Word: meganthropus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...lower jaw of an apeman far bigger than a modern gorilla. Dug out of a limestone cave at Swartkrans, near Johannesburg, the teeth and jaw are definitely human, rather than apelike. Their original owner (who will now be called "Swartkrans Man") must have looked something like the huge primates, Meganthropus and Gigantopithecus, whose teeth were found in Java and China some years...
Then he found a still larger jaw, the biggest ever discovered, which was unmistakably human. It was apparently the most primitive truly human fossil ever discovered. Koenigswald named it Meganthropus palaeojavanicus (Big Man of Ancient Java). Meganthropus seemed to have been about the size of a big male gorilla...
Koenigswald's crowning find dwarfed even Meganthropus. Prowling in South China apothecaries' shops, whose drawers are often full of fossils, he found three astounding fossil teeth. They were six times as big as a modern man's molars, twice as big as a gorilla's. Koenigswald thought they were an ape's. But Weidenreich is sure, from the pattern of their "biting surfaces, that they are definitely human. He has named this man monster, who was certainly much larger than a gorilla, Gigantanthropus...
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