English

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Noun

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ape-person (plural ape-people or ape-persons)

  1. A non-human australopithecine; an ape-like precursor to modern humans.
    • 1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World [], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC:
      The openings of these huts and the branches of the trees were thronged with a dense mob of ape-people, whom from their size I took to be the females and infants of the tribe.
    • 1982, James J. O’Donnell, Earthly Matters: A Study of Our Planet, New York, N.Y.: Julian Messner, →ISBN, page 171:
      The earliest fossils that can be classified as ape-persons have been found in South Africa and they date back about 5.5 million years.
    • 1999, James Perloff, “An Ape-man for All Seasons”, in Tornado in a Junkyard: The Relentless Myth of Darwinism, Arlington, Mass.: Refuge Books, →ISBN, page 82:
      In England, Grafton Elliot Smith, who had been involved in the Piltdown affair, convinced The Illustrated London News to publish an artist’s rendering of Nebraska Man. The picture, which appeared in a two-page spread and received wide distribution, showed two brutish, naked ape-persons, the male with a club, the female gathering roots. All this from one tooth.
    • 2000, Geoffrey Grant Pope, The Biological Bases of Human Behavior, Allyn and Bacon, →ISBN, page 101:
      It remains a great mystery as to how these slow locomoting ape-persons survived in relatively open terrestrial environments without the aid of great speed, large canines, large body size, stone tool technology, or other physical adaptations that most mammals possess.
    • 2013, Norva Y.S. Lo, Andrew Brennan, “The Last Man”, in John Huss, editor, Planet of the Apes and Philosophy: Great Apes Think Alike (Popular Culture and Philosophy; 74), Chicago, Ill.: Open Court Publishing Company, →ISBN, part IX (Planet), page 275:
      The anthropocentrist who values rationality, and sees it as the essence of being a person, would regard Taylor as having wiped out morally significant beings, since both mutants and ape-persons are clearly rational. Hence the act is a great wrong.
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