Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Australopithecus
/ˌɒstrələˈpɪθɪkəs/noun
An extinct genus of upright African hominins that lived between about four and two million years ago.
The Greek roots
πίθηκος
píthēkos
ape, monkey
Literally: “southern ape”
Follow a root:πίθηκος1 word
The story of the word
Raymond Dart announced the Taung child in 1925 and gave it a name half Latin, half Greek: australis for southern, πίθηκος for ape. Classicists complained about the mixture and anatomists complained about the claim that a small-brained African fossil walked upright and stood near our own line. Dart was right about the walking. Lucy, found in Ethiopia in 1974, belongs to the same genus.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek and Latin → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1925
Same family
pithecanthropuspithecoid
In a sentence
The Laetoli footprints were almost certainly made by Australopithecus.
Their brains were ape-sized; their hips were not.