Unearthing The Bones of Greece’s Ancient ‘Giants’ | BBC Timestamp
This is the most unlikely site.
How did you ever come to discover there were things to excavate here?
It was an accidental finding of this site
when a worker found a very interesting specimen of an Iparion.
That is an ancient horse, isn't it?
It is an ancient three-toed horse.
Evangelia Tsoukala is a palaeontologist.
With her team, she's been excavating this hillside near Mendi
and has made some remarkable discoveries.
I can show here a very extraordinary bone.
It's the biggest thing I've ever seen.
It is a femur of a mastodon.
Oh, my goodness. What is it?
It is an ancestor of the mammoth.
Ah, right. I mean, if I look at it knowing nothing,
I might think this was the bone of some enormously heavyweight human.
The imagination of the layman is incredible
and I have an example from my excavation in Grevena
with the huge mastodons there
and the people there thought that they'd become from an elephant from a circus.
From a circus, and they'd escaped.
But you persuaded them.
After 20 years, yes.
This hillside has already produced many other giant prehistoric bones.
They must have been a race of gigantic people.
What I'm thinking is that the Greeks, the Ubeans,
who had been out in Naples
and had seen the shattered remains of the battlefield
where the gods had zapped the giants with thunderbolts,
I can now understand why they come up here and they think,
this is the camp, this is where the giants bred, where they lived.
Once you see it, you can see what the Ubeans concluded.
Those things are far bigger than me.
They're proof. The poets knew.
These are giants.
And this is why the whole story is partly located here
and partly located on the smouldering volcanoes in Italy.