On the Red-Haired Nephilim of Lovelock Cave

I don't want to shock anyone, but no, there didn't used to be red-haired giants running around ancient Nevada.

This is another case of jerks exploiting indigenous folklore to promote false bullshit, and that always makes me mad. Anyway, thanks for reading my free Monday edition. Paid subscribers get a Thursday edition as well. Enjoy!

The New York Post is currently (April 11, 2024) reporting the following:

Scientists still baffled from giant human skeletons up to 10 feet tall decades after initial discovery

The New York Post’s bullshit headline. Also, the petroglyphs shown have nothing to do with Lovelock Cave in Nevada.

The story is that of the “red haired giants of Lovelock Cave.” This is a cave in Nevada on the shores of what was once Humboldt Lake (now long gone). Guano miners in the early 20th century found lots of artifacts, so they brought in archaeologists from the University of California. Many, many ancient artifacts have been found in the cave (over 10,000 were found by the very first archaeologist in the cave).

The Internet will tell you — and the New York Post has happily compiled it all for you — that the cave was populated by red haired giants who came here thousands of years ago. They fought with the local Paiute Indians, who called the giants the Si-Te-Cah, and killed them all in a climactic battle where they barricaded them inside the cave then smoked them to death. It was their giant bones and remains, ranging up to 10 feet tall, that the archaeologists recovered.

Were they relicts of the Biblical Nephilim? Were they the giants of ancient Tartaria? Were they the Greek Titans?

Well, they weren’t anything. There actually never were any reports of giants from Lovelock Cave or anywhere in the vicinity. No Paiute legends, no giant skeletons. The stories didn’t even exist until modern wooists made them up. I point this out because if the New York Post is publishing on it, then it’s a certainty others will follow up (Coast to Coast AM has already amplified it) and you need a URL to post in the comment thread of anyone talking about this amazing discovery. Let this be your URL.

I did a full Skeptoid episode on the Red Haired Giants of Lovelock Cave way back in 2013 — this is not a new story. In researching it, I read a lot of the archaeological papers written on it.

• The first guy in the cave, Llewellyn Loud, spent 17 years collecting and cataloging the artifacts from the cave. He never once mentioned giants.

• He did a second dig at the site in 1924 with colleague M.R. Harrington. They never mentioned giants.

• Further expeditions in 1936, by N. Nelson and Heizer and Krieger collected relics. They never mentioned giants.

• Krieger returned in 1949, 1950, and 1965. Still not a single mention of giants.

So where did the story come from? Well everyone says it’s a Paiute oral tradition. Sounds legit.

Despite the Si-Te-Cah having their own Wikipedia page, my own investigation into actual Piaute folklore finds no mention of a Si-Te-Cah at all, or of giants, or of anyone with red hair. I have written before on these pages how modern storytellers, crytozoologists, and other wooists have often made up indigenous legends about their pet creature, or at best, shoehorned their creature into an actual folkloric creature that really had nothing to do with it. See this post of mine from February for more on this.

However, part of the story does come from a Paiute source. In 1882, local Paiute author Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins became the first Native American woman to copyright a publication (Yay Sarah!!!!) with her book Life among the Piutes [sic]: Their Wrongs and Claims. She tells an oral tradition from hundreds of years ago, about a small band of cannibalistic barbarians who would regularly attack the Paiute. Eventually the Paiute barricaded them into Lovelock Cave and smoked them to death. I’ve attached the relevant pages below.

Nobody was red haired, nobody was a giant. And no, New York Post, the scientists aren’t baffled by any giants. And to all who spread this crap online: it’s very lame and disrespectful to vandalize indigenous folklore to pretend they support your modern bullshit.