Word: plesianthropus
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After some uncertainty over nomenclature, Dr. Broom has settled on the exciting names Plesianthropus ("Near-Man") and Paranthropus ("Beside-Man") for his finds. Their brain capacities were small, 600 and 440 cc. as against about 1,400 cc. for modern man. But when Dr. Broom had had a good look at their teeth he sent excited reports to the British journal Nature claiming that these old creatures must be assigned a place very close to the point of human divergence from the parent primate stock...
...teeth of Plesianthropus and Paranthropus, Dr. Gregory found an extraordinary mixture of human and apelike features. The general pattern seemed closely related to the dentition of Dryopithecus, a celebrated extinct ape. Most anthropologists believe man descended from a generalized type of Dryopithecus...
...manlike fossil ape discovered many years ago in India. The geological character of the ground, however, indicated that Dr. Broom's creatures lived relatively late in the Glacial Age, by which time definitely human types such as Peking Man, Piltdown Man and Heidelberg Man had already appeared. Plesianthropus and Paranthropus thus appeared as laggard survivors of a much earlier evolutionary spurt-"conservative cousins of man," says Dr. Gregory, "and progressive cousins of the modern apes...
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