“DRAGON BONES” AND GIGANTOPITHECUS
In almost any Chinese city are open-air markets with many different things for sale. The Chinese pharmacists, or apothecaries, sell a wide variety of products that are thought to be effective medicines, from minerals and crystals, to roots and herbs, to parts of various animals—over 130,000 are known and used in traditional Chinese medicine. Some are common and harmless, but others—like tiger penises, rhinoceros horns, bear gallbladders, turtle plastrons, and seahorses—have caused vulnerable animal populations to be poached and hunted nearly to extinction. Chinese medicine also includes human products, including organs, bones, fingernails, hair, dandruff, earwax, feces, urine, and sweat. But many Chinese apothecaries also sell ground-up “dragon bones”—pieces of fossil bone and teeth that have been poached from caves and fossil sites, often before scientists were able to find them. Indeed, for centuries, the Chinese have been mining and destroying fossils to be ground up and turned into medicine.
Some paleontologists have learned that shopping in the apothecaries for “dragon bones” is the best way to find Chinese fossils and acquire them for science. However, it was often impossible to determine where there might be important deposits nearby because the “dragon bones” were extremely valuable and the Chinese carefully guarded the secrets of their sources. In the 1850s and 1860s, British travelers sent their specimens to London, where in 1870, paleontologist Richard Owen at the British Museum identified teeth of extinct rhinos, tapirs, elephants, hyenas, horses, and many other Ice Age mammals whose extant descendants are no longer found in China. Between 1899 and 1902, German travelers in China sent paleontologist Max Schlosser many teeth from Ice Age mammals. Among them was the first tooth that led to the discovery of “Peking Man” (now considered to be Homo erectus) from the Zhoukoudian caves near Beijing. In 1921, paleontologist Walter Granger of the American Museum of Natural History managed to find the farmer who was supplying the apothecaries, and he excavated a cave that yielded many extinct mammals, including an Ice Age tapir that was as large as a modern rhino.
Figure B.2 A human skull compared with a reconstructed skull of Gigantopithecus blacki. (Illustration by Pat Linse, with Daniel Loxton)
So fossil collecting in Chinese drugstores was a tried-and-true technique for scientists such as German geologist and paleontologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald. He started his career by finding and describing the famous skullcap of “Java Man” (Homo erectus) at Mojokerto in 1937 and was the first to realize that “Java Man” was the same species as “Peking Man.” He also did work on early humans and primates in Africa and many other regions.
In 1935, he found a huge primate molar in a Chinese apothecary shop. He recognized immediately that it was from a gigantic ape not too different from the modern orangutan, but much larger, and named it Gigantopithecus blacki (figure B.2). The genus means “gigantic ape” in Greek, and the species is named in honor of Davidson Black, a pioneer in Chinese paleontology who was especially important in the discovery of “Peking Man.” Von Koenigswald spent four more years roaming Chinese marketplaces, but found only three more teeth of Gigantopithecus. He then talked to pharmacists who told him that the teeth came from Guangxi Province, in southern China. Using the kind of dirt clinging to the teeth and the gnaw marks of rodents as clues, he guessed that they were from cave deposits. When he finally found the caves, the teeth were mixed with middle Pleistocene elephant and panda fossils, so he estimated their age as between 125,000 and 700,000 years.
