ape-person

plural ape-people · plural ape-persons

1. A non-human australopithecine; an ape-like precursor to modern humans.

   The earliest fossils that can be classified as ape-persons have been found in South Africa and they date back about 5.5 million years.

   1982, James J. O’Donnell, Earthly Matters: A Study of Our Planet, New York, N.Y.: Julian Messner, →ISBN, page 171

   4 more examples

   The openings of these huts and the branches of the trees were thronged with a dense mob of ape-people, whom from their size I took to be the females and infants of the tribe.

   1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London; New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton, →OCLC

   In England, Grafton Elliot Smith, who had been involved in the Piltdown affair, convinced The Illustrated London News to publish an artist’s rendering of Nebraska Man. The picture, which appeared in a two-page spread and received wide distribution, showed two brutish, naked ape-persons, the male with a club, the female gathering roots. All this from one tooth.

   1999, James Perloff, “An Ape-man for All Seasons”, in Tornado in a Junkyard: The Relentless Myth of Darwinism, Arlington, Mass.: Refuge Books, →ISBN, page 82

   It remains a great mystery as to how these slow locomoting ape-persons survived in relatively open terrestrial environments without the aid of great speed, large canines, large body size, stone tool technology, or other physical adaptations that most mammals possess.

   2000, Geoffrey Grant Pope, The Biological Bases of Human Behavior, Allyn and Bacon, →ISBN, page 101

   The anthropocentrist who values rationality, and sees it as the essence of being a person, would regard Taylor as having wiped out morally significant beings, since both mutants and ape-persons are clearly rational. Hence the act is a great wrong.

   2013, Norva Y.S. Lo, Andrew Brennan, “The Last Man”, in John Huss, editor, Planet of the Apes and Philosophy: Great Apes Think Alike (Popular Culture and Philosophy; 74), Chicago, Ill.: Open Court Publishing Company, →ISBN, part IX (Planet), page 275