Ape-person

The openings of these huts and the branches of the trees were thronged with a dense mob of ape-people, whom from their size I took to be the females and infants of the tribe.

The earliest fossils that can be classified as ape-persons have been found in South Africa and they date back about 5.5 million years.

In England, Grafton Elliot Smith, who had been involved in the Piltdown affair, convinced The Illustrated London News to publish an artist’s rendering of Nebraska Man. The picture, which appeared in a two-page spread and received wide distribution, showed two brutish, naked ape-persons, the male with a club, the female gathering roots. All this from one tooth.

It remains a great mystery as to how these slow locomoting ape-persons survived in relatively open terrestrial environments without the aid of great speed, large canines, large body size, stone tool technology, or other physical adaptations that most mammals possess.

The anthropocentrist who values rationality, and sees it as the essence of being a person, would regard Taylor as having wiped out morally significant beings, since both mutants and ape-persons are clearly rational. Hence the act is a great wrong.