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The largest monkey on record was nearly 10 feet tall (3 meters) and weighed almost twice as much as a gorilla. Why and when the legendary colossus – which captured the popular imagination as “the real King Kong” – disappeared is one of the greatest mysteries in palaeontology.
German-Dutch paleontologist GHR von Koenigswald identified Gigantopithecus blacki about a century ago from large teeth sold as medicinal “dragon bones” by an apothecary in Hong Kong. About 2,000 fossilized teeth and four jawbones from the extinct species have since been discovered in caves in southern China.
Now, new research on many of these rare fossils and the caves where they were found builds on preliminary evidence, revealing a timeline that sheds more light on the unseen circumstances surrounding Gigantopithecus’ death.
“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 professor in the faculty of science and engineering at Southern Cross University in Australia.
The authors believe the giant creature went extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago, after the climate became more seasonal and the plant-eating primate struggled to adapt to changing vegetation.
Before Gigantopithecus populations declined due to climate change, the species thrived from about 2 million years ago in a rich and diverse forest environment, eating mainly fruit, said study coauthor Kira Westaway, a professor and geochronologist at Macquarie University in Australia.
“Around (700,000 or) 600,000 years ago we start to see major environmental changes and during that period we see a decrease in fruit availability,” she explained.
“Giganto ate foods that are less nutritious and less nutritious. We have evidence from looking at the structure of the teeth,” Westaway added. “Pits and scratches on the teeth indicate that it was eating very fibrous food such as bark and twigs from the forest floor.”
A detailed timeline
For nearly a decade, a team of Chinese and Australian scientists took sediment samples from 22 caves across a wide area of the Guangxi region in southern China that borders Vietnam. Half of the caves had Gigantopithecus fossils, and half of the caves had no fossils.
First, the researchers obtained exact dates for the fossils and sediments using different techniques. The luminescence dating revealed when the sediment was last exposed to sunlight when it was buried in a cave, and the U-series dating showed when uranium was built up in the bone specimens after the animal died. This analysis helped the team put together a detailed timeline of the species’ existence.
“The earliest caves have hundreds of teeth at 2 million years old, but the youngest caves around the extinction period have hundreds of teeth — only 3-4 … teeth,” Westaway said.
Next, the team analyzed pollen traces in the sediment samples to understand the plants and trees that dominated the landscape. Isotope analysis of elements such as carbon and oxygen in the teeth of Gigantopithecus helped the researchers understand how the animal’s diet may have changed over time.
The team found that the giant ape was not well adapted to changing environmental conditionsand showed chronic stress and declining numbers, Westaway said.
“We have a much more robust timeline of their life and when they went extinct — rather than being based on evidence from one or two caves, we’ve sampled 22 caves over a wide area and used six dating techniques to ensure that the timeline is there. accurate,” she said.
Questions remain
No Gigantopithecus fossils from the neck down have been found and documented. Given that Gigantopithecus roamed parts of Asia for 2 million years, Westaway said that was surprising.
The giant apes never lived in caves, according to the authors. Rodents are thought to carry their remains into them, often through small rock fissures in the region’s characteristic rocky karst terrain, said study author Wang Wei, a professor at Shandong University’s Cultural Heritage Institute in Qingdao, China.
“The teeth or mandibles of the great apes (based on the fossil evidence found) went through a very complex process of death, decay, weathering, transport and deposition before becoming embedded in cave sediments,” he explained by email.
“As a result, only a very small number of the harder parts of Gigantopithecus’ body would have fossilized throughout geological history.”
Due to 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 a gorilla and the lower molars are 33% larger, suggesting that its body weight would be between 440 and 660 pounds (200 to 300 kilograms).
The monkey’s enormous size suggests that it most likely lived on the ground, walking on its fists. A November 2019 analysis of proteins found in the Gigantopithecus fossil revealed that its closest relative is the Bornean orangutan.
Homo erectus, an early human ancestor, is known to have lived in northern China and further south in Indonesia at the same time the giant ape lived in the forests of what is now southern China.
Wang noted that at the Bose Basin, near a cave where Gigantopithecus fossils were found, archaeologists discovered a large number of stone tools dating to about 800,000 years ago. Although scientists have no direct fossil evidence of H. erectus and the great ape in the region, these human ancestors may have had contact with “the big man,” he said.
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