Why huge ape Gigantopithecus went extinct up to 295,000 years ago
The mysterious giant ape Gigantopithecus blacki died out up to 295,000 years ago, after failing to adapt to a changing climate and the food variability that went with it
By James Woodford
10 January 2024
Gigantopithcus blacki probably lived in “a mosaic of forests and grasses”
Garcia/Joannes-Boyau (Southern Cross University)
The largest known primate went extinct between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago, probably driven by its inability to adapt its food preferences amid a changing climate.
A relative of today’s orangutans, Gigantopithecus blacki, known as “Giganto”, was 3 metres tall and weighed up to 300 kilograms.
Despite surviving for more than 2 million years, the species has been a bit of an enigma since its fossilised tooth was found in a traditional medicine shop in Hong Kong in 1935. The enormous tooth was initially purported to belong to a dragon, but palaeontologists quickly recognised it was, in fact, from a primate.
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Huge mysterious ape Gigantopithecus was a distant cousin of orangutans
“When you think about them, you think about giants,” says Kira Westaway from Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “Normally when you think about a giant, you think about a dinosaur, but this was a giant in the primate family.”
To establish a timeline for when the ape went extinct, Westaway and her colleagues studied hundreds of its teeth and four jawbone fragments found in caves across Guangxi province in southern China. Looking at the radioactive decay of certain elements, such as uranium, within teeth and bone allows researchers to gauge how much time has passed since death.
