At some point during the three weeks the Spanish stayed in
Tlaxcala, a group of Spaniards began to question their hosts about their
history. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who wrote a history of the campaign
described their answer.
They said that their ancestors had told them, that in times past there had lived among them men and women of giant size with huge bones, and because they were very bad people of evil manners that they had fought with them and killed them, and those of them who remained died off. So that we could see how huge and tall these people had been they brought us a leg bone of one of them which was very thick and the height of a man of ordinary stature, and that was the bone from the hip to the knee. I measured myself against it and it was as tall as I am although I am of fair size.
Díaz wasn't the only Spaniard to report on the presence of
large bones and legends of ancient giants. Cortés himself had a collection of
bones at his estate. Later travelers, José de Acosta and Antonio Hererra y
Tordesillas, also recorded the Tlaxcala legend and were shown giant teeth and
bones. However, the most interesting report didn't come from Mexico, it came
from Ecuador.
The conquest of the Inca Empire was nowhere near as easy as that
of the Aztecs. For almost forty years, the Viceroyalty of Peru was plagued by civil
wars and uprisings—not to mention actual plagues—among both the indigenous
populations and their Spanish conquerors. In the 1540s, two very different men
were thrust into the chaos. One was a soldier, Pedro Cieza de Léon, and the other
a clerk, Agustin de Zárate. What they had in common was a strong sense of curiosity
for the natural world. Near Quito, they both recorded the same story told by
the local population. Long ago, horrible, deformed giants arrived on the Santa
Elena Peninsula from across the sea. They raped and murdered the coastal people
and ate all the food in the area. The people were defeated in every attempt to
fight the giants, until:
All the natives declare (wrote Cieza) that God our Lord brought upon them a punishment in proportion to the enormity of their offence. While they were all together, engaged in their accursed [sodomy] a fearful and terrible fire came down from heaven with a great noise, out of the midst of which there issued a shining angel with a glittering sword, with which, at one blow, they were all killed, and the fire consumed them. There only remained a few bones and skulls, which God allowed to remain without being consumed by the fire, as a memorial of this punishment.
Withal, what the Indians told about these giants was not fully believed until, in the year 1543, when the captain Juan de Olmos, a native of Trujillo, was lieutenant governor at Puerto Viejo, he caused excavations to be made in the valley, having heard of these matters. They found ribs and bones so large that, if the heads had not appeared at the same time it would not have seemed credible [i.e., that the remains were] of human beings.
What Olmos did was quite advanced for his time. He could
easily have ordered the natives to bring him a few bones. Instead, he went to
the place where the bones had been reported and examined them in situ. He
recovered the complete bones of an individual and tried to reconstruct what it
might have been based on the knowledge and worldview that he had. Europeans at
the time still firmly believed in giants. The first intellectual challenges to
the belief in giant wouldn't happen until the next decade. The debate over the historical
reality of giants would continue well into the Enlightenment two hundred years
later. That the skeleton did not perfectly match the proportions of a human
skeleton wasn't a problem. Giants, by definition, were monsters. That it looked
heavy-limbed and twisted was to be expected.
Both the central highlands of Mexico and Ecuador have
remained rich sites for proboscidean fossils. In 1802, Alexander von Humboldt
collected giant bones in Ecuador and in Mexico which he identified as
resembling the elephant of the Ohio country. He also mentioned that the local
people called one of the locations the Field of Giants. Humboldt sent the bones
to his colleague Georges Cuvier in Paris. In an 1806 paper, in which he coined
the name Mastodonte for the genus that included the Ohio animal, Cuvier
determined that Humboldt’s bones represented three separate mastodon species
(one of which he named M. humboldtii) and a giant ground sloth. Since then, several
other proboscideans have been identified in Central and South America (the
exact number is in constant flux). Some look quite different from the familiar
mammoth and mastodon from further north. Some had four tusks. Some had short,
almost fang-like tusks. Most paleontologists who work in the area probably don't realize that Latin America paleontology long predates its Anglo American sibling. Most don't know that the field began with a few soldiers who took time off from their wars to look at the world around them and ask questions.
4 comments:
Excellent historical essay on the conquistadors who valued the indigenous people's opinions on remarkable fossils.
Thank you. You've been a big influence on how I approach the topic.
"Most don't know that the field began with a few soldiers who took time off from their wars to look at the world around them and ask questions."
Is it not the case that the field began with the Tlaxcala bone collectors & not the Spanish?
How can the field have began with soldiers who asked questions then with the Tlaxcala who provided answers to them.
Credit where credit is due :-)
Curiosity of mankind! How wonderful to learn.. we descend from a long line of those.. who remain curious about our future.. as well as our past!
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