An extinct hominid postulated from bones found in Java in 1891 and originally designated Pithecanthropus erectus because it was thought to represent a species evolutionarily between apes and humans. Pithecanthropus is now classified as Homo erectus.
Also called Java man
See more at Homo erectus
First recorded in 1870–75; from New Latin: literally “ape-man”; from Greek píthēk(os) “ape” + Greek ánthrōpos “human being”
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But after further inspection, he changed the name to Pithecanthropus erectus, an upright “ape-man.”
From New York Times ● Apr. 10, 2019
Britain's Sir Arthur Keith, however, world's greatest authority on fossil man, considers Pithecanthropus the earliest known form of man.
From Time Magazine Archive
Some of the material is straightforward anthropological exposition: descriptions of such famed forerunners of Homo sapiens as Peking Man, Piltdown Man and Pithecanthropus erectus, and of the confused state of anthropological opinion about them.
From Time Magazine Archive
Professor Eugene Dubois, 82, Dutch anthropologist who in 1891 found the first skull of the Java ape man, concluded he had discovered the "missing link," called it Pithecanthropus erectus; in Haelen, Belgium.
From Time Magazine Archive
In Indonesia, the home of the orang-utan and gibbon, not to speak of Pithecanthropus, many authorities would place the original home of the human race.
From Anthropology by Marett, R. R. (Robert Ranulph)
The early haunt of the pithecanthropus was in the south of France, at Aix.
From Time Magazine Archive
In the museum, the clergyman remarks: "It is not certain that there has been much change in our intellectual and moral attainments since pithecanthropus dropped the first half of his name."
From Time Magazine Archive
In that case, the pithecanthropus must have lived one-third of 500,000,000, or 166,666,666 years ago.
From The Evolution of Man Scientifically Disproved In 50 Arguments by Williams, William A. (William Asbury)
In his "Men of the Old Stone Age," Dr. Osborn puts the pithecanthropus, the Heidelberg man, the Piltdown man, and the Neanderthal man, on limbs which terminate abruptly as extinct races.
From The Evolution of Man Scientifically Disproved In 50 Arguments by Williams, William A. (William Asbury)
The pithecanthropus was the first to reach it and the ape-man saw him spring upward for a handhold on the lowest peg above him.
From Tarzan the Terrible by Burroughs, Edgar Rice
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
