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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 giant statue that captured the popular imagination as the “real King Kong” disappeared is one of the greatest mysteries in paleontology.
German-Dutch paleontologist GHR von Koenigswald first described Gigantopithecus blacki from large teeth sold as medicinal “dragon bones” at a Hong Kong pharmacist nearly a century ago. Nearly 2,000 fossilized teeth and four jawbones from 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 builds on preliminary evidence and reveals a timeline that sheds more light on the elusive circumstances surrounding Gigantopithecus’ demise.
“I think the child in us wants to know about these magnificent creatures and what happens to them,” said Renaud Joannes-Boyau, a 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 had trouble adapting to changing vegetation.
Before Gigantopithecus populations declined due to climate change, the species thrived in a rich and diverse forest environment from about 2 million years ago, eating primarily fruit, said study co-author Kira Westaway, a professor and geochronologist at Macquarie University in Australia.
“We start to see major environmental changes around (700,000 or) 600,000 years ago, and we see a decline in fruit availability during this period,” he explained.
“Giganto ate less nutritious replacement food. “We have evidence when we look at the dentition,” Westaway added. “The pits and scratches on the teeth suggest that it was eating really fibrous foods, like bark and twigs from the forest floor.”
Detailed timeline
For nearly a decade, a team of Chinese and Australian scientists took sediment samples from 22 caves in a large area of the Guangxi province in southern China, bordering Vietnam. While half of the caves contained Gigantopithecus fossils, half did not.
First, researchers obtained accurate dates for fossils and sediments using a variety of techniques. Luminescence dating revealed the time when the sediment was last exposed to sunlight and deposited in a cave, and U-series dating pinpointed the time when uranium was introduced into bone samples after the animal died. This analysis helped the team create a detailed timeline of the species’ existence.
“There are hundreds of teeth in the original 2-million-year-old caves, but there are only 3-4 teeth in the younger caves from the extinction period,” Westaway said.
The team then analyzed pollen traces in the sediment samples to understand which plants and trees dominated the landscape. Isotope analysis of elements such as carbon and oxygen found in Gigantopithecus teeth helped researchers understand how the animal’s diet changed over time.
Westaway said the team found that the giant ape did not adapt well to changing environmental conditions and exhibited chronic stress and declining numbers.
“We have a much more robust timeline of their lives and when they went extinct – rather than relying on evidence from one or two caves, we sampled 22 caves across a large area and used six dating techniques to make sure the timeline was accurate.” “That’s right,” he said.
Questions remain
No Gigantopithecus fossils from the neck down have been found or documented. That’s surprising, Westaway said, given that Gigantopithecus roamed parts of Asia for about 2 million years.
According to the authors, giant apes never lived in caves. Rodents are thought to have carried their remains inland, often through small rock cracks in the region’s distinctive rocky karst terrain, said study co-author Wang Wei, a professor at the Cultural Heritage Institute of Shandong University in Qingdao, China.
“The teeth or jaws of great apes (based on found fossil evidence) went through an extremely complex process of death, decomposition, weathering, transport and deposition before being buried in cave sediments,” he explained via email.
“As a result, only a very small number of hard parts of Gigantopithecus’s body may have become fossils throughout geological history.”
Given the lack of fossils without a skull, it’s hard to know exactly what Gigantopithecus would have looked like. Upper molars are 57.8% larger than a gorilla’s, and lower molars are 33% larger; this suggests that its body weight may have been 200 to 300 kilograms (440 to 660 pounds).
The monkey’s enormous size indicates that it likely lived on the ground and walked on its fists. A November 2019 analysis of proteins found in the Gigantopithecus fossil suggested that its closest living relative was the Bornean orangutan.
It is known that Homo erectus, the first ancestor of humans, lived in northern China and further south in Indonesia, while the giant ape lived in the forests of the region now known as southern China.
Wang noted that near a cave in the Bose Basin where Gigantopithecus fossils were found, archaeologists unearthed numerous stone tools dating 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’s possible these human ancestors may have encountered the “big man,” he said.
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