Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowDid a race of red-haired, not-quite-human, cannibalistic giants really terrorize the Paiute people in ancient America? For a long time, according to the story, this tale was thought to be little more than a piece of imaginative folklore -- until, that is, the fall of 1911, when guano miners stumbled upon a thousands of artifacts hidden in a mysterious cave just outside of Lovelock, Nevada.
Tonight's classic is a personal favorite. We set out to we set out to do a folklore episode about a legendary race of giants in North America, and we don't always get to say this, but we figured this one out. I'm convinced we actually found the answer.
Matt poop Oh, Yes, indeed, it's venturea in Nature calls.
Everything we know.
About this came from that film directly. That's not true, Ben, You've always been such a fan of giants, just in your writing. It's such a cool thing, especially the idea of like a secret race of them.
You know, it's really weird because you know, folklore is a historical snapshot, right, It's a way to learn about history, and a lot of times folklore comes to us through a long telephone game, and it's often communicated through symbolism or metaphor. But these were actually giants, Like, there is not a metaphor here in the surviving folklore. The people and communities that we're talking about. The Sete Caw were very blunt and very emphatically saying, yes, giants are real. They eat people, and we had to wipe them out, grind our bones to make their bread.
Here we go from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know.
Hello, and welcome back to the show. My name is Noel, and our compatriot Matt is on vacation. I think we could say he's on vacation. Is that where he is? Yeah, that's I just knew he wasn't here. Yeah, he and his family have I don't know how much he wants me to say about this, but they're on a nice holiday vacation. That's lovely. He deserves it. If anyone deserves a vacation, it's our boy, Matt. Agreed. Agreed. And in the meantime they call me Ben. We were joined with our super producer Paul Mission controlled decadt. Most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. Now. How familiar were you growing up with Native American mythology or oral tradition.
Just Native American tradition in general, or.
Specifically folklore, folklore, or the legends of gods and monsters.
You know, I think I probably grew up with more of a grasp of like Greek mythology than Native American mythology, for sure. I remember, you know, reading stories about like Hiawatha, for example, that was a real, real historical figure.
Right, the founder of the Iroquois Confederacy, or a co founder rather, it's right. It's interesting because often depending on where you are in the world or where you are in the US, you will not learn an extensive amount of info about Native American folkloric or spiritual or mythological traditions. But the truth of the matter is that thousands of years before the first Europeans ever reached the continents that would become known as North and South America, native civilizations rose and fell, creating rich traditions of architecture, agriculture, and of course cultural beliefs. While each of these spiritual or historical traditions was unique, their stories shared many of the same traits that other cultures shared. You know, the lands were filled with gods or monsters and spirits, both good and evil. Animals often represented some certain moral compass or you know, perspective on life, and there were legendary heroes. There were sacred days that were of course origin stories of the people creating the traditions and their enemies and more. And there were also stories of other tribes or communities or civilizations. Like one thing that's strange is it doesn't happen all the time. But in many ancient cultures, the word that the people used to describe themselves translates directly to just the people, or the real people or the true people. Yeah, and everyone else is somehow othered, yes, exactly othered. And in a lot of cases, these stories that concern other tribes or communities might be stories explaining the animosity between a neighboring tribe or how they got a weird name, like the fish eater people or something. Or there might be stories that feature a single member of a distant tribe a stranger coming to town. But in some other cases, more cases than they might think, there were stories of intelligent beings that interacted with us that were not gods, but we're not quite human. And today's episode is about one of these groups. The how best to say this, the allegedly legendary Sea te Ka. Oh I like that good alliteration, man, thanks no, thanks no, so see Teka see Teka. So the story of the Sea Teka. They have several other names comes from allegedly the oral history of the Northern Paiute people. They're a numic tribe that traditionally that happened to live in what we would now call western California, western Nevada, and southeast Oregon. Yeah, that's right.
They lived in lands centered on a lake or in wetlands.
Uh.
And they existed and roved in bands who would team up and have these communal hunts, and members would move freely between these bands of hunters, and they would share this super rich and fascinating.
