The
genus Anthropopithecus was first proposed in 1841 by the French
zoologist and
anatomist Henri-Marie Ducrotay de Blainville (1777–1850) in order to give a genus name to some
chimpanzee material that he was studying at the time. After the genus
Anthropopithecus was established by De Blainville in 1839, the British
surgeon and
naturalist John Bland-Sutton (1855–1936) proposed the
species name
Anthropopithecus troglodytes in 1883 to designate the
common chimpanzee. However, the genus
Pan had already been attributed to chimpanzees in 1816 by the German naturalist
Lorenz Oken (1779–1851). Since any earlier
nomenclature prevails over subsequent nomenclatures, the genus
Anthropopithecus definitely lost its validity in 1895, becoming from that date a
junior synonym of the genus
Pan. In 1879, the French
archaeologist and
anthropologist Gabriel de Mortillet (1821–1898) proposed the term
Anthropopithecus to designate a "
missing link", a hypothetical intermediate between ape and man that lived in the
Tertiary and that supposedly, following De Mortillet's theory, produced
eoliths. In his work of 1883 ''Le Préhistorique, antiquité de l'homme
(The Prehistoric: Man's Antiquity
, below quoted after the 2nd edition, 1885 Yet the chimpanzee meaning of the genus persisted throughout the 19th century, even to the point of being a genus name attributed to fossil specimens. For example, a fossil primate discovered in 1878 by the British malacologist William Theobald (1829-1908) in the Pakistani Punjab in British India was first named Palaeopithecus
in 1879 but later renamed Anthropopithecus sivalensis
, assuming that these remains had to be brought back to the chimpanzee genus as the latter was being understood at the time. A famous example of a fossil Anthropopithecus
is that of the Java Man, discovered in 1891 in Trinil, nearby the Solo River, in East Java, by Dutch physician and anatomist Eugène Dubois, who named the discovery with the scientific name Anthropopithecus erectus
. This Dubois paper, written during the last quarter of 1892, was published by the Dutch government in 1893. In those early 1890s, the term Anthropopithecus'' was still being used by zoologists as the genus name of chimpanzees, so Dubois'
Anthropopithecus erectus came to mean something like "the upright chimpanzee", or "the chimpanzee standing up". However, a year later, in 1893, Dubois considered that some anatomical characters proper to humans made necessary the attribution of these remains to a genus different than
Anthropopithecus and he renamed the specimen of Java with the name
Pithecanthropus erectus (1893 paper, published in 1894).
Pithecanthropus is a genus that German
biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) had created in 1868. Years later, in the 20th century, the German
physician and
paleoanthropologist Franz Weidenreich (1873-1948) compared in detail the characters of Dubois' Java Man, then named
Pithecanthropus erectus, with the characters of the
Peking Man, then named
Sinanthropus pekinensis. Weidenreich concluded in 1940 that because of their anatomical similarity with modern humans it was necessary to gather all these specimens of Java and China in a single species of the genus
Homo, the species
Homo erectus. By that time, the genus
Anthropopithecus had already been abandoned since 1895 at the earliest. == In popular culture ==