As he continued to track down the source of the teeth, the Japanese invaded China and von Koenigswald was taken prisoner. Even though he had been born in Berlin in 1902 (making him German by birth and supposedly a Japanese ally), von Koenigswald had acquired Dutch citizenship during his years in Java (then a Dutch colony), so the Japanese incarcerated him in a prisoner-of-war camp. He survived the ordeal and managed to hide all but one of his fossils from the Japanese; one skull was presented to Emperor Hirohito but was recovered after the war. His Gigantopithecus fossils had been buried in a milk bottle in a friend’s backyard for safekeeping and were retrieved after the war. While he was imprisoned, his colleague Franz Weidenreich was at the American Museum of Natural History, where he published many of von Koenigswald’s finds (including the idea that “Java Man” and “Peking Man” were just different samples of Homo erectus, and the best descriptions of the “Peking Man” specimens), assuming that von Koenigswald was dead. So even though von Koenigswald made most of the discoveries, the volumes were published with Weidenreich as the author. After the war, von Koenigswald joined Weidenreich in New York and worked with him again.*
Since the 1930s, many more Gigantopithecus specimens have been found in the original cave deposits, including some complete lower jaws (figure B.3). Unfortunately, no other non-dentary skeletal parts from this mysterious ape are known, despite decades of searching by the large number of Chinese paleontologists who now work on the deposits. More recently, anthropologist Russell Ciochon revisited the region around Guangxi Province and found more specimens of Gigantopithecus. He did so by shifting his focus to cave deposits in northern Vietnam, which are unspoiled by the fossil poachers who rob the Chinese caves to supply bones for apothecaries to grind up. Still, even after more than seventy-five years since the first tooth was found, only three lower jaws and about 1,300 isolated teeth of this mysterious primate have been discovered. There is also a second species, Gigantopithecus giganteus, from India, which (despite its name) is about half the size of Gigantopithecus blacki. A third species, Gigantopithecus bilaspurensis, comes from much older beds (6–9 million years old) in India, suggesting that the Gigantopithecus line goes back to at least 9 million years ago and the evolutionary radiation of early apes such as the dryopithecines.
Figure B.3 A cast of the jaw of Gigantopithecus blacki, showing the robust thick-enameled and heavily worn molars. (Photograph by Donald R. Prothero)
Because paleontologists have only the lower jaw to go on, it is hard to reliably estimate the size of the entire creature. Ciochon and his colleagues estimated that it was about 10 feet tall and weighed about 1,200 pounds. Elwyn Simons and Peter Ettel suggested that it was proportioned like a gorilla, standing about 9 feet tall and weighing about 900 pounds.* Either way, it was the largest primate that has ever lived, immensely bigger than a gorilla (the largest living primate) or even the biggest human giants.
What does remain of Gigantopithecus are the heavily built jaws with huge teeth, especially the molars, which have very thick enamel (see figure B.3). Both the molars and the cheek teeth in front of them (premolars) are very broad and low-crowned, often with their entire occlusal surface ground down flat, suggesting that these apes ate a very tough, gritty diet. Close microscopic analysis of wear facets on the tooth enamel, and the presence of phytolith fossils from plants, show that Gigantopithecus ate mostly bamboo, as does the living giant panda.*
Gigantopithecus lived in Asia since at least the middle Miocene, about 9 million years ago, and were found mostly in East Asia during the Ice Ages. Careful dating of cave deposits in Vietnam, which yield both Gigantopithecus and Homo erectus, show that early humans invaded China about 800,000 years ago and that Gigantopithecus died out about 500,000 years later, around 300,000 years ago.† Although this time line certainly disproves the idea that Homo erectus immediately killed off its distant cousin, there are other possible factors for its extinction, including competition with giant pandas for bamboo and bamboo die-offs, which occur every twenty to sixty years and may have stressed the ape population and made them more vulnerable to competition from pandas or people.
