Gigantopithecus

 Setting the dial on our geological time travelling machine to a relatively recent period now, as we head back only 150,000 years ago to the Pleistocene epoch. In the dwindling bamboo forests of South Asia we might find our extinct homo-genus cousins, Homo Erectus (the oldest living of the homo- species) treading very carefully. That's because Homo Erectus had to share these forests with Giganthopithecus Blacki, the largest ape ever known. At nearly 10 feet tall, these bamboo-eating apes were King Kong before King Kong was even a thing.

My interest in Giganthopithecus was fuelled when I saw an artistic interpretation of what one of these apes might have looked like, and I was struck by the immediate resemblance to my ex-partner. Regardless, much of what we know about this 540 kg 'bigfoot' comes from teeth and jaws found in Vietnam, and the dental studies show that they lived on a diet of seeds, fruit and bamboo. What led to their extinction is likely to be a combination of climate change and a low reproductive rate, although there is also a strong possibility that Homo Erectus aggravated their demise, as shown in this aforementioned illustration: