South China’s giant apes, a distant human cousin, wiped out by failure to adapt to changing landscape, study finds
- The Gigantopithecus blacki went extinct some 250,000 years ago, study led by Chinese and Australian teams finds
- Struggle to adapt sealed fate for ‘ultimate specialist’, Nature article says, as co-lead cites lesson for planet facing ‘sixth mass extinction’
The Gigantopithecus blacki – a very distant human ancestor – stood as tall as 3 metres (nearly 10 feet) and weighed up to 300kg (660 pounds). They used to be found in Southeast Asia including southern China between 2 million and 330,000 years ago.
But the giant apes disappeared well before humans arrived in the karst plains of today’s Guangxi province, according to the study into their mysterious demise led by Chinese and Australian researchers.
The findings of the study were published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature on Thursday.
“The story of G. blacki is an enigma in palaeontology – how could such a mighty creature go extinct at a time when other primates were adapting and surviving?” said Zhang Yingqi, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology and co-lead author of the study.
The team, also comprising researchers from Germany, South Africa, Spain and the United States, looked at evidence collected from 22 cave sites spread across a wide region of Guangxi.
