A category of living hominids that includes gorillas, orangs, chimpanzees, and bonobos but excludes monkeys and humans. Comment:The word "ape" is even more mischievous in its misleading ambiguity than the word human. Obviously there are living animals referred to as apes, and they clearly derive from earlier proto-ape forms, but these forms have left practically no fossils, so the evolutionary history of modern apes had not been successfully traced until the advent of DNA studies, which are still ongoing.
Unfortunately, the term "ape" is often also loosely applied to extinct forms that are as close structurally to modern humans as to modern apes and that may have been ancestral to both. Why is a shared ancestor referred to as an ape rather than as a human if it is equally remote from both? Both terms are anachronisms. Referring to all or most fossil forms by a term that we also use to refer to dissimilar living animals is not helpful. Presumably the usage continues because there is no other convenient term in English —"hominoid is apparently too pretentious for ordinary use.
The same tendency can be seen when Latin and Greek words for "human" and "ape" are turned into neo-Latin species names like Australo-pithecus ("southern ape") or Pithec-anthropus ("ape person") or many other adopted or proposed species names that contain the elements -anthropus or -pithecus. Once you are aware of the problem, it is easy to interpret correctly what is being said, and to dismiss a certain amount of nonsense that comes from the misunderstandings that these usages tend to engender.
Perhaps if the word "hominoid" had been colloquial, Darwin would not have met the aesthetic opposition he did.
Definition Revised: 2016-07-04
Script Last Modified: 2022-05-30
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