Stymied, Grogan attempts to skip town with team funds, forcing his former protégé to enforce their deal in a more physical fashion.

De Camp based his Gigantanths on the fossil species Gigantopithecus, then called Gigantanthropus and theorized to be a human ancestor.

As de Camp himself noted in 1973, "[a]ccording to an article in the Scientific American for January 1970, the huge fossil primate ... is not now considered, as it was at first, a carnivore, [but] is now thought to have been a gramnivore (i.e., living mainly on the seeds of cereal grasses) [and] is no longer deemed partly ancestral to man (as the late Dr Weidenreich thought) but much closer to the gorilla, probably resembling a gorilla 9 feet tall when standing erect, and weighing circa 600 pounds.

"[3] P. Schuyler Miller, commenting on the story, notes that it "plays with the possibilities of back-breeding people to recreate our pre-Sapiens forebears—in this case a well-meaning Gigantanthropus who gets a short-lived job in pro-football.

Other examples include the short story "Living Fossil" (1939) and novel Genus Homo (1950), placing remnant Homo Sapiens in futures dominated by evolved monkeys and apes, "The Gnarly Man" (1939), about an immortal Neanderthal Man, some of the Viagens Interplanetarias and Novarian tales, which feature both advanced and primitive humanoids co-existing in their respective venues, and the late novel The Pixilated Peeress (1991), in which Neanderthal survivors live on as "trolls" in an alternate Europe.