Oral tradition m h. And in this tradition, according to the story, the Paiute told tales of a nearby ancient antagonistic tribe known as the se tech Ka, the Saiduca, or the Sae. And according to these legends, the sea Teka were a tribe of cannibalistic giants. It's weird because the name se Tekka doesn't mean anything. It doesn't signify anything about gigantism, nor does it signify anything about consuming human flesh. Instead, the phrase literally means tool eaters t ul e in the language of the Paiute, and tool is a fibrous water plant. We'll explain how this comes into play later. But what's the gist of this legend? How do they show up in this story?
Well, I'll tell you ben. The gist of this legend is as follows. After being terrorized by these terrifying, cannibalistic ten foot tall, redheaded giants, the Paiute had enough and they went to war. And this battle was incredibly long and incredibly bloody, but eventually, by pitching in and throwing their lot in together, the Piute prevailed. The Sea Tecon attempted to make a getaway very cleverly from the Payute by living on rafts that seems a little bit misinformed, just that couldn't swim, But this was also related to a legend that had they had crossed the ocean to the Americas on these rafts as well, before ending up in the desert area of western Nevada.
Eventually, a coalition of tribes, possibly with communities other than the Payout bands joining in, trapped the remaining Sea Techa in a nearby cave, and when these giants refused to come outside, the Paiute piled brush before the cave mouth and set it on fire. The entire population of Sea Techa ended up dying inside. You'll hear people say that some of them made a run for it and ran through the fire, only to be speared or shot with arrows or murdered by the people waiting outside. And this is pretty gruesome stuff, right, I mean, according to the story, the tribes didn't just seal off the cave and bury these folks alive. They also raised any traces of Setechkas settlements to the ground, and they wanted to erase them from history. Right except for this story, right, And ordinarily this story would just stay that a story, startling, fascinating, ultimately unprovable. I mean, ten foot cannibals, right, Come on, I like it. I like it as a story for sure. Yeah. Yeah, But wouldn't they have left some traces? Where's the proof? Here's the thing? What if someone else found the cave? Will answer that question? After a word from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy.
In nineteen eleven, a few people did think they discovered the actual resting place of the see Teka in western Nevada, on the outskirts of the Humboldt Sink is this small cave. It's hot and it's dry, and it's isolated. But it wasn't always that way right.
This was once part of an enormous lake called Lake Lahontan. It's applies to Senerra Lake that was round maybe thirteen thousand years ago, and at the time it was one of the largest lakes on this continent. But it eventually dried up and it left a number of smaller lakes. Among these was Humboldt Lake, and this cave was on the shore or is on the shore of this lake. Today, as you're listening to this episode, you can reach the cave yourself. You just drive down a dirt road from the small town of nearby Lovelock, Nevada. This cave takes its name from the town, and most people today also call it Lovelock Cave. It has a couple of other names, but Lovelock is its go to moniker. In nineteen eleven, there was a pair of guano miners from the town of Lovelock who were hunting guano deposits, which was quite a profitable thing to sell at the time. They discovered that the cave, as a result of being sealed off to a great extent, had accumulated a huge population of bats, which leads to over time vast deposits of guano. So they spent a year digging out this guano and shipping it to a buyer in San Francisco. And at first they were thinking, wow, we struck it rich. There's this huge pile of guano. But as they started to dig the stuff out, they found more and more ancient artifacts that were mixed in the batpoop. And eventually, most of the time when they were doing when they were mining this stuff, they would just find like a shard of pottery or a sandal or something, just throw it outside the cave in a little pile of rubbish. But they got to the point where there were they were finding more artifacts than they were finding guano, and it became less profitable. So in nineteen twelve they said, you know what are we doing. This is we've gone like a meter or so down into the ground and there's more stuff from this unknown ancient civilization. Then there is bat poop. And let's be honest, dude, we're here for the poop. So let's get some professional help. And they contacted the University of California. The university sent an anthropologist named Llewellyn L. Loud. I thought you'd like that name. I love the name Lluellen. Did you know that about me? I know a lot and Loud and.
