Halfway around the world, at Ternifine, near Oran, in Algeria, Professor Camille Arambourg recovered a portion of a youthful skull and three jaws in 1954-55. He called these _Atlanthropus_.[13] This was not a valid new genus, however, for there are strong resemblances between these jaws and those of Peking and Java man. Here is an African cousin of _Pithecanthropus_. (There are others. A fragment of jaw found near Rabat, in Morocco, also is thought to resemble Java man.) The Ternifine jaws seem to belong to the second interglacial period. At the bottom of an ancient spring from which Arambourg recovered his fossils, he also found a number of stone tools, including fist axes of the Acheulean type. This perhaps is the earliest association of Acheulean artifacts with human bones. You will recall that Acheulean fist axes also were found with Swanscombe. Have we, then, a single type of culture for two quite different kinds of men? Our accumulating evidence is beginning to make it clear that some half-brained form of man closely related to our Java “ape-man” was widely distributed across the inhabitable regions of the Old World during the long second interglacial period.
While Sunday supplements and scientists alike were occupied with Dubois’s “missing link” and his Peking cousin, primate fossils of even greater consequence were being recovered in southern Africa by Professor Raymond Dart and the late Dr. Robert Broom. In 1925, Dart named them _Australopithecines_ or “southern apes.”[14] Arousing little scientific curiosity at first, they were considered by some as a parallel, perhaps profitless, line of evolution. By 1950, such fossils were becoming impressively abundant. A bewildering array of names was assigned to them, without scientific justification. The first had been called _Australopithecus africanus_; later, another species, _prometheus_, was added. Others were labeled as distinct genera, taking note of their near-human features—_Telanthropus_, _Plesianthropus_, and _Paranthropus_ (with two species, _robustus_ and _crassidens_). In 1959, a new and important form was added, _Zinjanthropus boisei_. _Zinj_ is the Arab name for East Africa. Expert opinion now inclines toward lumping these all together, possibly under our own genus, _Homo_, or at most, within a single genus, _Australopithecus_. Their status of “ape” is being reassessed: man-apes, some still maintain; ape-men, say others; a few believe they included the earliest true men.