marehart Wrote:
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> what is the source for Spanairds being only five
> feet tall?
>
> I have no problem with a race of "giants" being up
> to say 10 feet tall. They would have had to be of
> different skeletal proportions (denser, thicker
> bones, stronger joints) than "normal people" as
> the rule concerning gravity and support comes into
> play above about 7.5 feet i.e. (basketball
> centers).
>
> They would of course also had an interesting
> genome.
>
> Beyond ten feet it seems to me that they would
> have had to be very different from us in skeletal
> proportions.

Rules concerning gravity & support are suspicious to me after examining size, weight, and load-bearing surfaces of bipedal dinosaurs

Nonetheless, I can see a human approaching even 11' as being somewhat reasonable (and even somewhat documented) albeit with considerable medical difficulties that increase exponentially with the height - though, in documented cases, this rarely had to do with structural support seemingly.

Nonetheless, isolated medically faulty biological specimens that deviate from a species norm certainly don't lend themselves to a hypothesized race of giants.

I am firmly with you that any race of humans more than 8' ft (more than 10 in your post) isn't likely - although for different reasons. Such a race would have had an extremely lasting impression on changing their environment.

As for probabilities, I still stand that the 5'x" specimens meeting up with 6'8" + specimens (The short Romans and the tallllll norsemen) would have easily led to the legends of giants.
It is interesting the the NORSE are the ones with the most recorded legends of giants though - that they sprang from a race of giants. Now, which is more likely? they descend from 'very' big humanoids? or that they were, once upon a time, surrounded by much shorter (1' or more) folks?