The world’s largest ape vanished from Earth more than 100,000 years earlier than once thought, pushed to extinction as the environment around it shifted, researchers report January 10 in Nature.
The new extinction date comes from new analyses of fossils of Gigantopithecus blacki, as well as on the sediments of about a dozen caves in southern China where the ape once dwelled. Instead of dying out around 100,000 years ago, the ape was driven to extinction between 295,000 and 215,000 years ago, the team found.
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