Giganto

A few days ago, I stopped by our local natural history museum to kill some time between appointments. What I found was mind-blowing: a lifelike bust of Gigantopithecus "Giganto" blacki. As it turns out, forensic archeology, carbon dating, electron microscopy, and geometrical extrapolation lets us know that Giganto was about ten feet tall and weighed an average of 1,200 pounds - and that's damn heavy for a vegetarian. And there wasn't just one - there were a whole bunch of Gigantos knuckle-walking around the vast forests of ancient Asia. Giganto papas! Giganto mamas! Wee giganto babies grazing on grasses and nibbling the fruits and seeds of dicotyledons.

What's most awesome about the Gigantos, though, is the fact that they lived during the middle Pleistocene (between one million & 300,000 years ago), alongside - that's right - Homo erectus. Yup, Asian pre-humans (Homo sapiens derived from Homo erectus) actually co-existed with a nomadic race of massive apes!

I did some web-based research on Giganto and discovered, right off the bat, that Bigfoot enthusiasts love 'em. They're a rosetta stone to a whole range of theories about how the elusive North American ape is simply a modern day Gigantopithecus, etc., etc., etc. And who knows, right? It could happen. Either way, I'm content to imagine what kind of relationship existed between Homo erectus and Giganto. Was Giganto feared? Hunted? Eaten? Worshipped? All of the above? Did Homo erectus learn survival skills/social organization from Giganto? Vice versa? What's embedded in our archaic collective unconscious as a result of sharing earth with a massive apeman tribe? I love generating hypotheses about this.

What I'm really waiting for, though, is the day that some archaeologist finds a mummified alien somewhere in North America, still clutching the blueprints to galactic world peace and, like groovy vibrations, daddy-o.