Back in 1820, in Tennessee, U.S.A., the newspapers reported that some farmers had discovered tombs containing the remains of pygmies! Of course we know there were no pygmies in Tennessee, but the reports about the tiny people refused to go away, and they persisted for decades, well into the late 1800s. Even nowadays they reappear again and again, like when the Flores Island "Hobbit" was discovered in 2004, the Tennesee pygmy resurfaced as an American relative. Let's look into the fake news of these pygmies.
The whole story is very well summarized by Kevin Smith in his article "Tennessee’s Ancient Pygmy Graveyards: The “Wonder of the Western Country" (Tennesee Archaeology, Vol. 7, No. 1, Fall 2013, p.42)↺.
The first report was published in the Nashville Whig on July 5th, 1820, reporting that Mr. Turner Lane, found between 200 and 300 small graves on his farm five miles east of Sparta, Tennessee (TN) - see spot on Google maps, the graves contained small skeletons: "skull bones, about three inches in diameter, nearly sound; the other bones being proportionally small."
John Haywoodin in his "Natural History of Tennesee..." published in 1823 (see p. 200, "Of their Pygmies") gives the account of Lane's findings adding some comments and details: "it seems to be intimated, that there hath been a race of people here in ancient times, whose height was from two feet, ten inches to three feet".
Towards the end of the book, on p. 360, Haywood reports another find:
"In 1818, Mr. Long, the proprietor of a farm on the south side of the Merimac river, fifteen miles from St. Louis, in the state of Missouri, discovered... a number of graves, the size of which appeared uncommonly small. He made a minute examination, which convinced him they were the remains of human beings much smaller than those of the present day."
However, by the 1830s, people were more critical. Robert Montgomery Bird in 1838 (Peter Pilgrim, p. 24) wrote with a more rational tone:
"The belief in the former existence of races of pygmies and giants in the Mississippi Valley is extremely prevalent in many Western communities though the visits of scientific men to the cemeteries of the former have been productive of results that have shaken the faith of many in regard to the pygmies. The celebrated graveyard on the Merameg (sic) river in Missouri was examined by some of the scientific gentlemen attached to Long's Expedition who found bones of men and infants of the ordinary Indian races in great abundance but no others. Bones from the Lilliputian graves in White County Tennessee have also been proved to belong to mortals of ordinary stature."
In a similar vein, in 1852, Dr. Samuel Morton in his Physical Type of the American Indians,in "Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the... Indian Tribes of the United States", p. 318), reports that he analyzed remains from the "pygmy Cemetery" in White County, Tennessee, and is categorical in declaring they are not pygmys at all:
"...these facts are to me an additional and convincing proof of what I have never doubted viz that the asserted Pygmies of the western country were mere children who for reasons not precisely known but which appear also to influence some communities of even our own race were buried apart from the adult people of their tribe."
In 1869, H.C. Williams wrote about them: "I think in the year 1825 in the Review a printed at Sparta the seat of justice of White County... Fiske and some other gentleman made an examination of an ancient cemetery near that town and finding no of adults came to the conclusion that the country had been by a race of pigmies. The graves were numerous covering more than an acre were generally three feet long and eighteen inches deep with a fin of slaty rocks. The bones were so much decomposed that they fell to pieces after a few moments exposure to the atmosphere."
The Smithsonian intervenes
Nevertheless, the belief in these pygmies continued (see Edward J. Wood, 1868, Giants and Dwarfs, p. 247, or Harper's Magazine, 1869, p. 208) so the Smithsonian Institution sent someone to investigate the findings, the sites and clarify the situation.
An article published by the Smithsonian Institution on January 20, 1876, (The Academy. The Tennessee Pygmies) mentions that the institution sent a person to investigate the "recent revival of the tradition... recent diggings unearthed the remains which have given origin a new to the recent reports." The search in Sparta TN where it had been said that 300 skeletons of "Tiny Folk" had been found during the past ten years only yielded "very few skeletal remains, all collected not filling more than a small box. The fragments thus sent proved on examination to be in no way abnormal... and and were evidently the remains of children between three and four years old... With the human remains forwarded were teeth of the beaver, the costal segments of a turtle, some rough pottery and broken valves of unios. These suggest the ordinary Indian sepulture"
The article says that the idea about pygmies comes from the size of the graves rather than their contents. The graves were small, 2 feet long (61 cm) and 14 inches wide (36 cm) and 12 in. deep (31 cm). They were covered with slabs of sandstone. They lie below the surface of the ground and are discovered when a farmer plows the land. Then they are removed, to clear the fields.
Another piece published in the American Naturalist, June 1876 conveys similar information:
"The following evidence that no pygmy race left their remains in this part of our country must be conclusive... Mr WM Clark employed during the last year by the Smithsonian Institution to investigate the same subject ... distinctly proves that the little slab graves are either those of children or are ossuaries... the most convincing proof brought forward from the examination of hundreds of graves that the small cists are either children's graves or ossuaries..."
A publication from 1883 (Tennesee Pygmies, The Comic Liar, 1883) mocked the idea of pygmies and compared them to the finding of giant skeletons in Kentucky:
"... their discovery of a grave yard contain ing the skeletons of seventy five thousand pygmies of the average height of three feet each. What are the three nine foot giants of Kentucky in comparison with so great a cloud of pygmies. If we may judge from the price usually paid by circus managers for living giants and dwarfs a three foot dwarf is decidedly more valuable than a nine foot giant and if the same standard governs the price of fossils the seventy five thousand Tennessee pigmies are worth fully twenty five thousand times as much as the three Kentucky giants."
