We’ve had a lot of big apes in our time, and not just in gangster movies but real, live, and now fossilized ones. Consider Giganthopithecus blacki, whose partial remains have been found largely in caves across China. At around 250 kg or 550 lb it was the largest ape ever. It survived from around 2.3 million years ago and disappeared about 215 to 295 thousand years ago. Hey, it wasn’t us humans doing them in.
Yingqi Zhang and colleagues put together a rather convincing story that ecological changes did them in. About 700,000 years ago their geographic area was mostly dense forest. This slowly, rather inexorably, changed to more open forests. Not only the climate and the vegetation – and ape food - changed. A tree-climbing orangutan, Pongo weidenriechi, was heading the opposite way. It showed better nutritional status while Gigantopithecus showed worst status, reflected in mineral bands in their respective teeth. To clarify the route to extinction from our former great ape, we’ll need more information about its trend of increasing body mass and the corresponding dietary demands. Let’s look in a lot more caves. Hmm. Why did they need caves, or is that analogous to the “looking under the lamppost where the light is better?” Caves might preserve the evidence best.
This has been an outreach activity of the Las Cruces Academy, viewable at GreatSchools.org.
