Hong Kong, 1935: a young palaeontologist picks his way through the back streets, ducking in and out of apothecary鈥檚 shops. He鈥檚 looking for dragon teeth, the name the Chinese give to old animal teeth used in traditional medicines. In a dusty drawer of trinkets, his eyes fall on a large molar unlike that of any living animal, and he instantly knows his search is over. The tooth belongs not to a dragon but an ape, and if its teeth are anything to go by, it was huge.
So begins the story of the discovery of a truly fantastic beast, the greatest of all great apes. According to some estimates, it stood 3.5 metres tall, weighed over 500 kilograms, and stalked the nightmares of the earliest humans to reach China. Its name? Gigantopithecus.
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Eighty years after Ralph von Koenigswald stood dumbstruck in a Hong Kong drugstore, fossils of the giant ape remain sparse. A jawbone fragment described earlier this year is just the fourth ever found. The four pieces and several thousand teeth are our only evidence it even existed. But from these scraps, we are slowly piecing together an image of this real-life King Kong聽(鈥r 鈥� as portrayed in this year鈥檚 remake of The Jungle Book 鈥� King Louie), how it lived and why it eventually vanished from the face of the planet.
Von Koenigswald was born in Berlin, Germany. From an early age, he yearned to hunt for evidence of humanity鈥檚 ancestors. That meant one thing: a journey to Southeast Asia, home to the oldest and most primitive human fossils at the time. After a stint looking for Homo erectus in Indonesia, von Koenigswald鈥檚 attentions turned to orangutans and their poorly studied ancestors. His particular stroke of luck was born of the realisation that he could take his search to Asian apothecary鈥檚 shops, where ground-up teeth are an important part of many traditional medicines.
鈥淚 began to hunt for fossils in the Chinese drugstores in Java,鈥� . 鈥淚 discovered that I had made a grave mistake in simply inquiring about 鈥榯eeth鈥�. I should have asked for 鈥榙ragon teeth鈥�, since that was the name of the 鈥榙rug鈥� I sought. When I finally learned the correct name and obtained a prescription, I succeeded in finding these teeth in every Chinese drugstore in every Chinese community.鈥�
Subjected to von Koenigswald鈥檚 expertise in extinct fauna, the so-called dragon teeth proved almost systematically to be fossils of ancient mammals, from horses to large giraffes.
A dragon鈥檚 tooth
In 1935, he headed for Hong Kong 鈥� a decision that would lead him to one enormous molar and change his career. 鈥淗e took one look at that tooth,鈥� says Russell Ciochon, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Iowa, 鈥渁nd knew it was ape. And it was huge.鈥� At roughly an inch across, its grinding surface was easily twice as big as a typical human molar.
For the next few years von Koenigswald scoured drugstores for more evidence of the extinct behemoth, with little success. 鈥淭he rarity of this giant form is obvious,鈥� he wrote. By 1939, he had examined thousands of fossil teeth but discovered only three more belonging to Gigantopithecus.
Still, each new find added weight to the idea that he was dealing with a new species. He was categorical that the four molars had belonged to four different individuals. He also noticed a trend that gave him clues about when the apes had lived. The molars were always found in shopkeepers鈥� trays, mixed in with other teeth in a similar state of preservation. Von Koenigswald knew the owners of these other teeth well: giant pandas, tapirs, bears and the extinct, elephant-like stegodon. The giant ape was systematically surrounded by middle Pleistocene animals. It was about a million years old.
Then came the war. Japan鈥檚 imperial army rolled into Java in 1942 and von Koenigswald was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp. The teeth he had gone to such lengths to collect saw out the Japanese occupation in a milk bottle buried in a neighbour鈥檚 garden on the island. For von Koenigswald鈥檚 colleagues in the US, the wait was interminable. Franz Weidenreich at the American Museum of Natural History in New York was particularly exasperated. He had big ideas about Gigantopithecus and was itching to share them with the scientific world.
