00:03we might fancy ourselves the smartest apes to ever have lived but we are certainly not the largest
00:08that honorific goes to gigantopithecus blackie a creature that likely stood nearly 10 feet tall
00:14and weighed upwards of 660 pounds so what happened to this veritable gargantuan well according to
00:20paleontologist yin qi zhang it's been somewhat of a mystery but they might finally have figured it
00:24out gigantopithecus went extinct between 295 000 and 215 000 years ago based on radiometric dating
00:32from the jawbone fossils and teeth we have the only signs of the creature it lived in what is now
00:37southern china and based on pollen samples from the time the giant ape went extinct researchers are
00:42beginning to divine a cause they say that gigantopithecus thrived in the dense forest the
00:47area was known for but a changing climate ultimately did them in those dense fruit-filled forests became
00:53more sparse with grasslands taking over many of those areas meaning less diverse foods to eat
00:58and fossil records indicate chronic stress as nutrition became more difficult in a changing world
01:02and for a creature as large as gigantopithecus was food is always going to be number one
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