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King Kong, Gigantopithecus & the Missing Link

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Author Topic: King Kong, Gigantopithecus & the Missing Link  (Read 5075 times)
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Kristin Moore
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« Reply #30 on: May 27, 2011, 03:01:51 am »

We immediately set to work cutting out hunks of the sandy deposit, revealing a small chamber that we surmised was the source of all the fossils the children had been bringing us. Our finds included barking deer, a musk deer the size of a big dog; sambar, a large deer with three-pointed antlers; wild boar; and giant panda. A huge, ridged molar, weighing several pounds and belonging to Stegodon, an extinct relative of the elephant, assured us that we were dealing with a Pleistocene site that might also contain Homo erectus and Gigantopithecus. One softball-sized sample of this deposit was later analyzed at the University of Iowa, revealing that it also contained some small teeth and fragmentary limb bones of a diverse microfauna, including rodents, reptiles, fishes, and riverine sponges. These fossil fragments were about the same size as the coarse sand particles they were mixed with.
        Then, on January 18, 1989, Nguyen Van Hao made a key discovery: in the floor of the fourth cave he found a premolar of Homo. Since it was an isolated tooth, we found it difficult - impossible, really - to identify the species. Since then, four additional teeth of Homo have been recovered from caves I, II, and IV. Subsequently, a boar tooth from cave I has been dated (by a method called electron-spin resonance) to about 480,000 years ago. Given this preliminary date, the specimens should be assigned to Homo erectus. The discovery helps fill the gap between Zhoukoudian, in northern China, and Java, more than 3.000 miles to the south.
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