In 1945, with von Koenigswald still a prisoner, Weidenreich . He had noticed that smaller breeds of dog often have relatively large brains and small faces compared with larger ones. Humans also have much larger brains and relatively smaller faces than chimps, gorillas and orangutans, something that had puzzled researchers for years. Weidenreich believed it all made sense if our family tree included some unusually large ancestors. As the millennia passed, our bodies shrank but our brains remained large. In other words, we were descended from Asian giants, and Gigantopithecus was one of them.
鈥淣o one gives the idea much credibility now,鈥� says Ciochon. 鈥淚f von Koenigswald had not been in prison, that episode probably would never have happened.鈥� But it鈥檚 not the craziest theory ever concocted and for a brief time, Weidenreich鈥檚 idea that humans evolved from an enormous Asian ape was in the scientific mainstream. Then the war ended, von Koenigswald was released, and he gently but firmly plucked Gigantopithecus out of the human evolutionary tree and plonked it back with the other apes.
The downgrading didn鈥檛 diminish scientific interest. Far from it: Chinese authorities, determined to find fossils of the giant ape in their proper geological context, launched a series of field expeditions in the 1950s. The quest took them to southern China鈥檚 fantastical karst landscapes, where limestone sugarloaf mountains loom over rice paddies. They met with farmers who had long collected Gigantopithecus teeth to sell on the lucrative medicinal market, and were directed to caves carved into the sheer cliff faces.
In Liucheng cave, no fewer than 1000 Gigantopithecus teeth were recovered, together with fragments of three giant jawbones. From the size of the jaw fragments, the Chinese researchers deduced that Gigantopithecus might have stood 3.5 metres tall. In truth, there鈥檚 little to go on. Ciochon believes the ape was more like 2.5 metres tall.
So what was Gigantopithecus and how did it live? Von Koenigswald named the Chinese species Gigantopithecus blacki. Its oldest reliably dated remains are 2 million years old. Another, older and slightly smaller species has also been found in northern India: G. giganteus, known from an 8.6-million-year-old jawbone and teeth.
The idea that the enormous apes might have been part of our family history stuck around until quite recently. In the 1980s, Bruce Gelvin of California State University argued that if it wasn鈥檛 a direct ancestor, it might have been , much like African Australopithecus species. Around the same time, a team including Ciochon found in Longgupo cave in China. And two years ago, a Chinese team .
Ciochon rejects the idea. If they did make tools, he says, these would probably have been made of organic material like sticks, bamboo or leaves, and in any case tools are not necessarily evidence of an intelligent ancestor. There are at least three living species of non-human primate that use stone tools: chimpanzees, bearded capuchins and long-tailed macaques. Ciochon says the stone tools at Longgupo were probably left much later by early humans.
Prickly post-mortem
There鈥檚 another reason to doubt the image of Gigantopithecus as a cave-dwelling toolmaker. The caves its teeth were found in were not caves when the ape was alive. At the time, the deep valleys had not yet been carved into the karst landscape to produce the iconic limestone mountains. Ground level was much higher up, and what we now see as lofty caves dug out of cliff faces were small sinkholes and underground fissures. They were home to porcupines, not giant apes.
Those porcupines offer an answer to one of the enduring questions about Gigantopithecus: how come it left so many teeth and so few bones? Porcupines need calcium to make their quills, explains Ciochon. They are known to gather bones, drag them back into their underground lairs, and gnaw on them until there鈥檚 nothing left. You could say that Pleistocene porcupines ate most of the evidence for the world鈥檚 biggest ape.
It鈥檚 lucky, then, that we can reconstruct a fair amount about an animal from its teeth and jaws alone. 鈥淓ven from tiny pieces of dental tissue, we learn about the diet, ecology and life history,鈥� says Kornelius Kupczik at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. What emerges is a picture of Gigantopithecus as a forest-dwelling herbivore. Analysis of carbon and other elements in the fossil teeth reveals no signs of a meat diet: the ape was vegetarian.
