, the Dutch and Croatians, who nowadays are the tallest people on Earth.
To 17th century Europeans, the tall Tehuelche must have appeared enormous. At that time, the average height of northern Europeans was barely 1.67 m (5 ft. 6 in.) and southern Europeans were even shorter (1.5 m or 5 ft.). When face to face with men over 30 cm (1 ft.) taller than them, they must have been very impressed and indubitably would have called them giants.
Unfortunately, the Tehuelche as a race disappeared in the late 19th century; the proud, strongly built and tall natives of the Patagonian steppes are now only a memory. But, as reported by Van Noort, Frezier and Byron, the Tehuelche were not alone; there was another group, gigantic and warlike, the Tiremenen. Could they have been the bearded bellicose Caucauhue seen by De Rueda and not reported by any other explorer since 1641?
Though contrary to contemporary mainstream anthropologists’ views who do not record any tribe of gigantic stature in the region, we believe that there may be some truth underlying van Noort’s Tiremenen.
It may be possible that they were a tribe of slowly vanishing giant men; a group of “foot-Indians” unable to compete with the horse riding Tehuelche. They were probably weakened by illnesses borne by the first European explorers, against which they had no defenses (small-pox, measles or even the common cold). Both factors –illness and war- forced them to retreat away from the coast where they had first been seen by the Europeans, into the Andes, their last bastion against their fierce Tehuelche enemies.
They somehow managed to survive until the late 1700s when they were last seen, and after bloody battles with the Southern Tehuelche groups (Aonikenk), they quite suddenly disappeared.
We find corroboration of this hypothesis in the reports of the 19th century Patagonian explorers:
Ned Chace, an American who lived in Patagonia between 1898 and 1929 had heard from contemporary natives of “Indians in Patagonia different from the Tehuelches, bigger than they, and hostile to them”. Unlike the Tehuelche who used boleadoras (stone weapons), they used the same stone tipped arrows and “bola perdida” that the Paleo-Indians –and Pigafetta’s Patagons- had employed. This clearly indicates their pedestrian way of life (bow and arrows are difficult to use while riding a horse).
He also had heard of the killing of the last of these giant Indians, which had been “caught by the Tehuelches in a cave near Gallegos and smoked to death there”. Chace was sure that they were giants because he had dug up some old graves and in one found a very large leg bone that when rested on the ground “came two inches [5 cm] above his knee. Chace was 5 ft. 11 in. tall [1.80 m]” so the bones were indeed large. That would make the owner of that femur 7'11" if a male - taller if a female.
There are however true and reliable reports on ancient stories of terrible battles fought in Southern Santa Cruz, where tribe decimated tribe; these may reflect the dying throes of the giant Tiremenen.
Italian explorer Giacomo Bove in 1881 wrote that a local “gaucho” (Argentine cowboy) named García told him that while driving cows through southern Santa Cruz, he came across “a valley full of bones”; they were gigantic, and human, belonging to “an extinguished race, a nation of men with colossal skeletons”.
Argentine explorer Ramón Lista heard similar tales from the Aonikenk and wrote about some caves along the middle course of the Gallegos River, (where Hwy 40 now briefly meets the river) which he believed “may be the homes of a race defeated by the Tehuelche”. Carlos M. Moyano, an officer of the Argentine navy had already explored these caves in 1886, reporting that the ground was strewn with their bones, his native guide told him that it was a place where, “many Indians of old had fought”.
Coinciding with Chace’s comments, Moyano noted that one of the caves was known as the “grotto of the asphyxiated”.
The succinct evidence mentioned above hints that, after all, there could be some truth in the myth of the Patagonian giants, the Tiremenen, proud members of a bellicose tribe that quietly vanished from the face of the Earth after being vanquished
by their fellow Tehuelche. Their bones turning to dust by the Gallegos River.
The above reveals plenty of stories by plenty of people of what they saw and were told of by old locals.
