A 2,200-year-old Chinese tomb held a new gibbon species, now extinct
Researchers suspect that humans drove this previously unknown lineage to extinction
EXTINCTIONS PAST People may have caused a distinctive line of gibbons to go extinct sometime within the last 2,000 years, a discovery from an ancient Chinese tomb suggests. All gibbon species living today (Hoolock hoolock, shown) are imperiled.
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A royal crypt from China’s past has issued a conservation alert for apes currently eking out an existence in East Asia.
The partial remains of a gibbon were discovered in 2004 in an excavation of a 2,200- to 2,300-year-old tomb in central China’s Shaanxi Province. Now, detailed comparisons of the animal’s face and teeth with those of living gibbons show that the buried ape is from a previously unknown and now-extinct genus and species, conservation biologist Samuel Turvey and colleagues report in the June 22 Science. His team named the creature Junzi imperialis.
There’s currently no way to know precisely when J. imperialis died out. But hunting and the loss of forests due to expanding human populations likely played big roles in the demise of the ape, the researchers contend.
“Until the discovery of J. imperialis, it was
