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The largest ape ever recorded was almost 3 meters tall and weighed almost twice as much as a gorilla. Why and when the legendary colossus, which has captured the popular imagination as “the real King Kong,” disappeared is one of the greatest mysteries of paleontology.
German-Dutch paleontologist GHR von Koenigswald first identified Gigantopithecus blacki about a century ago from large teeth sold as medicinal “dragon bones” in a Hong Kong apothecary. Some 2,000 fossilized teeth and four jaws of the extinct species have since been unearthed in caves in southern China.
Now, new research into many of these rare fossils and the caves where they were found is shedding more light on the difficult circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Gigantopithecus.
“I think the child in us wants to know about these amazing creatures and what happened to them,” said Renaud Joannes-Boyau, co-author of the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. Joannes-Boyau is a lecturer in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Southern Cross University in Australia.
The authors believe this enormous creature became extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago, after the climate became more seasonal and the herbivorous primate struggled to adapt to changes in vegetation.
Before Gigantopithecus populations declined due to climate change, the species flourished about 2 million years ago in a rich and diverse forest environment, eating mainly fruits, said study co-author Kira Westaway, a professor and geochronologist at Macquarie University in Australia.
“About (700,000 or) 600,000 years ago we began to see major environmental changes and during that period we see a decrease in the availability of fruit,” he explained.
“Giganto (ate) less nutritious alternative foods. “We have evidence by looking at the structure of the teeth,” Westaway added. “The pits and scratches in his teeth suggest that he was eating very fibrous foods, such as bark and twigs from the forest floor.”
Detailed schedule
Over nearly a decade, the team of Chinese and Australian scientists sampled sediment from 22 caves in a wide area of the Guangxi region of southern China, which borders Vietnam. Half of the caves contained Gigantopithecus fossils, while the other half did not.
First, the researchers obtained precise dates for the fossils and sediment using several techniques. Luminescence dating revealed when the sediment was last exposed to sunlight and deposited in a cave, and U-series dating pinpointed when uranium was absorbed into bone samples after the animal’s death. This analysis helped the team put together a detailed chronology of the species’ existence.
“The earliest caves, from 2 million years ago, have hundreds of teeth, but the younger caves around the extinction period have only 3 or 4… teeth,” Westaway said.
Next, the team analyzed pollen traces in the sediment samples to understand which plants and trees dominated the landscape. Analysis of isotopes of elements such as carbon and oxygen contained in Gigantopithecus teeth helped researchers understand how the animal’s diet may have changed over time.
The team found that the giant ape did not adapt well to changing environmental conditions and showed chronic stress and dwindling numbers, Westaway said.
“We have a much more solid timeline for their life and when they became extinct; Instead of relying on evidence from one or two caves, we sampled 22 caves over a wide area and employed six dating techniques to make sure the timeline is correct. Exactly,” he stated.
Questions remain
No fossil of Gigantopithecus from the neck down has ever been found or documented. Given that Gigantopithecus roamed parts of Asia for about 2 million years, Westaway said that was surprising.
According to the authors, giant apes never lived in caves. The rodents are believed to have carried their remains to them, often through small rock fissures in the region’s distinctive rocky karst terrain, said study co-author Wang Wei, a professor at the Institute of Cultural Heritage at Shandong University in Qingdao. , China.
“The teeth or jaws of great apes (according to the fossil evidence that has been found) went through an extremely complex process of death, decomposition, erosion, transport and deposition before becoming embedded in the cave sediments,” he explained by email. electronic.
“As a result, only a very small number of the hardest body parts of Gigantopithecus would have become fossils during geological history.”
Given the lack of non-cranial fossils, it is difficult to know exactly what Gigantopithecus would have looked like. Its upper molars are 57.8% larger than those of a gorilla and its lower molars are 33% larger, suggesting its body weight would have been 440 to 660 pounds (200 to 300 kilograms).
The ape’s gigantic size indicates that it most likely lived on the ground, walking on its fists. A November 2019 analysis of proteins found in a Gigantopithecus fossil suggested that its closest living relative is the Bornean orangutan.
Homo erectus, one of the first human ancestors, is known to have lived in northern China and further south in Indonesia, at the same time that the giant ape lived in the forests of what is now southern China.
Wang noted that in the Bose Basin, near a cave where Gigantopithecus fossils were found, archaeologists have discovered a large number of stone tools dating back to about 800,000 years ago. While scientists have no direct fossil evidence that H. erectus and the giant ape coexisted in the region, it is possible that these human ancestors had an encounter “with the big guy,” he said.
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