The largest primate ever to walk the Earth went extinct because it could not adapt to its changing environment, with the mighty beast reduced to living off bark and twigs before dying off, scientists said on Wednesday.
Gigantopithecus blacki, which stood three meters tall and weighed up to 300 kilograms, thrived in the forests of southern Asia until a little more than 200,000 years ago.
Exactly why the great ape died off after flourishing for hundreds of thousands of years has been one of the lasting mysteries of paleontology ever since a German scientist first stumbled on one of its teeth at a Hong Kong apothecary in the 1930s.
Photo: AFP
The molar was so massive it was being sold as a “dragon’s tooth.”
“It was three to four times bigger than the teeth from any great ape,” said Renaud Joannes-Boyau, a researcher at Australia’s Southern Cross University and a co-author of a new study in the journal Nature. “That intrigued him and that’s where all this research started.”
All that has been found of the Gigantopithecus since are four partial jawbones and around 2,000 teeth, hundreds of which were discovered inside caves in southern China’s Guangxi province.
Even after a decade of excavations in these caves, the cause of the ape’s extinction remained elusive, said the study’s co-lead author Yingqi Zhang of China’s Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology.
HUGE APES CAN’T JUMP
Seeking to establish a timeline of the animal’s existence, the team of Chinese, Australian and US scientists collected fossilized teeth from 22 caves.
The team used six different techniques to determine the age of the fossils, including a relatively new method called luminescence dating which measures the last time minerals were exposed to sunlight.
The oldest teeth dated back more than two million years, while the most recent were from around 250,000 ago.
Now the researchers can tell “the complete story about Gigantopithecus’s extinction” for the first time, Zhang said in his office in Beijing.
They established that the animal’s “extinction window” was between 215,000 and 295,000 years ago, significantly earlier than previously thought.
During this time, the seasons were becoming more pronounced, which was changing the local environment. The thick, lush forest that Gigantopithecus had thrived in was starting to give way to more open forests and grassland. This increasingly deprived the ape of its favorite food: fruit.
The huge animal was bound to the ground, unable swing into the trees for higher food.
Instead, it “relied on less nutritious fall-back food such as bark and twigs,” said Kira Westaway, a geochronologist at Australia’s Macquarie University and co-lead author.
Zhang said this was a “huge mistake” which ultimately led to the animal’s extinction.
CLEVER RELATIVE
The primate’s size made it difficult to go very far to search for food — and its massive bulk meant that it needed plenty to eat.
Despite these challenges, “surprisingly G. blacki even increased in size during this time,” Westaway said.
By analyzing its teeth, the researchers were able to measure the increasing stress the ape was under as its numbers shrunk.
They also compared Gigantopithecus’ fate to its orangutan relative, Pongo weidenreichi, which handled the changing environment far better.
The orangutan was smaller and more agile, able to move swiftly through the forest canopy to gather a variety of food such as leaves, flowers, nuts, seeds and even insects and small mammals. It became even smaller over time, thriving as its massive cousin Gigantopithecus starved.
Westaway emphasized that it was important to understand the fate of the species that came before us — particularly “with the threat of a sixth mass extinction event looming over us.”
On Facebook a friend posted a dashcam video of a vehicle driving through the ash-colored wasteland of what was once Taroko Gorge. A crane appears in the video, and suddenly it becomes clear: the video is in color, not black and white. The magnitude 7.2 earthquake’s destruction on April 3 around and above Taroko and its reverberations across an area heavily dependent on tourism have largely vanished from the international press discussions as the news cycle moves on, but local residents still live with its consequences every day. For example, with the damage to the road corridors between Yilan and
May 13 to May 19 While Taiwanese were eligible to take the Qing Dynasty imperial exams starting from 1686, it took more than a century for a locally-registered scholar to pass the highest levels and become a jinshi (進士). In 1823, Hsinchu City resident Cheng Yung-hsi (鄭用錫) traveled to Beijing and accomplished the feat, returning home in great glory. There were technically three Taiwan residents who did it before Cheng, but two were born in China and remained registered in their birthplaces, while historians generally discount the third as he changed his residency back to Fujian Province right after the exams.
Few scenes are more representative of rural Taiwan than a mountain slope covered in row upon row of carefully manicured tea plants. Like staring at the raked sand in a Zen garden, seeing these natural features in an unnaturally perfect arrangement of parallel lines has a certain calming effect. Snapping photos of the tea plantations blanketing Taiwan’s mountain is a favorite activity among tourists but, unfortunately, the experience is often rather superficial. As these tea fields are part of working farms, it’s not usually possible to walk amongst them or sample the teas they are producing, much less understand how the
With William Lai’s (賴清德) presidential inauguration coming up on May 20, both sides of the Taiwan Strait have been signaling each other, possibly about re-opening lines of communication. For that to happen, there are two ways this could happen, one very difficult to achieve and the other dangerous. During his presidential campaign and since Lai has repeatedly expressed his hope to re-establish communication based on equality and mutual respect, and even said he hoped to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) over beef noodles and bubble tea. More dramatically, as explored in the May 2 edition of this column,