Lovelock Cave: Were giant skeletons discovered in Nevada in 1911?
Speaking as someone with a lot more love for the country than most, it’s always justified to clown on the United States of America. This is a pastime that any decent citizen of the US of A will also happily join in on, given half a chance, and one of the most common ways of clowning on the Yanks is by people who haven’t heard of Lovelock Cave crowing that they “have no history”.
By one definition of the term, this is true. The country is just about to turn 250 years old at the time of writing, and there are dozens of pubs in London that are 300 years old. There’s a fistful that are literally double the age of the self-described “most powerful nation in the world”, yet there’s a big difference between the country having no history, and the land having no history. The land that was colonised by the US is old.
There’s history everywhere you can think of if you know where to look. One of the most legendary discoveries of ancient American history came, of all things, from excavating bat guano. In 1911, a number of guano miners were sent to Lovelock Cave in Nevada.
After removing three to six feet of bat guano, they discovered a native American burial site filled with artefacts and mummified human remains. A year later, a full-on excavation of that site was ordered. Which makes sense, a route to it had been cleared for the first time in centuries.
Despite the fact that the mining equipment had destroyed a large number of artefacts, what remained was an incredible haul of items that dated back thousands of years. Experts on the scene saw signs that the cave had been used by early humans as far back as 2500 BC, and over the next 20 years, the items excavated showed many signs of the technological advances made over those years. With an ancient sling among the items found stored in the cave, and even a set of 11 decoy ducks made from herbs and feathers.
However, American culture does like to take its own findings and turn them into myth. If you have heard of Lovelock Cave, you’ve probably heard about it via the tales of ten-foot-tall human skeletons found there. Unfortunately, that’s not true… A 15-inch sandal was found there, which fed into ancient oral stories of a tribe of giants that lived around the area thousands of years ago, but there’s a much more rational explanation for the sandal.
Lovelock Cave is next to a dried-out lake. At the time these early humans lived, the area would have been marshy, and the earth surrounding it damp. Large sandals would have been used to traverse waterlogged patches of Earth, much like snowshoes are used in snowbound areas of the planet. However, news of large, specially woven sandals used to traverse marshland doesn’t sell papers.
Y’know what does? Skeletons of ten-foot-tall, cannibalistic Native American giants. Would have been rad if it were true, but it’s not. A shame because the actual history of ancient human settlements is incredibly interesting, but Americans have got to jazz it up with spooky-sounding nonsense in order to make money.
Maybe that’s what we need to start clowning on Americans about, rather than this colonial idea that the land “has no history”.