Your four criteria leave an infinite set of explanations for any phenomenon. Including, yes, George the Giant. That’s why we have the idea of Occam’s razor—or, more formally, Solomonoff Induction. Though I suppose, depending on the data available to the tribe, the idea of giant humans might not be dramatically more complicated than plate tectonics. It isn’t like they postulated a god of earthquakes or some nonsense like that. At minimum, however, they are privileging the George the Giant hypotheses over the other equally-complicated plausible explanations. The real truth is that they don’t have enough data to come up with the real answers. They need to start recording data and studying the natural world. They can probably figure it out in a few hundred years if they really put their backs into it.
Your four criteria leave an infinite set of explanations for any phenomenon. Including, yes, George the Giant. That’s why we have the idea of Occam’s razor—or, more formally, Solomonoff Induction. Though I suppose, depending on the data available to the tribe, the idea of giant humans might not be dramatically more complicated than plate tectonics. It isn’t like they postulated a god of earthquakes or some nonsense like that. At minimum, however, they are privileging the George the Giant hypotheses over the other equally-complicated plausible explanations. The real truth is that they don’t have enough data to come up with the real answers. They need to start recording data and studying the natural world. They can probably figure it out in a few hundred years if they really put their backs into it.