The Giants

Nineteenth-century papers ran skeleton finds weekly. The Smithsonian, lore says, collected them all.

The documented layer: 19th-century American newspapers did print hundreds of giant-skeleton finds (searchable archives confirm the genre), and the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology did collect and centralize mound remains — the 'suppression' claim grew from real acquisition plus absent public display. Physical anthropology's answer: the reported measurements dissolve under modern examination (large but human remains, exaggeration, hoaxes like the Cardiff Giant — a confessed 1869 fabrication that drew paying crowds for years). The node holds the real newspaper record, the real collection practices, and the absence of a single surviving specimen.