- Key People:
- Edward Tyson
- Related Topics:
- lemur
- flying lemur
- Amphipithecidae
- anthropoid
- prosimian
The Pleistocene Epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago) is the epoch of hominin (protohuman) expansion. Knowledge of nonhuman primates, except for some selected Old World monkeys, is surprisingly sketchy. No ape fossils are known until relatively recent times, and monkeys have been identified in only a few regions in Africa and even fewer in Asia—e.g., Cercopithecoides, Paracolobus, and Rhinocolobus (members of the subfamily Colobinae) and Gorgopithecus and Dinopithecus (related to the living genus Papio), from South African deposits. Simopithecus, a giant ancestral forerunner, according to most authorities, of the present-day genus, Theropithecus (gelada), was unearthed from Olduvai Gorge and South Africa and was recently discovered also in India. It is possible that the Papio-Theropithecus divergence can be pushed well back into the Pliocene.
One genus of the Pleistocene that is neither ape nor monkey in the sense that these taxa are interpreted today is Gigantopithecus. The romantic story of the discovery of the gargantuan molar teeth of Gigantopithecus blacki by the German-Dutch paleontologist G.H.R. von Koenigswald in a Chinese pharmacy has often been told. His boldness in erecting a new genus on such apparently slender grounds has been amply justified by the subsequent discovery of several massive jaws from Kwangsi in South China, which are apparently about a million years old, and by numerous teeth from caves in China and Vietnam. In one such cave (Tham Khuyen), Gigantopithecus and Homo teeth occur in the same deposits, dated as recently as 475,000 years ago. Furthermore, the discovery of an enormous jaw in the Dhok Pathan deposits of the Siwālik Hills of India, from the earliest Pliocene, has provided a respectably long period of existence for this aberrant giant-toothed hominoid genus. Clearly, Gigantopithecus was a member of the Hominidae related to the orangutan, with divergent dental specializations that were possibly adaptive for foraging in grassland where tree products were unavailable and ground products available but hard to get, which makes it an orangutan lineage that ran for a while in parallel with that of humans.