In 1910, Bennett H. Young published in his work The Prehistoric Men of Kentucky: A History of what is Known of Their Lives and Habits, and on p. 24, he mentions pygmies as follows "Small stone cists measuring not more than two feet in length by fifteen inches and even less in breadth, are frequently unearthed. In these the bones of the dead, after having been disarticulated, were placed in a mass. The small size of these graves in former days gave rise to the belief that the valleys of the Cumberland and Green rivers were once the home of a race of pygmies." This shows that the myth about small folks spread northwards from Tennessee into Kentucky!
The myth lives on
But old myths, like conspiracy theories seem to fascinate us, and even if proven false, they take a long time to die. Some, like this one, manage to revive based on pseudoscientific factoids.
In 1992, an online magazine (Science Frontiers Online) published a note about American Pygmies which dismisses the children bones theory and promotes genuind pygmies that somehow reached America from Asia, small folk related to the Aeta negrito people of the Philippines. It mentions a paper by Pilapil, Virgilio R. MD., (The Aetas In America, B.C.. Journal of Filipino American Historical Society, University of Hawai'i Press, Vol. 2, 1992 pp. 30-35. 🔒) about this theory, its abstract states that:
"... Among the archeological finds were also hundreds of fragmented human bones from 600 burials which were dug from sites in east Tennessee... These pygmies with small, round heads (brachycephalic) and prominent, projecting (prognathous) jaws are similar to the pygmies of the Philippines and Malaysia, who probably originated in southern Mongolia. The pygmy bones and those of the other races present in the burial were in a similar state of preservation indicating that the pygmies were contemporary with the other races. Carbon-14 dating with carbon-13 correction done on the bone collagen yielded an age of 2,160 +- 135 years, putting these pygmies at about the third century B.C..."
Another website - Archaeology General Index hosted at the University of California, Riverside, in one of its many webpage articles European Bronze Age Visitors in America ⁄ Summary of Discoveries of Dr. Barry & René Fell, says the following:
"... it is clear that the pygmies of Tennessee were of Oriental--that is to say, East Asian--origin; and since pygmies are not maritime people, they can have reached the Americas only by the land route.
They must once have been more widely dispersed than our present finds imply. However, since they reached as far east as east Tennessee, and their bones have been found in association with Europoids and inscribed artifacts of Europoid type, such as loom weights and pottery stamps, lettered in ancient Irish (noted as Celtic) and Basque [see Figs. 183, 185, 186, 187 & 189], Fell concluded that there were in fact meetings of the two races, and that therefore the European visitors could well have taken back to Europe some account of these mysterious undersized people. An inscription that Professors Heizer and Martin Baumhoff had recorded from California (Fig. 63), when deciphered as Ancient Irish ogam, seemed also to suggest that early explorers had encountered some pygmy race that they considered dangerous."
This Californian inscription "fig. 63" can be seen in this image which is captioned as follows "A traveler’s warning written in Old Irish ogam, from Inyo County, CA, Site INY-430 of Heltzer & Bassenhoff (1942). The warning states: 'The men [here] are savages, small and ill nourished, but hostile.' (Fell 1982)."
They cite: Fell, Barry. 1982. Bronze Age America. Little, Brown and Co., Boston, Toronto. 304 p.
This blends Celts, Asians, "Europids" and the Tennessee pygmies into a surreal tale, which seems to be based on flimsy facts.
Similar nonsense is posted on a 2024 webpage titled Did Miniature “Moon-Eyed” People Really Inhabit The Appalachian Mountains - Somehow, the Welsh are mixed up in this baffling myth, which suggests that the short white pygmies called "Moon-Eyed" people by the Cherokee people of the Appalachians, were Welsh miners, offspring of the men who accompanied Madoc ab Owain Gwynedd, a Welsh prince c.1170 AD.
In The Lost History of the Little People (2013), (see Chap. 7 - The Wee People among other entries on these pygmies), Susan Martinez mentions the Tennessee pygmies with a distinct culture (they used copper and pearls) that set them apart from the Amerincians, they were the mound builders, an ancient race with large eyes, sensitive to light, that built mounds and pyramids across the planet, and who, in the Appalachians were known to the native Cherokee as "little people". Farfetched? Improbable? Very likely.
Closing Comments
I must point out that the Cherokee people believed in mythical tiny people which they called yunwi tsunsdi. They were short, and reached the height of a man's knee, they had long hair, were kind and helpful, and lived in caves on the slopes of the hills, some, known as yunwi amaiyinehi, were aquatic. They resemble the beliefs of the ngen spirits of the Mapuche, stewards of the waters, and their Trauco dwarves. Perhaps humans imagine the same mythical beings time and time again, around the world, repeating the same motif as a recurring theme.
Another option is that ancient human beings encountered dwarwfish hominins like those whose remains have been found in Flores Island, or in Palau, and retained this memory in their myths and legends about dwarves, elfs, trolls, etc.
There have been proper scientific papers written about the native burials in Tennessee, like the one mentioned at the beginning of this post, and for instance: Dowd, John T. (2008). The Cumberland Stone-Box Burials of Middle Tennessee. Tennessee Archaeology 3(2):163-180. From which the following images of box-like tombs were taken, notice the sandstone sides (top is similar, but were been removed to show the interior of the graves. They were dated to around 1350 AD.
Patagonian Monsters - Cryptozoology, Myths & legends in Patagonia Copyright 2009-2025 by Austin Whittall ©
No comments:
Post a Comment