Or did they die out? As Brian Regal points out, in the 1950s and 1960s some anthropologists like Carleton Coon made the inference that the Yeti was a relict population of Gigantopithecus.‡ At that time, many anthropologists embraced the multiregional hypothesis, which suggested that different populations of Homo sapiens had evolved separately over a million years ago from different stocks
of primates in different regions. Asians were descendants of “Peking Man”; Neanderthals, of an early European Homo; Africans, of African Homo erectus; and so on. Although a few holdouts still support a version of the multiregional model (like Milford Wolpoff at the University of Michigan), genetic evidence that has been amassed since the 1980s has overwhelmingly demonstrated that it is false. Instead, the human genome shows that modern Homo sapiens are all descended from African ancestors who spread across the Old World about 60,000 years ago, displacing any older populations of Homo (such as Homo erectus).* And the fossils plus the dating show that this “out of Africa” dispersal occurred more than once, since Homo erectus appears to have originated in Africa and then spread throughout the Old World (including China and Java) about 1.85 million years ago. Even more recent work in genetics shows that some populations (like Neanderthals) interbred with Homo sapiens, so when the invaders from Africa arrived, they incorporated the regional genome into theirs. Nonetheless, the hypothesis of multiregionalism and independent, isolated parallel evolution of Homo sapiens from local Homo erectus populations, as advocated by Coon in the 1950s (with its racist overtones), has long been discredited by anthropologists. Likewise, the idea that Gigantopithecus evolved in Asia into a human-like creature known as the Yeti is also discredited by the falsification of the multiregional hypothesis. So Gigantopithecus is no longer regarded as connected to the Yeti.
Not surprisingly, though, cryptozoologists beginning with Bernard Heuvelmans in 1952 have suggested that the Yeti (and, later, Bigfoot) is a surviving descendant of Gigantopithecus. The cryptozoological literature is full of unsupported speculations about the dispersal of these immense apes throughout Asia and North America from different primate stocks, and Bigfoot and Yeti are their relicts.† None of this amateur theorizing, based on outdated concepts of primate evolution, bears any relation to what anthropologists know about the real history of hominid fossils and human evolution. Many strong lines of evidence argue against the idea that either the Yeti or Bigfoot is a surviving Gigantopithecus:
• Gigantopithecus was a giant relative of the orangutan, not a close relative of humans. Although anthropologists do not have much evidence of its skeleton, it is reasonable to assume that its foot resembled that of an orangutan or another great ape, not that of a human, with its reduced big toe and inability to grasp. Thus its footprints should resemble ape footprints, not the human-like footprints allegedly produced by the Yeti or Bigfoot. And the tracks should show the stooped knuckle-walking gait of the orangutan and all the other great apes, not the extremely human-like bipedal-walking posture allegedly shown by the Yeti and Bigfoot. (Indeed, one of the biggest problems with the film by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin that purports to have captured Bigfoot is that the walking posture of the creature is almost completely human, not ape-like in the least.).
• Although Gigantopithecus fossils are rare, an animal as large as that ape would still be expected to be fossilized at least a few times if it had survived anywhere in the world after 300,000 years ago. For example, one pro-Bigfoot organization claims: “No research group has ever made an attempt to look for Giganto bones in North America, so no one should be surprised that Giganto remains have never been identified in North America. Ironically, the most vocal skeptics and scientists who rhetorically ask why no bones have been located and identified on this continent are the last people who would ever make an effort to look for them.”* This assertion is patently false and reveals ignorance about the fossil record and the practice of paleontology. Paleontologists do not look for particular fossils, but collect any and all deposits that yield decent fossils. For deposits of the past 300,000 years (middle and late Pleistocene), there are extraordinarily good fossil records in both China, where hundreds of paleontologists have been working for many decades, and especially North America, where fossils of larger mammals (especially from cave deposits) have been found in every state in the United States and in most provinces in Canada.† Hundreds of paleontologists have collected these fossils for more than a century and documented them in excruciating detail. Many extremely rare species are known, including an American cheetah and a camel that was built like a mountain goat. Yet not once has anything resembling Gigantopithecus been found—not even the smallest tooth fragment (which could be easily recognized by its thick enamel and distinct low-crowned cusps). Contrary to the conspiratorial thinking of cryptozoologists, paleontologists would be overjoyed to find such a fossil and announce it with great fanfare because such a discovery could make a reputation. They have no reason to hide such a fossil in order to thwart cryptozoologists.
* G. H. R. von Koenigswald, “Gigantopithecus blacki von Koenigswald, a Giant Fossil Hominoid from the Pleistocene of Southern China,” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 43 (1952): 295–325.
