pithecanthropoid

English

Etymology

Pithecanthropus +‎ -oid

Noun

pithecanthropoid (plural pithecanthropoids)

1. One of the first species of hominid that is considered truly human, originally classed as genus Pithecanthropus but now classed as genus Homo.
   • 1969, Robert Silverberg, The Challenge of Climate: Man and His Environment, page 87:

     And about 40,000 generations separate the australopithecines from their successors, the pithecanthropoids, whom we think of as the first animals that indisputably must be classed as men.

   • 1970, Colin McEvedy, Sarah McEvedy, The Atlas of World History: From the beginning to Alexander the Great, page 6:

     They may in fact have been disposed of more directly: pithecanthropoids certainly ate each other and are likely to have killed and eaten their weaker kin.

   • 1974, Leonard Cottrell, The Concise encyclopedia of archaeology, page 264:

     The brow is without the frontal overhang found in adult pithecanthropoids, but though there is no supra-orbital ridge, there is marked post-orbital constriction.

Adjective

pithecanthropoid (not comparable)

1. Pertaining to or characteristic of the pithecanthropoids.
   • 1924, H. P. Lovecraft, “The Rats in the Walls”, in Weird Tales:

     God! those carrion black pits of sawed, picked bones and opened skulls! Those nightmare chasms choked with the pithecanthropoid, Celtic, Roman, and English bones of countless unhallowed centuries!

   • 1929, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen. Afdeling Natuurkunde, Proceedings of the Section of Sciences - Volume 32, Part 1, page 204:

     3°. by the strong development of the mid-frontal fissure, which is predominant in the relief of Neanderthal casts, and more primitive (more pithecanthropoid) in its character than in recent men, where it is mostly divided up into pieces, probably in consequence of the greater development of the foot of the mid-frontal convolution (see my first paper).

   • 1960, Alan Houghton Brodrick, Man and his ancestry, page 96:

     Culture was the work of some more or less pithecanthropoid type of hominid (e.g. Telanthropus) at a period when the Australopithecines were still flourishing.

   • 1965, Ralph Leon Beals, Harry Hoijer, An Introduction to Anthropology, page 107:

     Coon finds pithecanthropoid characteristics in a number of other North African finds, including Litorina cave, Smugglers' Cave, and Rabat in Morocco and Tangiers.

   • 1969, E. O. James, Creation and Cosmology: A Historical and Comparative Inquiry:

     Two other skulls of the same pithecanthropoid type of Hominid have been revealed in the same geological deposits in Java by von Koeningswald in 1937 and 1938.

   • 2014, Philip Jose Farmer, Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke, →ISBN:

     They were undoubtedly the dwindling remnants of a pithecanthropoid species; they had enough intelligence to emulate their long-dead masters in working in gold.