Photo of Last Neanderthal Giant Taken in 1901? Find Out the Facts

Many of us like to listen to stories related to giants and see their heroics. There are a lot of Falk stories describing giants and their superhuman abilities. When we were kids, we tended to believe those. However, even in this era of artificial intelligence, there are images shared virally by social media users mentioning those are the actual images of giants. This is our investigation related to such an image of a giant Neanderthal.

Social Media Post

A photo of a giant human-like being spread on social media with the below note:

“This picture was taken in 1901… the last human Neanderthal giant alive then.”

Facebook | Archived

There were a lot of such posts based on this image on Facebook.

We decided to do a fact-check on this.

Fact Check

First, let's get aware of who the Neanderthals are.

Natural History Museum | Archived

According to Natural History Museum- UK's website data, the scientific name of Neanderthal beings is Homo Neanderthalenis. And they lived from about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago. However, there was no evidence about Neanderthals who lived in the early 20th century, as claimed in the viral post.

Their appearance is also different from modern human beings, Homo sapiens. They had large noses, strong double-arched brow ridges, and relatively short and stocky bodies. So, it's clear their impression is different from Homo sapiens.

When considering the height and body weight of Neanderthals, they are a bit shorter and lighter than Homo sapiens. While in many countries, the height of modern human beings is more than 1.7 meters, the average size of Neanderthals fluctuated between 1.5-1.75 meters.

How Does Neanderthals’ Evolutionary Differ From Homo Sapiens?

Together with an Asian people known as Denisovans, the closest human relatives of Sapiens(us) are Neanderthals. According to scientific evidence, these two species Sapiens and Neanderthals, share common ancestors.

Biological evidence (DNA) and archaeological evidence implicate that Neanderthal and Sapiens separated at least 500,000 years ago. Some DNA evidence suggests it happened about 650,000 years ago. More details about it can be read here. Archived

Evidence shows that some of our human Sapiens genomes have around 2% of Neanderthal genes. Details about it can be read here. Archived

And some experts suggest that Homo sapiens might have had sexual intercourse with Neanderthals also. Details about it can be read here. Archived.

Hence it's clear that biologically, there isn't any possibility of the prevalence of a giant Neanderthal at the beginning of the 20^th century.

Let's consider the technical aspect.

We did a reverse image search to check the origins of the viral image.

Then, we found that the beginning of this image happened from the official Reddit sub-group of an Intelligent artificial image-creating system named” MidJourney.” The Reddit image can be referred to from here. Archived.

And some international experts in the AI field stated to Reuters that this image is most likely AI-generated. Some of the giveaways were that many faces of the image are blurry with different contrast levels. Also, there are some discrepancies in highlights and shadows. The related Reuters fact check can be read here. Archived.

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Conclusion

According to our investigation, we found out that the viral image of the Neanderthal giant is most likely AI generated one, and it was first published in an AI-generated image system, “Midjourney”'s official subreddit account. Besides, according to archaeological and biological evidence, the Neanderthal giant could not live at the beginning of the 20^th century.