In 1613, the skeleton of a giant was discovered in the French province of Dauphiné
In 1613, the skeleton of a giant was discovered in the French province of Dauphiné. The coins found in the burial and the inscription Teutobochus Rex indicated that this was the grave of the Teutonic chieftain Teutobod, famed for his colossal size. True, when the Christian theologian of the 5th century Paulus Orosius wrote of the capture of the Teutons' leader, remarking how astonished the Romans were at the size of their prisoner, nobody could have supposed that Teutobod was so enormous: almost 8 metres tall and 3 metres across the shoulders!
News of the find quickly spread across the whole country, and the curiosity was even delivered to the court of Louis XIII. Several learned works appeared about the giant, relating, for instance, that he devoured a young bullock at a sitting and travelled in a chariot drawn by six horses. On the whole, hardly anyone was surprised that such giants had once lived in France: people recalled the biblical strongmen and the legends of other ogres of Europe. The skeleton began to be carted around the country and was shown in Flanders and Germany, earning no small sum of money.
The general rapture over the newly acquired semi-legendary giant was not shared by a couple of sceptics alone. Doubts were voiced by the anatomist Jean Riolan and the antiquary Fabri de Peiresc. The former maintained that a man could not be so large, and that the skeleton looked more like an elephant's, which in certain circumstances resembles a human one. The latter went further and discovered that the coins found at the dig did not correspond to the time when Teutobod lived, and that an inscription in Latin was not at all characteristic of Germanic burials. Stung by this distrust, the learned public rained angry pamphlets down on the nitpickers, and the polemic descended into outright insults and dragged on for decades.
Only almost two centuries later did the French naturalist Georges Cuvier name this giant the skeleton of Hannibal's elephant, while the zoologist Ducrotay de Blainville in 1834 established with certainty that the bones belonged to none other than a dinothere, the huge proboscidean Deinotherium giganteum, extinct some 2 million years ago. A pity, really: it made for a charming hoax.
