Foraging across the dense tropical forests of Southeast Asia between 2 million and 200,000 years ago, the giant ape may have shared the habitat with new arrivals — hominins such as Homo erectus. (Hominins are members of the group that includes modern humans, their ancestors and closely related species, after the evolutionary split from great apes.)
So what would have happened when Gigantopithecus encountered these human ancestors?
It's "very difficult to say with any certainty, as we have no direct evidence documenting interactions between Gigantopithecus and human ancestors," Renaud Joannes-Boyau, director of higher-degree research training at Southern Cross University in Australia and an archaeologist who has conducted extensive research into human evolution, told Live Science in an email.
What would have happened if hominins encountered Gigantopithecus? (Image credit: ZUMA Press, Inc. via Alamy)Friedemann Schrenk, a professor of paleobiology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, thinks Gigantopithecus would have likely tried to avoid humans. "Humans were and are the most aggressive primates ever on earth using tools and weapons and were probably encroaching on Gigantopithecus habitats," he told Live Science in an email. Homo erectus made use of hand axes and possibly hafted spears.
Different environments?
Yet it's also possible that Gigantopithecus and hominins lived in different environments in Southeast Asia, which would have minimized the number of interactions they had, said Hervé Bocherens, a professor of biogeology at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
Fossilized Gigantopithecus jawbones suggest that the giant ape's diet was plant-based. (Image credit: Forrest Anderson via Getty Images)Related mysteries
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We can only imagine what hominins would have thought when they glimpsed these gigantic creatures. It’s not clear how hominins and Gigantopithecus would have interacted, if they ever did, said Frido Welker, a professor of biomolecular paleoanthropology at the University of Copenhagen. He thinks they would have avoided each other but they may have "been in awe when they did happen to run into each other."
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