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It's like deja vu all over again.

Meganthropus are just a group of Java hominids that typically had very large teeth and sometimes show signs of being very robust in other ways. It likely includes different populations or species even though they are all grouped as Homo erectus. The teeth of one individual was something like two thirds the size of gigantopithecus. They typically seem to be an older group of hominids that were likely largely replaced in later migrations. Dating of fossils is very difficult on Java for geological reasons. It seems likely to me that they were replaced as the dominant hominid about 800,000 years ago by our common ancestor with heidelbergensis. That approximate time is supported by teeth studies in Asia that show either an extremely rapid evolution or a replacement about a million years ago. My source for that opinion was the book A New Human by Mike Morwood and the fact that it seems a logical assumption for other reasons. Meganthropus were found in Java. There were probably other populations in other parts of Asia that have yet to be discovered besides georgicus. Georgicus were little though not that it really matters that long ago as a potential ancestor of sasquatch. Any one of the hominids back that far could have radiated into other species and been the ancestor of sasquatch. Some of them likely had already grown very large by a million years ago so the argument for gigantopithecus being the logical ancestor of bigfoot based on size evaporates. It was extremely weak since size can change very easily depending on niche. How large some of the meganthropus grew remains an open question because some hominids like the robust australopithecines otherwise known as paranthropus apparently grew large teeth in response to their niche. They have more than just the jaws by the way. Some parts of the lower skulls of some meganthropus have been interpreted by some to indicate very large size. Some of them have very thick skulls, indications of reduced frontal lobes, a double occipital crest that converges on the top of the skull and other features that don't suggest it was the technological immediate ancestors of modern humans. They had assumed that all the Asian fossils were erectus based on the largely discredited notion that erectus was the first hominid to leave Africa. The basis for that argument has largely evaporated recently with evidence from floresiensis and other hominids. It is so difficult for most people to adjust to new data and drop discredited notions that I don't expect the erectus bias to end anytime soon. There was also a bias that said that they weren't large apparently mainly because of giants in mythology and the tendency of many scientists to want to distance themselves from mythology. There seems to be some hostility toward the idea that some of them might have been very large. It seems to be a strong emotionally based bias in many anthropologists that don't even seem to regard that as a bias. My belief was basically that early in Homo our ancestors no longer required trees as nighttime sleeping places and that allowed a radiation event as we spread to Asia which included non forested areas and large size wasn't inhibited by the need to climb trees. There was also an apparent increase in brain size. We changed fundamentally and that opened opportunities for many different populations to adopt different lifestyles or niches. They eventually became species but how many depends on if you are a lumper or a splitter but that is basically semantics. They still apparently split into different populations. Growing larger isn't difficult from an evolutionary perspective. All it requires is a niche where it is beneficial and some time but certainly not millions of years as is easily demonstrated in the fossil record. It is something that should be expected in some populations in a radiation event and it apparently happened. Turkana boy was huge and he was found near a fossil of one of the smallest adult erectus fossils known not to mention a Homo habilis fossil. That should spell it out for people who are paying attention how rapidly hominid sizes can change. I always thought it was bogus to just assume that all the varieties of meganthropus were necessarily erectus armed with Acheulean technology and stone handaxes especially considering how few Asian stone handaxes they found. It was circular logic to support what they thought they knew and that was that erectus was the first to leave Africa. There was a wonderful narrative that had become common knowledge how we evolved on the plains as a hunter, lost our hair to cool off, made stone handaxes and other circular logic was built up to support the narrative. It should have been obvious to anyone looking at the fossils how hollow that evidence was but agendas and wonderful narratives get in the way until the evidence eventually forces people to abandon what they think they know. That will probably take several years for something as deeply ingrained as what some people assume they know about erectus. The polyphyletic designation of paranthrupus would just mean they think the large teeth evolved independently. It therefore doesn't make a valid taxonomic group and they don't share common paranthropus ancestors so it is sort of odd that someone would propose using it.

I've said before that they are the ultimate lurkers. And they're not just confined to the wilderness. They inhabit rural America and they are sighted with regular frequency in what we would normally call suburban developments. As BFSleuth says, they are apex predators, and thier stealthy behavior mirrors that of ambush predators. People will not be sanguine about either their behavior, that they are monstrous in aspect (face it, the scariest monsters are perversions of the human form), or the fact that they have remained active, yet unknown, for generations. I can think of several monster movies based solely on these three elements.