From One Tooth to One Body: Single-Specimen Molecular Anchoring and Inferential Drift in Gigantopithecus blacki Reconstruction

Gigantopithecus blacki is among the most visible extinct hominoids in public-facing, secondary, textbook-level, and museum-style reconstructions, yet its anatomical record remains unusually narrow. The species is currently known from a dental and mandibular hypodigm: four partial mandibles and nearly 2,000 isolated teeth, with no recovered skull, pelvis, vertebrae, femur, tibia, hand, foot, or articulated postcranial material. In 2019, paleoproteomic work recovered dental-enamel protein sequences from one referred G. blacki molar from Chuifeng Cave and placed the specimen as an early-diverging pongine, close to the orangutan lineage. That result is a genuine scientific advance and should be treated as the strongest available molecular anchor for the taxon; the issue is not whether the tested molar can support a pongine placement, but whether one molecularly sampled referred tooth can support whole-body anatomical reconstruction. The argument does not require that primary researchers have uniformly overstated the evidence. Instead, it tracks how cautious primary results can become anatomical certainty in secondary summaries, public visuals, and simulated bodies. This paper distinguishes four evidentiary categories often compressed in secondary reconstructions: direct dental evidence, single-specimen molecular anchoring, comparative inference, and whole-body visualization. It argues that diet, dental development, approximate body size, and phylogenetic placement are valid targets of dental analysis when reported with appropriate uncertainty, but locomotion, posture, hand and foot anatomy, facial structure, and gait cannot be measured from teeth alone. A cautionary comparison is drawn from the Hemanthropus peii reassessment, in which internal dental imaging reassigned most of a historically named Asian Pleistocene “hominin” dental sample to Pongo. The lesson is not that G. blacki is misclassified, but that isolated Asian Pleistocene teeth can stabilize narratives beyond their evidentiary reach. The paper proposes a reporting template for dental-only hominoid taxa that separates measured traits from reference-taxon borrowing and flags full-body reconstructions as conditional visualizations rather than recovered anatomy.