Anthropopithecus

The terms Anthropopithecus (Blainville, 1839) and Pithecanthropus (Haeckel, 1868) are obsolete taxa describing either chimpanzees or archaic humans. Both are derived from Greek ἄνθρωπος (anthropos, "man") and πίθηκος (píthēkos, "ape" or "monkey"), translating to "man-ape" and "ape-man", respectively. Anthropopithecus was originally coined to describe the chimpanzee and is now a junior synonym of Pan. It had also been used to describe several other extant and extinct species, among others the fossil Java Man. Very quickly, the latter was re-assigned to Pithecanthropus, originally coined to refer to a theoretical "missing link". Pithecanthropus is now classed as Homo erectus, thus a junior synonym of Homo. 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.