Gigantopithecus also suffered from unusually poor dental health. Something like 10 per cent of the teeth that have been found have caries, and the recently discovered fourth jawbone shows that some individuals lost a tooth or two during their lives. Both features suggest the ape ate lots of sugary fruit. Earlier this year, Herv茅 Bocherens of the University of T眉bingen, Germany, published a study of Gigantopithecus teeth that argued confined to the forest floor by its great size.
The shape of its dental roots suggests another possibility, say Kupczik and Christopher Dean at University College London. It . Other lines of evidence, including on some teeth, also suggest bamboo was on its menu. In other words, perhaps Gigantopithecus was more like a giant panda than an oversized orangutan.
Either diet leaves a central puzzle unsolved. Both species that Gigantopithecus has been compared with 鈥� giant pandas and orangutans 鈥� lived alongside it in Asian forests. Why did they survive and the ape die out? 鈥淭he extinction ofGigantopithecus blacki is still mysterious,鈥� says Yingqi Zhang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. On present evidence, it seems it may have vanished around 320,000 years ago. This is the , which Zhang and his colleagues described in 2013.
We now know that those last apes might well have been the grandest of the bunch. Last year, Zhang, Ciochon and their colleagues collaborated on a systematic study of teeth from a number of sites. They were able to confirm that , even by its own standards. The biting surfaces were 1.5 times larger than those of earlier members of the species. 鈥淭his does not necessarily mean their body size increased accordingly, although I prefer to believe so,鈥� says Zhang. If he鈥檚 right, then Gigantopithecus was larger than it had ever been just before vanishing.
Zhang and his colleagues recently noticed something else about those last teeth. The biting surfaces were not just larger, they were also distinctly more complex. The team hasn鈥檛 yet worked out exactly what that means, but it might hint that the giant ape was facing a drastic change in its menu before its extinction, perhaps because the region鈥檚 plants were changing.
鈥淢aybe Gigantopithecus was more like a giant panda than an oversized orangutan鈥�
Bocherens agrees with this assessment. His team鈥檚 work suggests that while Gigantopithecus ate any leaves, shoots and fruits it could lay its hands on, it drew the line at grasses and other vegetation from the savannah. That doomed the species, says Bocherens, because climate change during the Pleistocene meant grasslands got bigger at the expense of forests, where the apes lived.
That might not be the full picture, though. Homo erectus arrived in Southeast Asia about 1.7 million years ago and could have rubbed shoulders with Gigantopithecus for a million years. If Homo erectus hunted the apes, or competed with them for resources, this might have added to their problems. Gigantopithecus may even have been one of the first species that humans pushed towards extinction. Then again, maybe not 鈥� for here too, the Gigantopithecus story is plagued by open questions.
In the mid-1990s, Ciochon and others , and declared that the two apes had had a 鈥渓ong coexistence鈥�. But Ciochon now thinks the 鈥�H. erectus鈥� teeth belonged to another ape, and there were no hominins in the cave. 鈥淚 think today most people agree humans and Gigantopithecus were not living side by side,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hey were certainly both present in China 1 million years ago, but I don鈥檛 think they were inhabiting the same areas.鈥�
Gigantopithecus, he says, was confined to dense forests, whereas early humans were far more likely to live and hunt in open grasslands. That鈥檚 not to say they never, ever met. 鈥淟et鈥檚 not forget that humans may kill for other purposes than feeding,鈥� says Bocherens. 鈥淲e cannot rule out that humans hunted Gigantopithecus even if they did not feed on the same resources.鈥� Proof would come with the discovery of Gigantopithecus bones with butchery marks. 鈥淭his is probably a bit too much to ask,鈥� he concedes.
We鈥檝e learned more about Gigantopithecus in recent years than von Koenigswald could have hoped as he stood in that Hong Kong drugstore 80 years ago. Yet still the story of our largest fellow ape eludes us. 鈥淲e need to find its face,鈥� says Zhang. Such a momentous discovery would at last tell us what Gigantopithecus really looked like.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淗unting for the greatest of apes鈥�
