Giants haunt our imagination and nightmares. They haunt the pages of our fairy tale books, our
myths and legends worldwide.
Scientists are largely silent about them, but for the admission that there were at least two forms
as known from fossil teeth and jaws of massive size; namely the “Giant Java Man”, Meganthropus
palaeojavanicus, argued by some to be a 3m tall giant form of Homo erectus, and the giant forest-dwelling
bipedal primate, Gigantopithecus blacki. Both forms shared Java half a million years ago and
earlier.
And, while a grudging international scientific community accepts these beings, huge stone ‘megatools’, giant-size fossil footprints and skull remains of a variety of gigantic hominids of the past,
recovered right here in Australia, continue to be ignored by our scientists who remain fixated upon the ‘politically correct’ “nobody before the Aborigines” dogma of our Stone-Age past.
Yet the evidence gathered by the Gilroys continues to mount, with discoveries made by us
Australia-wide, in spite of the denial of scientists who protest that “such evidence can’t possibly exist in
Australia”.
We beg to differ.
What we now offer is an up-to-date picture of giant tool-making hominids having shared
Australia with other, smaller races during Ice-Age [Pleistocene] times and earlier.
For many years we could only theorise as to the identities of the makers of the massive fossil
tracks and ‘megatools’. We suspected a giant form of Homo erectus as the origin for much of this
evidence, but only with the start of the new millennium did Heather and I begin to turn up fossil
skeletal evidence.
This was, in the form of skull and jaw fragments, and finally two huge skull
endocasts, which finally enabled us to positively identify a giant form of Homo erectus as the owner of
all these relics.
My quest for fossil remains of giant hominids began with the giant lower back premolar tooth
mentioned earlier. I excavated the specimen at a Pleistocene fossil site at Westmead in September 1969
and although I was to turn up numbers of megatools and massive fossil hominid footprints over the
years ahead, it would be 31 years before I was to find any more skeletal remains of these beings.
The tooth had been mineralised into ironstone with a fine mudstone coating. It measured
52mm tall, the two roots being 18mm long by 13mm wide and in depth, the crown being 32mm long
by 25mm wide. Its owner had to have stood from 3 to 3.66m in height and been a powerfully built
individual.
Then, on December 24th that year, together with my father, I was searching along an extinct
[Ice-Age] course of the Macquarie River south of Bathurst, in the New South Wales central west, when
projecting from a section of bank, I discovered numbers of massive stone implements; hand-axes,
adzes, clubs, knives and other tools all of jasper, ranging in weights of from 5.5 to 16.5 kg. Such huge ‘megatools’ we knew, could only have been made and used by beings of immense stature and strength.
Afterwards I would learn of old Aboriginal traditions hereabouts, of a race of giant men and women,
the ‘Jogungs’, who once roamed the central west and who, the Aborigines say, stood two or three times
the height of a normal human.
In the years since then I have recovered further ‘megatools’ elsewhere in New South Wales,
South Australia, and in central and north coastal Queensland.
For example, on Wednesday 28th
September 1994 Heather and I uncovered an ancient giant’s occupation site at Timor, out from Nundle
and just inside the northern end of the Hunter district. The site had definitely been inhabited by giant
hominids. Among the megatools we found there was one massive ‘chopper’, an immense grey basalt
specimen of 20kg weight. It measured 36.5cm in length by 37cm in width and was 9cm thick. The
monster-hominid who once used it would have held it with a single hand!
Rex Gilroy
Australian Yowie Research Centre,
Katoomba, NSW
Monday 25th June 2007
