NOC Yourself Out

is perhaps most crucial between two divers. After all, if you want to know if you're about to swim into a dangerous cave system, or if there's something wrong with your oxygen tank that you can't see, you need a friend. In May of nineteen eighty four, a pair of Navy divers happened to be working on underwater repairs to the

whale enclosures in San Diego Bay. For those times when they needed to communicate with the surface, they used a specially designed underwater comms device known as a wet phone. But one day the divers heard someone yelling at them. He kept shouting out out. The voice was unmistakable. There was no way this was a trick of the ear. Someone was frantically telling the men to get out of

the water. But one of the divers, a Navy veteran named Miles Braggett, shot to the surface and asked his supervisor, who told me to get out. The supervisor, though, was perplexed he hadn't said anything over the wet phone. But Braggett wasn't the only one. Sam Ridgeway, a veterinarian and the co founder of the National Marine Mammal Foundation, had an office near the San Diego Bay. He'd also heard the talking in the area, about one hundred and fifty

feet away on an adjacent pier. Ridgeway soon got word of the phantom voice hunting bracket and started listening more closely at the sounds of the bay. As it turned out, the warnings to get out of the water hadn't come from the wet phone after all, nor had the supervisor shouted them from the surface. In fact, the voice didn't belong to a person. It belonged to a whale. One specific whale, a beluga named No S Nose had been legally captured in nineteen seventy seven by Inuit hunters when

he was very young. His name no Si spelled nc was an allusion to a Canadian fly called noseums or biting midges. They were plentiful in Manitoba, where he was captured. Ridgeway wanted to learn more about Nose's capabilities, so he and his team taught him to speak on command while simultaneously recording his sounds. What they learned was that the whale also had been listening to them. He'd been studying the voices coming from the people on the shore and

then learned how to recreate them himself. He'd heard the diving supervisors saying out so many times he figured out how to say it too. Ridgeway found that Nose's whale calls were several octaves higher than his more human like sounds. In other words, this beluga didn't just learn to say human words, he also changed his voice to sound more like a human being. Much of Ridgeway's research was done

using a special sensor implanted in Nose's nasal cavity. The instrument was able to tell him how the whale was able to sound like a person. To generate the normal chirps and clicks that they're known for, whales pass air over a set of vibrating flaps in their heads called phonic lips. But to sound like a person, nose increased the air pressure in his nasal cavity while changing the shape of those phonic lips, allowing him to achieve a

lower pitched tone. This action didn't just alter his voice either, It caused his head to swell to.

Once he reached a certain age, he simply stopped talking that way. So pay close attention the next time you're in the ocean. If someone starts shouting at you to get out of the water. It might not be because a shark is nearby. It could just be a whale with something to say. Humanity has evolved over millions of years to become what we are today. Our bone structure is different from what it once was, our speech patterns have changed, and even the shape of our teeth is

not what they used to be. Remnants of previous generations have been discovered all over the world, including skulls and bone fragments from Ostrellopithecus and paranthropists. But in eighteen ninety a French anthropologist stumbled across a major discovery, one that forced humanity to ask itself an important question, did we used to be taller? His name was George Vauche de

la Pouge. He was a former magistrate and prosecutor who eventually became a professor of anthropology in eighteen eighty six, although he would be remembered by history as the man whose work in eugenics eventually inspired the Holocaust in the nineteen forties. In eighteen ninety, de la Pouge traveled to the small commune of Castelnaut le Lais in the south of France. Its population numbered fewer than a thousand people. But for such a tiny town, it held a massive secret,

one that De la Pouge was going to uncover. It was wintertime and he was excavating a Bronze Age cemetery when he came across a unique find. Right there in the ground was a set of bone fragments. Now, of course, this being a setmetery, that wasn't surprising. But these pieces were different. For one, they were much older than the bones surrounding them. The fragments dated back to the Neolithic period, sometime between ten thousand and four thousand, five hundred BC.

He had found them at the bottom of a tumulus or an ancient burial mound. But the bones weren't just old. They were also large, very large, much larger than the bones of any other individual buried nearby. So De la Pouge wrote about them for a nineteenth century science journal called Le Nature. In his article, he described the three pieces that he'd found. The first segment had come from a femur and measured five and a half inches in length.

The second fragment was broken off of a tibia. It was nearly eleven inches long, and the third piece had come from a humerus Twice the size of a normal one. In fact, scientists compared these remains to the bones of regular sized humans and found that all three of them were twice as big. According to De la Pouge, the person they belonged to would have been eleven and a half feet tall when they died. This unknown subject eventually came to be known as the giants of castell Know.

The fragments were eventually taken to the University of Montpierre, about three miles away from where they were found. They were studied by several professors and scholars, but one in particular made an interesting proclamation. His name was Paul Louis Andre Quyney, and he taught pathological anatomy at Montpierre School of Medicine. Doctor Keeney examined the bones De la Pouge had found and noted that they came from what he

described as a very tall race. Perhaps they were not an anomaly among a civilization of normal sized human beings. Maybe there were more giants yet to be found. Well,

that's exactly what happened. A few years later, in a Montpierre cemetery, another ancient burial ground was found by workers who had been excavating a waterworks reservoir, they discovered a number of human skulls that were described in the papers as being twenty eight, thirty one and thirty two inches in circumference, and buried beside them were more oversized bones,

which were soon sent to Paris to be studied. The one expert claimed that they had come from a race of giant men who were somewhere between ten and fifteen feet tall. There could still be more giant bones waiting to be unearthed in France or elsewhere in the world. Around the same time as the Giants of Castile Know was found, it was widely believed that a race of giants had also lived in North America thousands even millions of years ago. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour

of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldolore dot com and Until next time, stay curious,