The Giants

This episode examines the global persistence of giant legends and explores whether they might reference real, extraordinarily large humans. The central focus is a geophysical survey conducted along the Euphrates River by German archaeologist Jörg Fassbinder's team, which detected a large underground tomb near ancient Uruk—possibly, the episode suggests, the burial site of King Gilgamesh. According to the 4,000-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh, this Sumerian king stood 11 cubits tall, roughly 17 feet, and was buried beneath the Euphrates exactly where the tomb was found. Ancient astronaut theorists including Giorgio Tsoukalos and William Henry argue that nearly every culture—from Australian Wandjina creator gods to the Greek Cyclops to descriptions of a 12-foot-tall Buddha in Vedic texts—preserves memories of giant beings, suggesting a "common denominator" rooted in actual encounters.

Mainstream archaeologists confirm that Gilgamesh was likely a historical ruler of Uruk, but view his legendary height as mythological embellishment typical of hero epics. The tomb detected by Fassbinder's team remains unexcavated due to the Second Gulf War, so its contents are unknown. While isolated reports of unusually large skeletal remains have surfaced over the centuries, no verified examples of giant humans exist in accredited museum collections, and such claims often trace to misidentified megafauna bones or newspaper hoaxes. Still, the episode raises genuinely intriguing questions about why giant figures appear so consistently across unconnected cultures and whether the Uruk tomb might eventually provide concrete answers about the man behind humanity's oldest written epic.