Some 330,000 years ago, giant apes the size of elephants roamed the forests of southern China. Their massive teeth—once sold as a “dragon tooth” by a Hong Kong apothecary—gnawed tough leaves and devoured fruit. Then suddenly, while other primates were thriving, these supersized orangutan-like creatures vanished with almost no trace.
Over geologic time, the vast majority of all species that have ever existed have gone extinct. It’s not particularly meaningful to try to divine the reasons for the extinction of any one particular species. Obviously, the subtext they are trying to convey here is “these were apes, and climate changes drove them to extinction; we are apes, so won’t anthropic climate change drive us to extinction?!1!?” But it doesn’t carry over like that.
maybe if there were 8+ billion of those apes they’d still be alive. but they really sucked at forcing the environment to adapt to them so they went extinct.
Just more population that can’t adapt, lol.