Paranthropus had a gorilla-style skull crest on a small, upright body
The robust australopithecines had huge jaws, broad grinding teeth and a bony ridge along the top of the skull that anchored powerful chewing muscles. Below the neck they were small: a typical Paranthropus boisei male stood about 137 centimetres and weighed around 50 kilograms. They walked upright and shared their landscape with early humans.
Three species are widely accepted: P. aethiopicus, P. robustus and P. boisei, living from about 2.9 million to at least 1.2 million years ago. Some researchers fold the whole genus into Australopithecus. Diets differed: P. robustus was likely an omnivore, while P. boisei seems to have been a plant eater, perhaps favouring abundant bulbs and tubers. They lived mostly in woodland, alongside Homo habilis and Homo erectus, and were hunted by crocodiles, leopards, sabre-toothed cats and hyenas. Bone tools have been linked to them, and they are a disputed candidate for the earliest use of fire.
The genus began with a schoolboy. Gert Terblanche found a male braincase at Kromdraai, about 70 kilometres south-west of Pretoria, and in 1938 Robert Broom named the genus from it, choosing a Greek name meaning beside man. Ten years later, at nearby Swartkrans Cave, Broom and John Talbot Robinson described a second species from a young jaw, but it has since been merged into P. robustus because the two populations look too similar to separate.
East Africa produced the most famous specimen. In 1959 Mary Leakey found a skull at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, and Louis Leakey named it Zinjanthropus boisei, combining an old Arabic word for the East African coast with the name of their patron, Charles Watson Boise. Colleagues rejected a new genus built on a single fossil, and the species was shuffled into Australopithecus before Paranthropus boisei became the favoured name as more finds accumulated.
The third species took a similar winding path. A toothless jaw from Ethiopia described in 1968 was later lumped with another australopithecine, then moved into Paranthropus in 1986 after Alan Walker and Richard Leakey found the skull KNM WT 17000.
Source: Paranthropus
