The largest ape that ever walked the Earth, Gigantopithecus blacki, lived in what is now China and went extinct between 295,000–215,000 years ago.
📏 Height: ~3 meters (9.8 ft)
⚖️ Weight: 200–300 kg (441–661 lbs)
📸 Image: Paleo-anthro sculptor Bill Munns with his Giganto reconstruction in his Los Angeles backyard.
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imagine a homo florensis (hobbit people lived in they area), walking though the forest and meeting a Gigantopithecus.
Like meeting a gid
Imagine homo florensis had managed to domesticate Gigantopithecus, riding on their shoulders like toddlers shooting arrows to hunt food.
History would have played out differently with a mini Genghis Khan and his horde riding on giant apes!
there’s room for prehistoric fantasy,
there are multiple human races: Neanderthals, Cromagnon, Nadelii, Florensis… Megafauna, endless wilderness…
however, knowing humans, chances are of one didn’t kill all the others, battle royale style, it would end up with one domesticating the others for what is basically slavery, but with 50 thousand years of artificially selecting the best most loyal ‘slaves’ it’ll end up as a extremely loyal and friendly household/and industrial labour.
Yeah that’s basically what we’ve done to wolves, horses, cats and cows/oxen through breeding. A giant ape would be a little more intelligent and sapient, but not that much. What would be unique would be a domesticated animal that can grasp and pick up and carry things, and trained to use some tools.
Hypothetically humans could have "domesticated " another group of humans, and with enough drifting, cause speciation. or at least enough difference that a “domesticate domestic/labour human” would be much different than a normal human, then breed them into countless breeds.
imagine if a slaver tribe 10k years ago existed until now, and their slaves ended up domesticated…
Only reason I doubt that could happen in long term, is because slavers will sexually assault their slaves resulting in enough intermixing to stop any genetic domestication.
sorry, I’m in a long drive and just stop in the bathroom and I’m now chatting for no reason …
Haha well that is much darker and sounds like a good premise for a science fiction / fantasy. I think star trek had a story like that. And planet of the apes / the time machine.
Crazy enough, there have been attempts to create a hybrid between an chimpanzee and a human. Luckily, none succeeded lol
What I imagined gorillas looked like as a child.
It’s super cool that we can still see it even though the photograph isn’t real.
I think its a real photo of a recreation of the ape.
No, it’s not a real photograph. It says so in the photograph.
I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic.
Sure but I think this photograph was taken in an era when the only technology available to make an image that looked like this was photography. At that time “not a real photograph” was the equivalent to the statement “a photograph of something which is not what it appears to be”.
Pretty sure they’re just joking. They’re correct though, it says it’s not real on the photo, photos don’t lie.
Depicting what the extinct Gigantopithecus blacki looked like standing next to a modern human for scale.
Which one is which?
Basketball players and their girlfriends
Is there any evidence it stood on two feet? Figured it would look more like a gorilla then this.
Wikipedia on gorillas:
The heaviest wild gorilla recorded was a 1.83 m (6 ft 0 in) silverback shot in Ambam, Cameroon, which weighed 267 kg (589 lb).[30] The tallest gorilla in captivity was Gust, a western lowland gorilla that was captured as a baby in Belgian Congo and spent his life at Antwerp Zoo. He was 2.20 m (7 ft 3 in) tall. Males in captivity can be overweight and reach weights up to 310 kg (683 lb).
The Gigantopithecus has nothing to do with Gorillas, it was a specie which lived between 6 millon and 200.000 years ago and with an estimated hight between 2,7 - 3m. Means that the recreation of the photo is correct, except, like also Gorillas he moved mostly over legs and arms.
The Gigantopithecus is the largest extinct primate and the gorilla is the largest extant primate. They are both primates. So are humans but we already have an idea about how big humans can get.
Edit: I should have included something on the average size of gorillas though since these Giganto sizes are approximately averages.
We finally got a clear picture of bigfoot.
Great photo. Tried to fix the colors just enough to clarify the scale:
Caption writer seems to be confused about what a real photograph is and what conceptual means.
I just commented this somewhere else:
I think this photograph was taken in an era when the only technology available to make an image that looked like this was photography. At that time “not a real photograph” was the equivalent to the statement “a photograph of something which is not what it appears to be”.
See my reply to the other reply to my comment.
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Fake and real photograph used to have a very different meaning indeed.
This is a “real” photo of Denise Richards and Paul Walker:
This is a “fake” photo of Denise Richards and Paul Walker (in the body of a cybernetic T-Rex):
In case I wasn’t clear about this in my other reply, my main point is that a photo of something fake is not the same thing add as a fake photo. If the dinosaur is animatronic, it’s not a fake photo. If the dinosaur is CGI, yeah fake photo.
Yeah, that’s why my comment was basically words and phrases have shifting connotations as time passes and contexts change.
No, this is sloppy use of language, which worked the same 50 years ago. The only thing different today is the range of things that exist that we can infer that they really mean by their sloppy language. There were still ways to manipulate photos, before CGI. One might have called such a manipulated photo a ‘fake photograph’ in that day (though even that is arguably a little sloppy). But a non manipulated photo of a real physical model is not in any way a ‘fake photograph’. You could say a photograph of a fake Gigantopithecus, or of a fake scene but that’s not the same thing. Yes, we can infer what’s meant when people carelessly slap adjectives on the wrong nouns, but it is sloppy writing.
Notice how much more accurate and well written OP’s description is: “Paleo-anthro sculptor Bill Munns with his Giganto reconstruction”
Yeah nah.
I agree that its sloppy language but it would’ve been more descriptive in the 80s.
Dude I’m not arguing that it’s correct or not, I’m saying that this is the way many people used to (and how some still do) use the language.
Oh, sure, no disagreement from me on that. But this looks to me like something from a magazine, so one expects some level of professionalism. Now if this is some 12 year old’s fanzine or something, ok, I feel bad for giving them shit, but a professional journalist should be embarrassed.
No u should 🤦♀️
The banana is being covered by the dude’s left arm.
“Holy FUCK, boys! He looks t’ be about a ten footer!”
“We noticed you from across the canopy and like your vibe”