Just paired that's first of all ticks, all my alliteration boxes. You've got Llewellen, l Loud, Loud is an amazing last name. Yeah, Llewellen is a man's name, right.
Wasn't that the name of the dude in the country Davis?
That's Lewin Davis. I think, as was leu Allen, the main dude in No Country for old Man. I think his name was Lewellen injury.
I think you might be right. Yeah, it's been a while since I saw that, but that's a great, great film. So they said this guy, this anthropologist, doctor Loud, also a great nickname. To check it out. And what does he ended up finding.
We found a lot of things, about ten thousand individual artifacts from that rubbish sheep in different parts of the caves. It was mostly along the walls where miners had kind of ignored and not cut into. And Loud's workload was such that it took him like seventeen years before he was finally able to publish an account of all of these findings.
Yeah, and you know, it may sound like it took him forever. But this was a herculean task. What we now know is that the earliest evidence of human habitation in this cave goes back about four thousand years, and that's according to the radiocarbon dating of the oldest artifacts. Today's anthropologist call these people whomever they may have been, the Lovelock Culture, and the time in which they lived was referred to as the Lovelock Period. It lasted three thousand years, during which they left us all these artifacts that you mentioned, nol. We're talking about baskets crafted with a pretty impressive degree of sophistication, these ancient duck decoys made from fibers of that same plant, tool and sagebrush, sandals and so on. They think the cave was experiencing its heydays somewhere between fifteen hundred BCE until four forty, when a collapse cut off the easiest access to most of the cave. And by the time that collapse had occurred, this group we call the Lovelock Culture had been supplanted by the Paiute, and the Piute's name for these predecessors was Saidaku, literally translated to tool matt house dwellers. I mean they lived in those they lived in huts made of that stuff. I have a good literal descriptive translation like that. A lot of the names that they have for different bands or communities are descriptions of what they eat, like the fish eaters. There's the brine fly ears. Really, I don't know what that is. They sound like they were living the roughest.
Like yeah, it does sound like a brine flies.
Yeah. So the PIU, once they take over this cave, they continue using it until eighteen twenty nine when Europeans and European descended people begin populating the region and they are all killed off or driven away the PIUT that is in eighteen thirty three, when an expedition led by a guy named Joseph Walker explores the area.
So there is a real cave and the civilization or a civilization existed in the area before the PIU. But how does the rest of the story a checkout? Like the whole you know, redheaded cannibalistic giants, sitch.
That's the thing. Yeah, there are a few issues. The first and the biggest issue is that, according to more skeptical researchers like Brian Dunning over at Skeptoid, there is no actual piut story about this group. There are he notes stories about lone giants that pop up, but there's nothing actually about some group of people called the Sea Techca. However, there is one account from eighteen eighty three by an author named Sarah Winnemuka Hopkins. She's the daughter of a Piot chief named Winnemuka, and in her book Life among the Piot's Wrongs and Claims, she tells the story. We have an extensive excerpt of this, so I'll just paraphrase it here. She tells a story of a among the traditions of our people is one of a small tribe of barbarians who used to live along the Humboldt River. This is many hundred years ago. She says, they used to waylay my people and kill them and eat them, and they would even eat their own dead. They would come and dig up our dead after they were buried, carry them off and eat them. And now and then they would come and make war on my people. They would fight, and as fast as they killed one another on either side, the women from their tribe would carry off the dead to consume them. So at last the Piot make war on them. There were about twenty six hundred of these Sea Teca and the war lasted three years. And then Hopkins goes on to say, we did kill them in great numbers. We saw that they fled to the bush. We set the bush on fire. Then they tried to make boats to live on the lake or rafts to live on the lake. And her people would ring around the lake and would kill anyone who came on land. And then finally they all managed to get to land on the east side of the lake. They went to a cave and then they got cornered and the payout, according to Hopkins, again came to them and said, look, will you be cool? Will you not eat people like coyotes or beast or scavengers? Please righte that'd be super swell. And they said no, we're not going to give it up. This is what we do.
