“Of Giant Apes and Snowmen
IN the 1930’s, Ralph von Koenigswald, who discovered the first man-ape jaw in Java and some human remains to be described shortly, combed the Chinese drugstores of several Oriental cities, in search of fossil teeth. For centuries the Chinese have used the bones of fossil animals to cure their ills, in the belief that courage, strength, and virility come from the powdered remains of large, strong, and potent animals. Their cure for toothache is powdered teeth. Out of thousands of teeth, von Koenigswald found, in Hong Kong, six of particular interest.
They are human-like in form, but six times as large, in volume, as those of living men. Between the stubs of the roots, gnawed by cave porcupines, he detected powdered yellow earth, which told him that the teeth had come from caves near the Yangtze gorges.
He called the animal to whom the teeth had belonged Giganto-pithecus, the giant ape. For years some paleontologists believed that Gigantopithecus was an ancestor of man, but in the late 1950’s Chinese scientists found three jaws of this animal, which was an aberrant ape. It lived in the Pleistocene, too late to be our ancestor.
An even more famous and fabulous animal is the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman. His tracks have been found in snow and mud in the Himalayas, and he has been reported as far north as Mongolia. Eyewitnesses have described him as tall, two-legged, tawny-coated, maned, big-muzzled, and big-toothed. Several expeditions to Nepal and Soviet Central Asia have failed to find this elusive animal, whose numerous tracks are so far unique.
Even if it turns out to be a primate it is more likely to be a survival of Gigantopithecus than an Australopithecine.”
From, The Story of Man
Carleton S. Coon, 1962
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