Halfway around the world, at Ternifine, near Oran, in Algeria, Professor
Camille Arambourg recovered a portion of a youthful skull and three jaws
in 1954-55. He called these _Atlanthropus_.[13] This was not a valid new
genus, however, for there are strong resemblances between these jaws and
those of Peking and Java man. Here is an African cousin of
_Pithecanthropus_. (There are others. A fragment of jaw found near
Rabat, in Morocco, also is thought to resemble Java man.) The Ternifine
jaws seem to belong to the second interglacial period. At the bottom of
an ancient spring from which Arambourg recovered his fossils, he also
found a number of stone tools, including fist axes of the Acheulean
type. This perhaps is the earliest association of Acheulean artifacts
with human bones. You will recall that Acheulean fist axes also were
found with Swanscombe. Have we, then, a single type of culture for two
quite different kinds of men? Our accumulating evidence is beginning to
make it clear that some half-brained form of man closely related to our
Java “ape-man” was widely distributed across the inhabitable regions of
the Old World during the long second interglacial period.
Man-Apes or Ape-Men in Africa
While Sunday supplements and scientists alike were occupied with
Dubois’s “missing link” and his Peking cousin, primate fossils of even
greater consequence were being recovered in southern Africa by Professor
Raymond Dart and the late Dr. Robert Broom. In 1925, Dart named them
_Australopithecines_ or “southern apes.”[14] Arousing little scientific
curiosity at first, they were considered by some as a parallel, perhaps
profitless, line of evolution. By 1950, such fossils were becoming
impressively abundant. A bewildering array of names was assigned to
them, without scientific justification. The first had been called
_Australopithecus africanus_; later, another species, _prometheus_, was
added. Others were labeled as distinct genera, taking note of their
near-human features—_Telanthropus_, _Plesianthropus_, and _Paranthropus_
(with two species, _robustus_ and _crassidens_). In 1959, a new and
important form was added, _Zinjanthropus boisei_. _Zinj_ is the Arab
name for East Africa. Expert opinion now inclines toward lumping these
all together, possibly under our own genus, _Homo_, or at most, within a
single genus, _Australopithecus_. Their status of “ape” is being
reassessed: man-apes, some still maintain; ape-men, say others; a few
believe they included the earliest true men.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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