And then once you get a taste for human meat, ben, we all know that you can't go back.
Yeah. Always stunning Philadelphia talks about it. That's what the Weddigo legends about. But apparently they started to gather wood to fill up the mouth of the cave, and then they came back to the Seteka and gave them one more chance they said, will you give up and be like men and not eat people like beast? Say it quickly, and we will put out this fire. But they had either refused to talk to them, or they had gone too deep in the cavern to hear people talking at the entrance. So no answer came, and the fire burned. And in ten days some people went back to see if the fire had gone out. They said they must all be dead. There was a horrible smell. This tribe was called people eaters. And after that.
Were they what's the thing, the one eyed, three toad flying purple people eaters.
Yeah, one eyed, one horn, one horn. That's that's it. Yeah, they called them people eaters. And they say, according to Hopkins, that the tribe they exterminated had reddish hair. And she said that she has some of this hair. It's been passed down from father to son. But she has it in a dress, a dress that is ringed with red hair, that was a morning dress. But no, the trail goes dead there. We don't know. There's no picture of the dress. We don't know if anyone's seen it. And that's not the only issue with the story. No, it's definitely not.
We will get to some more of those holes after one more quick sponsor break.
So first.
As often happens with stories like this, there are no actual giant humanoid bones available for viewing today, which I find.
To be a shame.
According to one of the miners, the best specimens were taken by a local fraternal order Amazons.
Yeah, that's right, who.
Boiled them clean to use in and misonic initiation rituals.
Right right. And according to the reports of what doctor Loud actually found, there were sixty mummies that were onearthed, but they were of average height, some of the world's oldest duck decoys. One of the big things they found was a sandal that was over fifteen inches long, so someone with really really big feet, right. They found doughnut shaped stone with three hundred and sixty five notches carved along the outside fifty two carved inside. Some people think that's a calendar. They also found a human femur dating back to fourteen fifty BC, human muscle dating to fourteen twenty BC, and basketry dating back to twelve eighteen. They found a bunch of stuff, and during the initial excavations there were these reports of mummified remains being found of two red haired giants. One they said was a female skeleton six and a half feet tall, and the other was a male over eight feet tall. However, not only is as you said, not only is there no evidence we can find about this today physical evidence at least, but no one mentions giants in those original tales or the original discoveries, or even Hopkins recollection, because again she tells that story that sounds pretty familiar to us, but she calls them barbarians and cannibals, not giants. The first mention of giants doesn't occur until a nineteen thirty one newspaper article, not some ancient legend, and then there are some other authors. As you say, it's possible that because of the because of the amount of large megafauna fossils that could be around that area, they could have just found the bone of a large or ancient animal and thought this is the leg of a giant person.
I mean, a femur bone doesn't look that different between like say, some sort of giant cat and a human.
Right exactly exactly. But then we get to the question of the hair, because the red hair thing seems to be pretty consistent. Is it a red hairing. It's you know what it is, It exactly is, and that's a great way to put it. So Naturally, dark hair over time has a tendency to fade to red in certain conditions, and that's part of the reason why you will see so many stories of red haired mummies being found in ancient burial grounds around the world. It's because the amount of time that they are interred can affect the rate of decay or appearance of the color of their hair. So they very well may be red haired now, but most of the red haired mummies you hear about originally had very dark hair.
So is it about like getting bleached and discolored by exposure to the sun or are there other factors at play?
Yeah, it appears to be a chemical reaction as the hair d natures. This means that exposure to certain temperatures or certain chemicals present in soil can change the chemical composition of the hair and change the way at which it would decay. I see. So it removes some of that pigment or it alters it. So it's a fascinating thing. But the key element here is that these people don't art off with red hair, which is relatively rare throughout our species, right. I guess you and I both have a little bit of red hair. Matt probably has the most of us.
