New Scientist - USA (2019-11-16)

8 | New Scientist | 16 November 2019

News

Primates

The largest ever ape

A pioneering technique reveals the huge, extinct Gigantopithecus

was a distant cousin of orangutans, reports Michael Marshall

STANDING at least 2.5 metres

tall, Gigantopithecus lived in the

forests of South-East Asia between

2 million and 300,000 years ago.

It was larger than any living great

ape, but all we have found of it

so far are teeth and fragments

from jawbones (see picture),

so we know little about its

appearance or behaviour.

Now we have been able to

glimpse its family tree, which

suggests it split from orangutan-

like cousins around 11 million

years ago.

To create the family tree,

Frido Welker at the University of

Copenhagen in Denmark and his

colleagues studied a 1.9-million-

year-old Gigantopithecus tooth

discovered in southern China.

The climate in this region is

subtropical, with an average

temperature of around 20°C.

In such warm and wet conditions,

DNA soon breaks down, so it isn’t

possible to read Gigantopithecus’s

genome. Instead, the team

extracted proteins from its tooth

enamel, as these are more durable.

“This is the big breakthrough of

this paper,” says Katerina Douka

of the Max Planck Institute for the

Science of Human History in Jena,

Germany. DNA is normally used

for studies like these, but proteins

are a promising alternative in

cases where this isn’t possible.

“No one so far has ever managed

to get DNA older than 8000 to

10,000 years old from that part

of the world.”

The researchers compared the

Gigantopithecus proteins to those

of other apes. This allowed them

to draw a family tree that suggests

Gigantopithecus’s closest living

relatives are orangutans (Nature,

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1728-8).

This was long suspected,

says Russell Ciochon at the

University of Iowa. “We expect

Gigantopithecus to be more

closely related to the orangutans

than the African apes,” he says.

Welker’s study suggests the

ancestors of Gigantopithecus

split from those of orangutans

10 to 12 million years ago, a time

when apes were diversifying.

This means much of the ape’s

evolutionary history remains

unknown, as the oldest

Gigantopithecus remains found

so far are only 2 million years old.

The study is a significant step

forward for the use of ancient

proteins. It demonstrates that

it is possible to obtain proteins

from 2-million-year-old teeth in

warm climates. Proteins may last

even longer in fossils in more

temperate regions.

Indeed, other researchers have

managed to extract proteins from

a 3.5-million-year-old camel bone

found in the Arctic.

It is unclear just how long

such proteins can be preserved.

Some researchers claim to

have extracted proteins from

66-million-year-old dinosaur

fossils. However, many believe

those proteins are bacterial

contamination.

Douka is optimistic about

whether ancient proteins can last

this long. She says it is possible

dinosaur proteins are preserved,

but she thinks that our techniques

aren’t yet sensitive enough to

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Research funding

Ethnic minority

academics get less

money for research

WHITE researchers are nearly 59 per

cent more likely to get funding for

their research than ethnic minority

researchers, according to a

summary of data about seven UK

research councils. The summary

also reveals that the average grant

awarded to white researchers is

more than £100,000 bigger than

the average grant awarded to those

from ethnic minority backgrounds.

The summary covers 2014 to

2019 and was collated by UK

Research and Innovation (UKRI),

which oversees a number of

research funding councils in the UK.

It reveals that white principal

investigators are successful in their

grant proposals 27 per cent of the

time on average, whereas ethnic

minority principal investigators are

only successful 17 per cent of the

time. The average research grant

given to a white researcher was

£670,000, whereas the average

for an ethnic minority researcher

was £564,000.

UKRI collated the figures in

response to a request from the

MP Norman Lamb, then chair of

the House of Commons Science and

Technology Committee. The request

followed pressure from campaign

group The Inclusion Group for Equity

in Research in STEMM (TIGERS).

Tanvir Hussain, at the University

of Nottingham and a member of

TIGERS, says that the summary

doesn’t go into enough detail.

By lumping the research councils

together, he says, it isn’t possible

to tell which are doing better

or worse than the others. The

summary also doesn’t look at the

success rates of different ethnicities.

A UKRI spokesperson says the

body will publish diversity analyses

for each research council after next

month’s general election.

UKRI welcomed the Science and

Technology Committee’s plans to

hold an inquiry into the impact of

science funding policy on equality.

However, the committee has been

dissolved until after the UK election,

and will comprise a different set

of MPs when it is reconvened. ❚

Jason Arunn Murugesu

A reconstruction of the

ape, and one of several

jawbones found

17 %

of proposals from ethnic minority

researchers are successful