“Giant Ape”—a Mythical Ancestor?
Behind Java and Peking man, it was once supposed, a giant ancestor lurked. Ideas of giants occur in the myths and folklore of most peoples, but here the germ was planted by reputable scientists. It began between 1935 and 1939, when von Koenigswald discovered in a Hong Kong apothecary’s shop three molars that had six times the volume of our teeth and were greater than the equivalent teeth in any other man or ape, living or fossil. Their owner obviously was related to man, but how closely we cannot guess. He was promptly dubbed “giant ape,” Gigantopithecus. Then, in Java in 1941, von Koenigswald recovered part of a massive jaw with a few huge teeth intact. Their great size again prompted a fanciful name, “the giant man of ancient Java,” or Meganthropus palaeojavanicus.
Gigantopithecus—giant ancestor of man? A normal human molar contrasted with one of a number of teeth found in a Hong Kong store. (After Koenigswald, 1947.)
Professor Franz Weidenreich speculated that the Hong Kong teeth would require a beast twice the bulk of a gorilla, while the jaw and teeth of the Java “giant” indicated an ancient man half again as large as a gorilla. Gorillas stand, quite uncomfortably, five and a half feet or so; some weigh more than 600 pounds. Further evidence appeared in 1957, when Pei Wenchung reported the discovery in Kwangsi Province, China, of a jaw bone with teeth, which he claimed to be Gigantopithecus. Pei added that it was closer to man than any other ape yet discovered, and he must have been 12 feet tall.[12]
The logic of including giants among our ancestors stems in part from the fact that many Pleistocene mammals were larger than their modern descendants. What these great teeth and jaws mean, we do not yet know. In the complete absence of such clues to stature as thigh and other bones, there are few who would now speculate that the huge teeth mean more than a fossil ape of otherwise moderate proportions. There is not always an exact correlation between size of teeth and stature, as comparisons among modern man, Peking and Java man, and South African man-apes indicate. The smallest teeth occur among some of the tallest humans; the largest teeth are found among some of the smaller man-apes.
“Java” Men in Africa and Europe?
Halfway around the world, at Ternifine, near Oran, in Algeria, Professor Camille Arambourg recovered a portion of a youthful skull and three jaws in 1954-55. He called these Atlanthropus.[13] This was not a valid new genus, however, for there are strong resemblances between these jaws and those of Peking and Java man. Here is an African cousin of Pithecanthropus. (There are others. A fragment of jaw found near Rabat, in Morocco, also is thought to resemble Java man.) The Ternifine jaws seem to belong to the second interglacial period. At the bottom of an ancient spring from which Arambourg recovered his fossils, he also found a number of stone tools, including fist axes of the Acheulean type. This perhaps is the earliest association of Acheulean artifacts with human bones. You will recall that Acheulean fist axes also were found with Swanscombe. Have we, then, a single type of culture for two quite different kinds of men? Our accumulating evidence is beginning to make it clear that some half-brained form of man closely related to our Java “ape-man” was widely distributed across the inhabitable regions of the Old World during the long second interglacial period.
Man-Apes or Ape-Men in Africa
While Sunday supplements and scientists alike were occupied with Dubois’s “missing link” and his Peking cousin, primate fossils of even greater consequence were being recovered in southern Africa by Professor Raymond Dart and the late Dr. Robert Broom. In 1925, Dart named them Australopithecines or “southern apes.”[14] Arousing little scientific curiosity at first, they were considered by some as a parallel, perhaps profitless, line of evolution. By 1950, such fossils were becoming impressively abundant. A bewildering array of names was assigned to them, without scientific justification. The first had been called Australopithecus africanus; later, another species, prometheus, was added. Others were labeled as distinct genera, taking note of their near-human features—Telanthropus, Plesianthropus, and Paranthropus (with two species, robustus and crassidens). In 1959, a new and important form was added, Zinjanthropus boisei. Zinj is the Arab name for East Africa. Expert opinion now inclines toward lumping these all together, possibly under our own genus, Homo, or at most, within a single genus, Australopithecus. Their status of “ape” is being reassessed: man-apes, some still maintain; ape-men, say others; a few believe they included the earliest true men.