In 1935, the German anthropologist Ralph von Koenigswald found in a Hong Kong pharmacy what was sold as a dragon's tooth, heterogeneous teeth and bones that were crushed to prepare traditional remedies. The scientist, who was looking for the cradle of humanity on the island of Java and Southeast Asia, associated those molars with a gigantic primate that he named Gigantopithecus blacki. Since then, searches have continued for remains of this three-meter-tall, 300-kilogram ape that for more than a million and a half years walked the karst plains of what is now the Guanxi region, in southern China. . After more than 85 years of searching, no skull has been found, something that has left its place in the tree of evolution unknown. Only four jaws and about 2,000 teeth have been found, accumulated in sites, often dispersed, probably by porcupines that gnawed on their bones to obtain nutrients to feed their quills. After appearing two million years ago, its trace was lost about 300,000 years ago. Today, an international group of scientists publishes in the magazine Nature his reconstruction of the end of the greatest ape that ever walked the Earth.
One of the key aspects of the study has been the dating, which was carried out with six different techniques and precisely demonstrated that the giant primate disappeared between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago. Kira Westaway, a specialist in geochronology at Macquarie University in Sydney (Australia) and co-author of the study, explains that this dating is one of the main challenges in trying to define the cause of extinction of a species. “Once you have this information, it is possible to reconstruct what was happening in the environment at that time to try to find causes for the disappearance of G. blacki”, he indicates. In a story that has been repeated over and over again in the history of the world, those magnificent animals that had survived countless generations succumbed, when circumstances changed, condemned by the same traits that made them successful.
“The history of G. blacki is an enigma in paleontology: how could such a powerful creature become extinct at a time when other primates were adapting and surviving? The unresolved cause of its disappearance has become the Holy Grail of this discipline,” says Yingqi Zhang, from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in a statement.
About 700,000 years ago, the stable environment in which it had emerged G. blacki, began to change. The differences between seasons increased, with more extremes of humidity and drought, and the habitat was disrupted by the climate. The analysis of pollen remains and the reconstructions of the fauna with which these apes shared their lives show the transformations that forced them to abandon their customs. Unlike its other relatives, the gigantopithecus was a specialist herbivore, enjoying abundant food in the tropical forest. “These relatively small environmental changes took a long time to affect G. blacki that struggled to adapt while its population decreased,” says Westaway. “It was a gradual path to extinction, not an abrupt event,” she summarizes.
Analysis of the teeth, which over the centuries became larger and capable of processing even fibrous and fibrous foods, show that the ape was adapting in response to ecological change. But it was not enough. The authors compared their diet to that of the Chinese orangutan (I put weidenreichi). This species is also extinct today, but, in the years of decline of the G. blacki, was able to adapt its size and diet to more variable conditions in which, sometimes, it was necessary to travel a certain distance to obtain food or find water that thousands of years before was abundant everywhere. The giant ape was not as mobile and had to settle, according to tooth analysis, with lower quality food when its favorite morsels were missing. Furthermore, its large size makes it likely that it was less prolific, something that undermined the sustainability of the species.
“It was the ultimate specialist, compared to more agile adaptive species like orangutans, and this ultimately led to its demise,” Zhang summarizes. About 300,000 years ago, the remains of G. blacki They become increasingly rare and the marks on the teeth reflect that the survivors suffered from chronic stress. At that same time and in those same forests, a distant relative of those animals, the Homo erectus, successfully adapted to the changing and diverse conditions of Southeast Asia. Although the arrival of the Homo sapiens has been linked to the extinction of large animal species, including Neanderthals, it appears that these archaic members of our lineage are not related to the annihilation of the greatest apes in history.
“With the threat of a sixth mass extinction event looming over us, there is an urgent need to understand why species become extinct. Exploring the reasons for past unresolved extinctions gives us a good starting point for understanding the resilience of primates and the fate of other large animals, in the past and in the future,” says Westaway.
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