The Giants Are In The Newspaper. They Are Not In The Cave.
Two miners dug guano out of a Nevada cave in 1911. The bones they found were about six feet. We tracked every retelling since, and the skeletons grow by roughly four inches per reprint.
A months-long reporting project. Documents cited below are held in The Vault and available to readers.
LOVELOCK, Nev. — Two men were digging bat guano out of a cave for fertiliser in 1911. They found human remains.
Nobody measured anything. No archaeologist was there. Both men are dead.
Everything since has come from newspapers.
What the excavations found
The cave was properly excavated twice, in 1912 and again in 1924. Both reports were published. Both are in print. Anybody can read them.
They list thousands of artefacts — duck decoys, basketry, sandals, an extraordinary record of a people living in that basin for millennia. The human remains are described in the ordinary way and nothing in either report says anything about unusual stature.
The University of Nevada later measured what survives. About six feet. Tall for that population. Six feet.
Reading the rest of the newspaper
The measurements everybody cites come from a Nevada paper in 1931 — 8 feet 6 inches in one article, nearly 10 feet in another four months later.
We went to the microfilm and read the whole issues rather than the clipping.
The same paper, those same months, carried a serialised adventure story on the facing page, three separate items about a lost mine that has never been found, and a standing column of "local marvels" that a modern reader would file under gossip. The giant items sit in that column. They are not on the news pages. They were never presented as news, and no reporter is named on any of them.
That is not a smoking gun. It is a context, and the context has been stripped off every time the clipping has been reproduced for ninety-five years.
The growth
Laid end to end, the printed sources give a clean pattern.
Nothing in 1911. About six feet in the excavation record. Eight and a half in 1931. Ten a few months later. Ten to twelve in the paperbacks of the 1970s, each citing the newspapers. Up to fifteen on the websites of the 2000s, citing the paperbacks.
The skeletons grow by roughly four inches per retelling and they only ever grow in one direction, which is what you would expect from copying and is not what you would expect from measuring.
What the Paiute historian asked us to print
Dr. Wilma Tsosie-Aldrich was clear that she did not want to be quoted as debunking her own people's tradition, and that this is what happens to her every time.
The Si-Te-Cah story is a real and old oral tradition. It is about a conflict, a people, and a cave. It is not, and was never, a claim about how many feet tall anybody was — that framing was imposed on it by outsiders who needed it to be a measurement so they could argue about the measurement.
"You are asking me whether my grandmother's history is true," she said. "You are asking it in a unit of length. That is your question, not hers."
The bit about us
Our standards editor's note in the box below is the one this newspaper should sit with.
We are a newspaper, writing a story about how newspapers are unreliable, in which the villain is a small paper in 1931 with a marvels column and no bylines.
A 1931 edition of They Buried would have printed it too. We know this because our own archive from that decade exists, and our correspondent has read it, and it is worse.
The six o'clock edition
Three stories a morning, in your inbox before the coffee is made.
Sources & Method
We did the thing nobody does with a newspaper clipping: we read the rest of the newspaper. Then we traced every printed retelling we could find, in order, and wrote down the height each one gives.
Who we spoke to
- Dr. Wilma Tsosie-Aldrich, Paiute historian. Interviewed by telephone twice June 2026 Asked that the oral tradition not be treated as a failed claim about height. Her framing is printed.
- Published excavation reports, 1912 and 1924, Public. Read in full 2026 Both list the human remains found. Neither describes anything unusual in stature.
- Nevada newspaper archive, Public microfilm. Read on site over two days May 2026 We read the whole issues, not the clipping. That is the story.
- University collections staff, Named in our notes. In person; showed us the catalogued remains May 2026
Documents
- PX-2011 — Chain of printed sources for the Lovelock 'giants', 1911–2024 accepted
What we could not confirm
- What the 1911 miners actually saw. No archaeologist was present, nothing was measured, and both men are long dead.
- Whether any material left the site before 1912. Guano mining is not careful work and the floor was disturbed for a year before anybody trained arrived.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
-
The Hollow PostTHE SKELETONS THE SMITHSONIAN BURIED
Reported the institutional cover-up as established and did not contact the institution.
Had that we did not
Nothing.
Left out
The 1912 and 1924 excavation reports, both published, both in print, both listing what was found.
-
ApertureThe Cannibal Giants Of The Paiute
Took the oral tradition seriously as literature and history rather than as a claim about anatomy, which is a better piece than ours.
Had that we did not
Three Paiute historians. We reached one.
-
They Buriedthis newspaperThe Giants Are In The Newspaper. They Are Not In The Cave.
Traced every printed retelling and measured the growth.
Had that we did not
The chain of sources, laid out end to end.
Left out
We are a newspaper writing about newspapers being unreliable, and the piece does not say clearly enough that our own 1931 equivalent would have printed it too. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
How was this story?
We publish the result, whatever it is. Reader verdicts appear on the front page and in our newsroom metrics.
Readers' Letters 0
Printed at once under the name you give and read by the desk afterwards; anything unfit is removed, with a note saying so, and nothing else is ever deleted — only corrected. Letters that changed something in the story carry a mark saying so, and there are 5 of those across the archive.