* Russell L. Ciochon, John Olsen, and Jamie James, Other Origins: The Search for the Giant Ape in Human Prehistory (New York: Bantam Books, 1990); Elwyn L. Simons and Peter C. Ettel, “Gigantopithecus,” Scientific American, January 1970, 77–85.
* Russell L. Ciochon, Dolores R. Piperno, and Robert G. Thompson, “Opal Phytoliths Found on the Teeth of the Extinct Ape Gigantopithecus blacki: Implications for Paleodietary Studies,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 87 (1990): 8120–8124; Russell L. Ciochon, “The Ape That Was,” Natural History, November 1991, 54–62.
† R. Ciochon, V. T. Long, R. Larick, L. González, R. Grün, J. de Vos, C. Yonge, L. Taylor, H. Yoshida, and M. Reagan, “Dated Co-Occurrence of Homo erectus and Gigantopithecus from Tham Khuyen Cave, Vietnam,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 93, no. 7 (1996): 3016–3020.
‡ Brian Regal, Searching for Sasquatch: Crackpots, Eggheads, and Cryptozoology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 64–72.
* Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).
† “The Bigfoot–Giganto Theory,” Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, http://www.bfro.net/ref/theories/mjm/whatrtha.asp (accessed October 22, 2011).
* Ibid.
† Björn Kurtén and Elaine Anderson, Pleistocene Mammals of North America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
One of the most famous “sightings” was by physicist and runner Anthony B. Wooldridge. On March 5, 1986, while doing a 200-mile run with just a rucksack in the upper Alaknanda Valley of northern India, he saw what he thought was a Yeti at an elevation of about 12,500 feet near Ghangaria:
It was difficult to restrain my excitement as I came to the realization that the only animal I could think of which remotely resembled this one before me was the Yeti. My skepticism about the creature’s existence was overturned by this all-too-real creature then in view. It was standing with its legs apart, apparently looking down the slope, with its right shoulder turned towards me. The head was large and squarish, and the whole body appeared to be covered with dark hair, although the upper arm was a slightly lighter color. The creature was amazingly good at remaining motionless, although the bush vibrated once or twice, and when I moved back to lower ground, it appeared to have changed its head position and to be looking directly at me.
I took a number of photographs from an estimated range of 150 meters [490 feet]….
After about 45 minutes, the weather continued to deteriorate, and light snow began to fall. The animal still showed no sign of moving, although occasionally the shrub vibrated slightly. I moved back down the slope a short distance, and got the impression that the animal was now peering towards me around the other side of the shrub, but its feet had not changed in position.132
Wooldridge then left the area as the snowfall increased. When he returned to civilization, his account was published. His photographs were a sensation in the cryptozoological community. Enlarged and digitally enhanced as far as they could be, they were analyzed, discussed, and debated endlessly about what the large dark object was and how it should be interpreted
. But a subsequent trek revealed why the mysterious Yeti had been able to hold still for so long. A year later, Wooldridge retraced his trail to the same mountain site and took stereo photographs of the location. Photogrammetric analysis then revealed that the large black “hominid” was just an outcrop of rock! Wooldridge conceded that “beyond a reasonable doubt that what I had believed to be a stationary, living creature was, in reality, a rock.”133
Like Bigfoot, the Yeti has been hoaxed. In 1996, the television program Paranormal Borderland played a video sequence taken from March 12 to August 6, 1996.134 Called “The Snow Walker Film,” it was presented as genuine footage of the Yeti, but later investigation proved that the video had been a staged hoax, probably by the producers of the film. It was broadcast on the same network that produced the famous program Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction …?, which became one of the most famous hoaxes in television history—although some UFO fans still believe that the footage is real. Cynically, the show was later recycled by the same network in a program called The World’s Greatest Hoaxes: Secrets Finally Revealed.
Abominable Science Page 14
