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King Kong, Gigantopithecus & the Missing Link

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Author Topic: King Kong, Gigantopithecus & the Missing Link  (Read 4342 times)
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Stacy Dohm
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« on: February 11, 2007, 03:13:21 pm »



We now have a fairly complete picture of the Pleistocene environment of Lang Trang. The jungle vegetation would have been more lush, but not startlingly different. The fauna, however, would have been striking, with huge beasts of all kinds dominating the landscape. Carnivores such as the tiger and leopard were much more common then and competed for food with species, such as the Asiatic black bear, that have entirely disappeared from Vietnam. And they all competed with the wolf and the Asiatic wild dog in preying on the dozens of bovid and cervid species (cowlike and deerlike mammals). Also present were the rhinoceros and elephant (both now rare) and the stegodon, as well as the orangutan and tapir, both now extinct in Vietnam. The giant panda, also now vanished, chomped its way through the bamboo stands. Taken in this context, Gigantopithecus was no freakish monstrosity, but simply the primate example of a Pleistocene phenomenon.
        Primates make up 13 percent of the total fauna in our collection. At least five genera are accounted for: two types of macaque monkey, orangutan, langur monkey, gibbon and Homo. So far we have been disappointed only by the absence of Gigantopithecus.
        Sometime near the end of the middle Pleistocene, perhaps 200,000 years ago, Gigantopithecus became extinct. The animal had flourished for at least six million years, quite a respectable figure, but it went the way of a great many genera of every shape and size. At about the same time, the giant panda disappeared from much of its original territory, notably insular southeast Asia, until it now survives only in the cold upland regions of Sichuan Province. The best guess as to what caused the panda's extinction in Southeast Asia is human hunting: even now the animal is hunted for food and for pelts, despite the best efforts of the Chinese government to discourage the practice. Similarly, human hunting may have led to the demise of Gigantopithecus.
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