The Origins of the Red-Haired Giants of Lovelock Cave?


Today's mind fuck is a theory I'm totally digging.

Ancient stories tell of the Paiute Indians having to share the land in Nevada with evil red-haired giants who were cannibals. The Paiutes supposedly trapped the last of the clan of giants into Lovelock Cave and then asphyxiated them with smoke. End of tribe, right? 

What if it wasn't?

In a strange series of serendipity, it began with a woman talking to me anonymously about Bigfoot and referring to him as Jinu. I had not heard that word before. It hung in my mind.

In the usual distracting manner of life, I moved on for the next week and got into other projects, coming across an interesting post about the Red-Haired Giants of Lovelock Cave (a subject that intrigues me greatly). They mentioned in the article the potential for the giants to be the Ainu, a Japanese aboriginal tribe that also settled into Mongolia and Alaska. I then looked them up and found this -



The Ainu have often been considered to descend from the Jōmon-jin people, who lived in Japan from the Jōmon period. (**Ainu + Jin = Jinu** BINGO!).

It gets even weirder. A photo of a tribe found in the early 1900s in Nevada (the state where Lovelock Cave is), were unidentified. They did not seem like usual native people. Here is a comparison of the Ainu and this unnamed tribe that assimilated or vanished - 

  
So, when reading about the Ainu's customs, they tattooed and they also wore hats made of paper bark.  They also wore their beards very thick and untamed and cut their hair in a circular pattern.
Hmm...

The Ainu were believed to be of aboriginal/oceanic origins which explains their wavy hair and taller height and non-Asian features. But were they then related to Denosovans, a DNA found in islanders? 

Subsequent study of the nuclear genome from this specimen (Denosovan) suggests that this group shares a common origin with Neanderthals, that they ranged from Siberia to Southeast Asia, and that they lived among and interbred with the ancestors of some present-day modern humans, with up to 6% of the DNA of Melanesians and Australian Aborigines deriving from Denisovans.

Denisovan ancestry is shared by Melanesians, Australian Aborigines, and smaller scattered groups of people in Southeast Asia, such as the Mamanwa, a Negrito people in the Philippines. However, not all Negritos were found to possess Denisovan genes; Onge Andaman Islanders and Malaysian Jehai, for example, were found to have no significant Denisovan inheritance. These data place the interbreeding event in mainland Southeast Asia, and suggest that Denisovans once ranged widely over eastern Asia.

We don't know much about what the Denosovans looked like because we have only a small bone fragment and tooth to evaluate them with, but we know that they could and did interbreed with modern man and Neanderthal. If Neanderthal was the origin of the red-haired gene, that could show up in future generations.

This is all quite intriguing and I do hope it has adequately overtaxed your Tuesday brain!

Comments

  1. This is why I like to collect stories and information. Even if something doesn't seem particularly useful at the time, you never know when it might relate to something else you find out later on.

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