Frido Welker

Palaeoproteomic analysis of Early Pleistocene Gigantopithecus blacki.

Welker, F.§,#, Ramos Madrigal, J.§, Wang, W.£, de Manuel Montero, M.±, Allentoft, M.§, Demeter, F. §,≠, Lalueza-Fox, C. ±, Marques-Bonet, T. ±,ʭ,¤, Olsen, J.V.‡, Cappellini, E.§

§ Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark; # Department of Human Evolution, Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany; £ Anthropology Museum of Guangxi, Nanning, China; ± Institute of Evolutionary Biology (UPF-CSIC), Barcelona, Spain; ≠ National Natural History Museum, UMR7206 Anthropologie Évolutive, Paris, France; ʭ Catalan Institution of Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain; ¤ CNAG-CRG, Centre for Genomic Regulation, Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Barcelona, Spain; ‡ Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, Faculty of Health Science, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.

Gigantopithecus blacki is a giant hominid known from a few subtropical or tropical localities between 2.0 and 0.3 Ma in southern China and northern Vietnam. The first remains of the species were discovered and identified by von Koenigswald in a Hong Kong drugstore where they were sold as “dragon teeth”. Knowledge on the species remains limited to relatively large amounts of teeth and four mandibles. Nevertheless, it is one of the few, if not the only, extinct non-hominin hominid for which Pleistocene fossil specimens are available. The species is currently considered a diverging side branch of Pongo, although initial phylogenetic assessments proposed Gigantopithecus to represent an ancestral hominin. Its relationships with Pongo and other extinct pongines (such as Sivapithecus) remains tentative due to the paucity of postcranial Gigantopithecus remains, and the primitive status of most shared dental characteristics between Gigantopithecus blacki, Indopithecus giganteus (a presumed late Miocene ancestor) and Sivapithecus.

To clarify the phylogenetic status of Gigantopithecus blacki, we sampled a Gigantopithecus molar from Chuifeng Cave, China, for palaeoproteomic analysis. The site is dated by ESR, U-series and paleomagnetic methods to approximately 1.38-1.92 Ma. The Gigantopithecus molars are associated with a typical Early Pleistocene fauna that does not include any Pongo specimen. We attempted proteomic analysis of both dentine and enamel samples and obtained a variety of protein identifications. We explore this proteome in terms of endogenous and contaminating proteins, and utilize any endogenous proteins to describe the phylogenetic relationship of Gigantopithecus in relation to extant hominids from a molecular point of view.