You may have heard them referred to by their old names of Java Man and Peking Man. In Latin, before they were admitted into the Homo fold, they had the generic names Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus. They walked on two legs like us, but had smaller brains (averaging perhaps 800 cc in early specimens to over 1,000 cc in late ones), housed in lower, less domed, more ‘swept-back’ skulls than ours, and they had receding chins. Their jutting brow ridges made a pronounced horizontal ledge above the eyes, set in wide faces, with a pinching in of the skull behind the eyes.
