Pithecanthropus

The terms ''Anthropopithecus'' ( Blainville, 1839) and ''Pithecanthropus'' (Haeckel, 1868) are obsolete taxa describing either chimpanzees or archaic humans. Both are derived from Greek ἄνθρωπος (anthropos, "man") and πίθηκος (píthēkos, "ape" or "monkey"), translating to "man-ape" and "ape-man", respectively.

''Anthropopithecus'' was originally coined to describe the chimpanzee and is now a junior synonym of '' Pan''. It had been also used to describe several other extant and extinct species, among others the fossil Java Man. Very quickly, the latter was re-assigned to ''Pithecanthropus'', originally coined to refer to a theoretical " missing link". ''Pithecanthropus'' is now classed as ''Homo erectus'', thus a junior synonym of ''Homo''.

History

The genus ''Anthropopithecus'' was first proposed in 1841 by the French zoologist and anatomist Henri-Marie Ducrotay de Blainville (1777–1850) in order to give a genus name to some chimpanzee material that he was studying at the time.Bernard Wood ''et alii'', ''Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Human Evolution'', June 2013 (single-volume paperback version of the original 2011 2-volume edition), 1056 pp.;

After the genus ''Anthropopithecus'' was established by De Blainville in 1839, the British surgeon and naturalist John Bland-Sutton (1855–1936) proposed the species name ''Anthropopithecus troglodytes'' in 1883 to designate the common chimpanzee. However, the genus ''Pan'' had already been attributed to chimpanzees in 1816 by the German naturalist Lorenz Oken (1779–1851). Since any earlier nomenclature prevails over subsequent nomenclatures, the genus ''Anthropopithecus'' definitely lost its validity in 1895,P. K. Tubbs, "Opinion 1368 The generic names ''Pan'' and ''Panthera'' (Mammalia, Carnivora): available as from Oken, 1816", ''Bulletin of Zoological Nomenclature'' (1985), volume 42, pp 365-370 becoming from that date a junior synonym of the genus ''Pan''.According to the current international consensus, the genus ''Pan'' includes two species: the common chimpanzee (''Pan troglodytes'') and the bonobo or dwarf chimpanzee ('' Pan paniscus'').

In 1879, the French archaeologist and anthropologist Gabriel de Mortillet (1821–1898) proposed the term ''Anthropopithecus'' to designate a " missing link", a hypothetical intermediate between ape and man that lived in the Tertiary and that supposedly, following De Mortillet's theory, produced eoliths.Gabriel de Mortillet, ''Le Préhistorique, antiquité de l'''''homme'', Bibliothèque des sciences contemporaines, 2nd edition, Paris, C. Reinwald, 1885, 642 p. In his work of 1883 ''Le Préhistorique, antiquité de l'homme'' (''The Prehistoric: Man's Antiquity'', below quoted after the 2nd edition, 1885), De Mortillet writes:

When in 1905 the French paleontologist, paleoanthropologist and geologist Marcellin Boule (1861–1942) published a paper demonstrating that the eoliths were in fact geofacts produced by natural phenomena (freezing, pressure, fire), the argument proposed by De Mortillet fell into disrepute and his definition of the term ''Anthropopithecus'' was dropped. Yet the chimpanzee meaning of the genus persisted throughout the 19th century, even to the point of being a genus name attributed to fossil specimens. For example, a fossil primate discovered in 1878 by the British malacologist William Theobald (1829-1908) in the Pakistani Punjab in British India was first named ''Palaeopithecus'' in 1879 but later renamed ''Anthropopithecus sivalensis'', assuming that these remains had to be brought back to the chimpanzee genus as the latter was being understood at the time. A famous example of a fossil ''Anthropopithecus'' is that of the Java Man, discovered in 1891 in Trinil, nearby the Solo River, in East Java, by Dutch physician and anatomist Eugène Dubois, who named the discovery with the scientific name ''Anthropopithecus erectus''. This Dubois paper, written during the last quarter of 1892, was published by the Dutch government in 1893. In those early 1890s, the term ''Anthropopithecus'' was still being used by zoologists as the genus name of chimpanzees, so Dubois' ''Anthropopithecus erectus'' came to mean something like "the upright chimpanzee", or "the chimpanzee standing up". However, a year later, in 1893, Dubois considered that some anatomical characters proper to humans made necessary the attribution of these remains to a genus different than ''Anthropopithecus'' and he renamed the specimen of Java with the name ''Pithecanthropus erectus'' (1893 paper, published in 1894). ''Pithecanthropus'' is a genus that German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) had created in 1868. Years later, in the 20th century, the German physician and paleoanthropologist Franz Weidenreich (1873-1948) compared in detail the characters of Dubois' Java Man, then named ''Pithecanthropus erectus'', with the characters of the Peking Man, then named ''Sinanthropus pekinensis''. Weidenreich concluded in 1940 that because of their anatomical similarity with modern humans it was necessary to gather all these specimens of Java and China in a single species of the genus ''Homo'', the species ''Homo erectus''. By that time, the genus ''Anthropopithecus'' had already been abandoned since 1895 at the earliest.

In popular culture

The term ''Anthropopithecus'' is scientifically obsolete in the present day but did become widespread in popular culture, mainly in France and Belgium:
* In his short story '' Gil Braltar'' (1887), Jules Verne uses the term ''anthropopithèque'' (''Anthropopithecus'') to describe the simian aspect of one his characters, General McKackmale:

* In the science-fiction novel ''La Cité des Ténèbres'' (''The City of Darkness''), written by French journalist and writer Léon Groc in 1926, the ''anthropopithèques'' (''Anthropopithecuses'') are a large herd of ape-men having reached a very low degree of civilisation.
* The Belgian comics author Hergé made the term ''anthropopithèque'' (''Anthropopithecus'') one of the numerous swear words of Captain Haddock in the comic album series ''The Adventures of Tintin''.Albert Algoud, ''Le Haddock illustré, l'intégrale des jurons du capitaine'', Casterman (collection "Bibliothèque de Moulinsart"), Brussels, November 1991, 93 p., 23,2cm x 15cm ;
* In 2001, French singer Brigitte Fontaine wrote, sang and recorded the song titled ''Pipeau''.The French word ''pipeau'' refers to a type of pipe, but in French slang ''pipeau'' also refers to a lie. In this song, the chorus repeats the term ''anthropopithèque'' (''Anthropopithecus'').

See also

* Anthropomorpha
* Archaic humans
* Caveman
* Hominini
* Human taxonomy
* Humanzee

Notes and references

Notes

References

{{Reflist

Further reading

* John de Vos, lecture
The Dubois collection: a new look at an old collection
'. ''In'' Winkler Prins, C.F. & Donovan, S.K. (eds.), ''VII International Symposium ‘Cultural Heritage in Geosciences, Mining and Metallurgy: Libraries - Archives - Museums’: “Museums and their collections”, Leiden (The Netherlands), 19–23 May 2003''. ''Scripta Geologic, Special Issue'', 4: 267-285, 9 figs.; Leiden, August 2004.

External links

*
L'anthropopithèque
' (from the "Pôle international de la Préhistoire", archived document, in French)

Biological anthropology
Prehistoric life
Obsolete primate taxa