I only have a little bit. It's in my beard and in the parts that used to be red are now turning gray. So I guess they're becoming denatured themselves a different way. I don't know, in a different way, right, So there you have it. Today, many of those original artifacts found at the Lovelock Cave can be viewed at a small natural history museum located in winnim Muca, Nevada. And then some of the other objects are at the Smithsonian, like there's ancient duck decoys and the basketry and bones, or in the Nevada State Museum. One thing you will not find in any museum, at least that we have been able to as so far as we've been able to ascertain, are any trace of giant humans or a race of giant humans, a tribe, a species, a community or band of giant humans.
But we do have one more thing. We had to save it for last. You see, the myth of the se Tekka is not completely busted. Miners and archaeologists did find something else in Lovelock Cave, human bones that have been split to allow for the extraction of marrow, Human bones that have been processed the same way the bones of an animal would have been processed. They may not have been giants who ever lived here in this Lovelock culture, but these people did. It turns out practice cannibalism at the very least in times of famine, and who knows nol Perhaps it was a situation where at first they ate human flesh because they had to, and then later they developed a taste for it. Either way, at least according to one source, Sarah Hopkins, the payute objected and drove them to extinction.
It's definitely a fascinating legend. I love the idea of giants, as I know you do.
Ben.
It's something that I think you're fond of in fiction, and this idea of some sort of proto man that roamed the earth that was some kind of species of giant. I'm also a big fan of Andre the Giant.
Yeah, and it's true that giganticism does occur in the human species throughout the world as a result of genetic mutation. It's also true that some parts of the in some regions of the world people on average will tend to be much taller. I think the Netherlands are somewhere in northern Europe that's the place where people on average are the tallest, and the Philippines, I believe, is where people on average are the shortest. But again those averages can be deceiving. There are also some fascinating reports from early Spanish explorers in South America who swear up and down that they've met first or second hand actual giants, like people so large that an average person of let's say five ten to six feet tall would have only come up to their waists.
What's the cutoff here though, because Andre the giant was I want to say seven something. And we had some stats talking about the couple that was found supposedly in this story where the female was only six and a half feet tall and the male was like eight something, which isn't super giant. That's a little taller than Andre, but it's not, you know, so tall that an average height man would be like knee high to a bed bugs by exactly.
And also, if they were giants, how did this war go on for three years? And how were the seed Teka always on the run. It sounds like maybe they were, if there is truth to Again, the only primary source we have for this is Era Winnimuka Hopkins. If they existed, they were probably just practicing objectionable cannibalism. So for now, as today's episode ends, we can say with confidence only that the tallest record the tallest person in recorded history is Robert Wadlow, at eight feet eleven inches tall, and he was not a fierce warrior. He suffered from a medical condition that made it incredibly painful for him to walk around, at least for now. Because you know, there are people out there who believe that various museums and secret institutions have been suppressing knowledge of giants since time immemorial. And this is not the first time we've investigated historical tales of lost civilizations or giants. Perhaps we will find some proof in another episode. I would love that, Ben, I would love that too, NOL. In the meantime, thank you so much for tuning in. As always, we hope you enjoyed this exploration of this seat tech. Let us know what other what other legends you've heard in your neck of the global woods that later came to have some sort of Seed of Truth. We are all Ears.
You can find us on Twitter and Facebook where we are Conspiracy Stuff on Instagram or Conspiracy Stuff Show. You can join our pretty cool Facebook group discussion group called Here's where it Gets Crazy. All you have to do is name one of our names. We set the bar pretty surely you can do that. If you are familiar with the show. We say it at the top of every episode.
I'll tell you. I don't know if we mentioned this on air, but sometimes I think our mods might get a little irritated with me because sometimes if the answer is funny enough, I'll just let someone in.
Well, I mean, I applaud any amount of creativity when it comes to this, and if there is something that you put down that makes us unequivocally know that you're into the show, then we're gonna We're gonna let you in.
That's true. It's not about it's about you.
There we go, and that's the end of this classic episode. If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode, you can get into contact with us in a number of different ways. One of the best is to give us a call. Our number is one eight three three st d WYTK. If you don't want to do that, you can send us a good old fashioned email.
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