5 hours ago
https://gizmodo.com/bigfoot-like-ancient...2000801208
EXCERPT: To the ongoing consternation of joyless scolds, Tschernezky’s hypothesis has forever linked his study’s “Abominable Snowman” and America’s legendary Sasquatch to Gigantopithecus—the quite literally gigantic genus of great ape that made Asia its home from about 2 million to 200,000 years ago.
In the intervening 76 years since Tschernezky’s paper, anthropologists, paleontologists, and experts in primate anatomy and genetics have since learned a lot more about Gigantopithecus and related prehistoric primates, like Paranthropus and Australopithecus.
Now, a new study published Tuesday in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology argues that several of these groups ought to be recategorized into the genus Homo, alongside Homo Sapiens like us.
“These groups do not necessarily represent distinct evolutionary branches, or ‘clades,’ and differences in behaviour and ecology once used to distinguish them have also become increasingly difficult to maintain,” Ian Towle, a research fellow at the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute and author of the study, explained in a statement.
The fossil record on several genera of extinct ape, he writes in the paper, have shown these primates to display smaller and more human-like canine teeth, among other dental similarities; and those cases included specimens from the genera Indopithecus, Ouranopithecus, and (Bigfoot suspects themselves) Gigantopithecus... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: To the ongoing consternation of joyless scolds, Tschernezky’s hypothesis has forever linked his study’s “Abominable Snowman” and America’s legendary Sasquatch to Gigantopithecus—the quite literally gigantic genus of great ape that made Asia its home from about 2 million to 200,000 years ago.
In the intervening 76 years since Tschernezky’s paper, anthropologists, paleontologists, and experts in primate anatomy and genetics have since learned a lot more about Gigantopithecus and related prehistoric primates, like Paranthropus and Australopithecus.
Now, a new study published Tuesday in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology argues that several of these groups ought to be recategorized into the genus Homo, alongside Homo Sapiens like us.
“These groups do not necessarily represent distinct evolutionary branches, or ‘clades,’ and differences in behaviour and ecology once used to distinguish them have also become increasingly difficult to maintain,” Ian Towle, a research fellow at the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute and author of the study, explained in a statement.
The fossil record on several genera of extinct ape, he writes in the paper, have shown these primates to display smaller and more human-like canine teeth, among other dental similarities; and those cases included specimens from the genera Indopithecus, Ouranopithecus, and (Bigfoot suspects themselves) Gigantopithecus... (MORE - missing details)