This just in:

"The old Gigantopithecus has been shoved back to 300,000 years, sorry to say. It appears Jack Rink was a little hasty. Here is what I received from Dr. Jeff Meldrum: "Jack Rink released to the press a preliminary result of an age of 100,000 years ago (likely because they were hoping for that young of a date so they could carry on with plans to attempt to extract and sequence DNA from the fossil teeth). However, the final result was an absolute date of 300,000 years ago, confirming earlier relative dating estimates for those cave deposits based on faunal associations. [Of course it is unlikely that Gigantopithecus routinely inhabited caves, rather its bones were occasionally carried into caves by scavengers. So the dates are for the age of the deposits in the particular caves that happened to have the few Giganto bones that comprise the paltry sample at hand. They may not reflect the actual temporal and geographic range of the species, but merely reflect the bias in preservation and discovery of these rare fossils.] I hate to see this dating inaccuracy perpetuated, as much as I would have liked it to be so." "


Frm the Murphy File Newsletter #2.

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On C2C THUSDAY NIGHT LOREN COLEMAN was on during the 1st hr and he said this BIGFOOT-LIKE CREATURE could very will be a giato or a close reliveted and it is belived to be 12 feet tall and not as bulky as the NORTH AMERICAN BIGFOOT but cross between skinny and fat (not to much fat) if true and the way the evdince is mounting we should know soon.TIME WILL TELL

In a phone conversation with Dr. Krantz maybe 15 years ago he told me they had discovered some very young (approximately 100,000 year old) Giganto fossils in Vietnam apparently by the Viet Cong during the tunnelling in the war; however, I have never been able to confirm this through other sources. As a geologist, hearing that 300,000 year old fossil of an animal were found just makes me conclude that it lived relatively recently. Not to imply that Murphy was saying this, but too often, they seem to imply that they found the fossil from the very last animal before the species went extinct. When there are lots of fossils form lots of places, the degree of certainty increases as to when it probably went extinct. In species that have very few fossils, such as Gigantopithecus, there is no degree of certainty at all when they went extinct. Their estimates are just wild guesses. Environments change over thousands of years as Ice Ages come and go. Animals will either move, adapt or die to these changing environments. Just because a particular place was suitable for Gigantos 300,000 years ago doesn't mean that it was suitable 200,000 years ago. They may have moved. Exposures of soil only give you a hint of a very small snap shot of time when that soil was deposited.

Seems like a lot of folks think that bigfoots come in only one body build......Krantz is at least partly to blame for this mistaken idea......."taint so......lots of variety in body builds....from the bulky females to the much moe slim older males........variety, variety and variety......

100,000 years old was pretty exciting, but 300,000 is okay too. At least that's positive. DNA would have been fantastic.

This was one of the articles:

http://www.physorg.com/news7950.html

By the way, a delayed thanks to LAL for posting this and clearing this up for me.
The Giganto documentary that was on Discovery channel awhile back said Rink came up with a date of 300,000 years ago, but the news articles which came out just prior to that mentioned the 100k y.a. date. So I had been wondering if there was new dating that didn't make it in time for the documentary or what. But none of the articles mentioned any kind of publication. It now seems clear to me that there wasn't actually any new science being published, and the news articles were only reporting on this press release from Rink's university. And the purpose of the press release was not to announce a new paper with any new findings, but to announce that Jack Rink had received "an invitation to join the renowned New York-based Explorers Club."
But it still left me scratching my head about that date.
So thank you for posting this.

A delayed "You're welcome."

The more recent date (to BFers) meant Giganto was more recent than thought and could easily have wandered over the Bering Strait some 30,000 years later. (The older date doesn't mean it, or a descendent, didn't, of course.)

I think it was great of Dr. Meldrum to alert Chris Murphy before any feet got more firmly stuck in the mouth.