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Paranthropus is a genus of extinct hominin which contains two widely accepted species: P. robustus and P. boisei. However, the validity of Paranthropus is contested, and it is sometimes considered to be synonymous with Australopithecus. They are also referred to as the robust australopithecines.
It was long assumed that if Paranthropus is a valid genus then P. robustus was the ancestor of P. boisei, but in 1985, anthropologists Alan Walker and Richard Leakey found that the 2.5-million-year-old East African skull KNM WT 17000—which they assigned to a new species A. aethiopicus|A. aethiopicus—was ancestral to A. boisei (they ...
Paranthropus aethiopicus is an extinct species of robust australopithecine from the Late Pliocene to Early Pleistocene of East Africa about 2.7–2.3 million years ago. However, it is much debated whether or not Paranthropus is an invalid grouping and is synonymous with Australopithecus, so the species is also often classified as Australopithecus aethiopicus. [1]
Australopithecus fossils become more widely dispersed throughout eastern and southern Africa (the Chadian A. bahrelghazali indicates that the genus was much more widespread than the fossil record suggests), before eventually becoming pseudo-extinct 1.9 million years ago (or 1.2 to 0.6 million years ago if Paranthropus is included).
Homo (from Latin homō 'human') is a genus of great ape (family Hominidae) that emerged from the genus Australopithecus and encompasses only a single extant species, Homo sapiens (modern humans), along with a number of extinct species (collectively called archaic humans) classified as either ancestral or closely related to modern humans; these include Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis.
“Its demise is enigmatic considering that it was one of the few Asian great apes to go extinct in the last 2.6 million years, whereas others, including orangutan, survived until the present.”
While none of the groups normally directly assigned to this group survived, the australopithecines do not appear to be literally extinct (in the sense of having no living descendants) as the genera Kenyanthropus, Paranthropus, and Homo probably emerged as sisters of a late Australopithecus species such as A. africanus and/or A. sediba.
Why did they go extinct? Well, the Molossus dogs weren’t really as necessary anymore and, let’s face it, these dogs took a LOT to raise, train, and feed. Their numbers started to decline ...