|
?:reviewBody
|
-
Although the scriptural writings of many religions include tales of races of giant men who lived long ago, a viral message and its accompanying photograph are not examples of archaeological proof of those accounts: The image displayed above was taken from Worth1000 (now DesignCrowd), a site devoted to hosting contests in which entrants show off their skills at manipulating photographs using digital editing programs. This particular picture was an entry from one of the site's Archaeological Anomalies competitions, in which entrants vied to create the most realistic archaeological hoaxes: Your job is to show a picture of an archaeological discovery that looks so real, had it not appeared at Worth1000, people might have done a double take. The basis for this image was a real photograph of an excavation site near Hyde Park, New York, where scientists were working to uncover the skeleton of a mastodon. Someone then linked the altered version of the image used for the Worth1000 contest entry with a fictitious backstory based on the Islamic account of the Prophet Hud, creating the hoax quoted above — which spread especially far after being published as a seemingly real news article on the web site of The New Nation, described as Bangladesh's Independent News Source. A May 2007 blog entry entitled Bhima's son Gadotkach like skeleton found (and attributed to a 22 April 2004 Times of India article) repeated the hoax, with the locale switched from Saudi Arabia to northern India and additional skeleton photos included. In early 2010, the same basic theme was recirculated with more hoax photos of a similar ilk, usually some version of a 1993 photograph of a University of Chicago dig for dinosaur bones in Niger, into which someone has added an image of a large human skull and accompanied by some variation of the following text: In any case, we don't need to know the specific origins of these photos to definitively determine that they're fakes. The square-cube law makes it a physical impossibility that humanoids of the size represented by these bones could ever have existed.
(en)
|
![[This page as RDF]](http://data.gesis.org/claimskg/static/rdf-icon.gif){kind=icon}