OntarioSasquatch

 ... continued

The Ape That Was

Asian fossils reveal humanity's giant cousin
by Russell L. Ciochon

Then, on January 18, 1989, Nguyen Van Hao made a key discovery: in the floor of the fourth cave he found a premolar of Homo. Since it was an isolated tooth, we found it difficult - impossible, really - to identify the species. Since then, four additional teeth of Homo have been recovered from caves I, II, and IV. Subsequently, a boar tooth from cave I has been dated (by a method called electron-spin resonance) to about 480,000 years ago. Given this preliminary date, the specimens should be assigned to Homo erectus. The discovery helps fill the gap between Zhoukoudian, in northern China, and Java, more than 3.000 miles to the south.

We now have a fairly complete picture of the Pleistocene environment of Lang Trang. The jungle vegetation would have been more lush, but not startlingly different. The fauna, however, would have been striking, with huge beasts of all kinds dominating the landscape. Carnivores such as the tiger and leopard were much more common then and competed for food with species, such as the Asiatic black bear, that have entirely disappeared from Vietnam. And they all competed with the wolf and the Asiatic wild dog in preying on the dozens of bovid and cervid species (cowlike and deerlike mammals). Also present were the rhinoceros and elephant (both now rare) and the stegodon, as well as the orangutan and tapir, both now extinct in Vietnam. The giant panda, also now vanished, chomped its way through the bamboo stands. Taken in this context, Gigantopithecus was no freakish monstrosity, but simply the primate example of a Pleistocene phenomenon.

Primates make up 13 percent of the total fauna in our collection. At least five genera are accounted for: two types of macaque monkey, orangutan, langur monkey, gibbon and Homo. So far we have been disappointed only by the absence of Gigantopithecus.

Sometime near the end of the middle Pleistocene, perhaps 200,000 years ago, Gigantopithecus became extinct. The animal had flourished for at least six million years, quite a respectable figure, but it went the way of a great many genera of every shape and size. At about the same time, the giant panda disappeared from much of its original territory, notably insular southeast Asia, until it now survives only in the cold upland regions of Sichuan Province. The best guess as to what caused the panda's extinction in Southeast Asia is human hunting: even now the animal is hunted for food and for pelts, despite the best efforts of the Chinese government to discourage the practice. Similarly, human hunting may have led to the demise of Gigantopithecus.

Munching on bamboo, a giant panda
survives on a diet that may resemble
that of Gigantopithecus.

Environmental change may also have been a contributing factor, just as the bamboo die-off in China in the 1970s nearly wiped out the remaining population of giant pandas, with fewer than a thousand estimated to have survived. Or by eating the tender bamboo shoots and exploiting the plant for other purposes, including toolmaking, humans may have outcompeted the giant ape for this critical resource. The competition from both humans and the giant panda may have been too much.

Gigantopithecus is gone. Or is it? Following the publicity about our research in Vietnam, I have received several letters from veterans who say that they came face to face with huge, hairy apes in the Southeast Asian jungle when they were posted in Vietnam. And of all the theories advanced to provide a zoological identity for Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, and other elusive creatures, perhaps the most popular is that they are none other than Gigantopithecus, still alive in relict populations (relict populations of Neanderthal man run a close second). While these contemporary reports are probably false, we can contemplate the time when our remote ancestors did encounter the giant of all apes in the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia.

Bamboo leaves frame the scientists
excavating the cemented deposits
in Lang Trang Cave IV.

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Reprinted from the University of Iowa website: http://www.uiowa.edu/~bioanth/giganto.html

Reprinted under the Fair Use Doctrine of International Copyright Law as educational material without benefit of financial gain.