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Paranthropus: Where Do Things Stand?

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Human Paleontology and Prehistory

Part of the book series: Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology ((VERT))

Abstract

In 1960 John Robinson suggested that the newly defined species Zinjanthropus boisei should be transferred to the genus Paranthropus Paranthropus (Broom 1938) as Paranthropus boisei (Leakey 1959). Since then fossil evidence of two hyper-megadont early hominin taxa has come to light. One of these taxa, Paraustralopithecus aethiopicus (Arambourg and Coppens 1968), has been added to the Paranthropus genus, whereas the second taxon, Australopithecus garhi (Asfaw et al. 1999), has been included in a different taxon, Australopithecus. This contribution will tease out why different alpha-taxonomic decisions were made about the generic affinities of Paraustralopithecus aethiopicus and Australopithecus garhi. It will also review the types of data that are now available for generating and testing hypotheses about the relationships of megadont and hyper-megadont hominins . On the basis of this review, in this paper we will suggest a hypothesis, or hypotheses, that are most consistent with the current fossil and contextual data from East and southern Africa.

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Acknowledgments

BW would like to thank the Provost of George Washington University for his continuing support for the GW University Professorship of Human Origins and via the GW Signature Program for his support of CASHP. KS was supported by the NSF-IGERT DGE-0801634 and NSF-GRFP and is currently supported by Neukom Instititute for Computational Science, Dartmouth. We are grateful to Bill Kimbel and an anonymous reviewer for excellent suggestions that improved the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CASHP, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA

    Bernard Wood

  2. Neukom Institute Fellow in Computational Sciences and Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA

    Kes Schroer

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  1. Bernard Wood
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Correspondence to Bernard Wood .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anatomy & Anthropolog, Tel-Aviv University Department of Anatomy & Anthropolog, Tel-Aviv, Israel

    Assaf Marom

  2. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem Institute of Archaeology, Jerusalem, Israel

    Erella Hovers

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Wood, B., Schroer, K. (2017). Paranthropus: Where Do Things Stand?. In: Marom, A., Hovers, E. (eds) Human Paleontology and Prehistory. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46646-0_8

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