Editing Giant (section)

==Archeology and paleontology==

[[Claudine Cohen]], in her 2002 book ''The Fate of the Mammoth'', argued that the history of human interaction with fossil bones of prehistoric [[megafauna]] was heavily influenced by giant lore.<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Cohen |first=Claudine |title=The Fate of the Mammoth |publisher=University of Chicago Press |year=2002 |isbn=9780226112923 |pages=xiv (prescientific analysis of megafauna fossils), 23–26 (historiography of giant lore), 27 (Boccaccio), 31 (1613 France)}}</ref> Per Cohen, the proto-scientific study of giants appears in several phases of human history: [[Herodotus]] reported that the [[Orestes#Reported remains|remains of Orestes]] were found in [[Tegea]]; [[Pliny the Younger|Pliny]] described a giant's skeleton found in [[Crete]] after an earthquake, and seemed to refer to evolution as the process by which giants become human-size over time; and [[Augustine of Hippo|Saint Augustine]] mentions what is believed to have been the fossilized molar of an ancient [[Elephantidae]] in his ''[[The City of God|City of God]]'', in a passage reflecting on the nature and meaning of the Noahacian deluge.<ref name=":0" /> The academic consideration of giants continued through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and even the early modern period. [[Giovanni Boccaccio|Boccaccio]] devoted a passage of his ''[[Genealogies of the Pagan Gods]]'' to purported archeological discoveries in Sicily that he thought might be evidence of the historicity of ''[[The Odyssey]]''<nowiki/>'s [[Polyphemus]].<ref name=":0" /> [[François Rabelais|Rabelais]] created a wholly "fabricated giantology" for his 16th-century ''[[Gargantua and Pantagruel]]''.<ref>Smith, P. J. (2019). Parody and Appropriation of the Past in the Grandes Chroniques Gargantuines and in Rabelais’s Pantagruel (1532). In K. A. E. Enenkel & K. A. Ottenheym (Eds.), ''The Quest for an Appropriate Past in Literature, Art and Architecture'' (Vol. 60, pp. 167–186). Brill. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctvbqs5nk.14</ref> Massive bones found in 1613 in France were initially assigned to [[Teutobochus]] but the examinations of them by various physicians and their publication of diverging conclusions about the bones kicked off a "pamphlet war" between anatomists and surgeons of the day.<ref name=":0" />  The discovery of the so-called [[Claverack Giant]] in [[Province of New York|colonial New York]] triggered giantological investigations by two important early American intellectuals, [[Cotton Mather]] and [[Edward Taylor]].<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Amy Morris |date=2013 |title=Geomythology on the Colonial Frontier: Edward Taylor, Cotton Mather, and the Claverack Giant |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.70.4.0701 |journal=The William and Mary Quarterly |volume=70 |issue=4 |pages=701–724 |doi=10.5309/willmaryquar.70.4.0701|jstor=10.5309/willmaryquar.70.4.0701 }}</ref>