Giant 10-foot-tall apes once roamed China until their mysterious demise

[Still Waters]

Standing over 3 meters (nearly 10 feet) tall, Gigantopithecus blacki was the largest species of primate to ever walk the Earth (at least that we know of). This elusive beast stomped around modern-day China until it fell into extinction between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago under mysterious circumstances.

In a new study, scientists investigate why the giant ape met an untimely demise, concluding that the species struggled to adapt to a rapidly changing environment. 

The study is published in the journal Nature.

https://www.iflscience.com/giant-10-foot-tall-apes-once-roamed-china-until-their-mysterious-demise-72390

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[Abramelin]

Amazing what they can conclude from a mere lower jaw and a couple of molars...

[L.A.T.1961]

So bigfoot lived in China 😉 

[Piney]

The Phys Org article stated it was a distant human ancestor. It wasn't. It's a species of Orang and a distant human relative, 

[Carnoferox]

5 hours ago, Abramelin said:

Amazing what they can conclude from a mere lower jaw and a couple of molars...

There are four mandibles and thousands of teeth known from Gigantopithecus, which come from many localities in Southeast Asia spanning around 2 million years. That is actually a lot of data points from which conclusions can be drawn.

[Carnoferox]

2 hours ago, Piney said:

The Phys Org article stated it was a distant human ancestor. It wasn't. It's a species of Orang and a distant human relative, 

That article's author must have been reading too much of Grover Krantz's work. 

[Piney]

3 minutes ago, Carnoferox said:

That article's author must have been reading too much of Grover Krantz's work. 

😆

Grover....I love how "cryptozoologists" don't have a clue about evolutionary biology.

Which my sister jammed in every hole during my Bigfoot hunting years. 

[Occupational Hubris]

7 hours ago, Abramelin said:

Amazing what they can conclude from a mere lower jaw and a couple of molars...

It is actually amazing. You can infer tons from just a tooth. In fact, in my primate evolution class days, we'd be shown a tooth and based on the type of molar pattern, we'd need to infer diet, habitat, social structure, etc. 

[+Hammerclaw]

Considering its closest relative has been determined to be orangutan, the skeletal morphology has been extrapolated from that of the jaw and teeth. Like the orangutan, it thought to have been a knuckle-walker, not bipedal.

[Myles]

"Real-life 10ft prehistoric 'King Kong'"

Odd to say that.  King Kong was anywhere from 30 feet tall to 300 feet tall.  

[C L Palmer]

There is a whole lot of inference going on in this article and video. Then again, that's part of the nature of the field. Still, calling a 10 ft. Gigantopithecus a "real-life King Kong" is like calling a monitor lizard a real-life Godzilla.