Graecopithecus

[8] The original Graecopithecus specimen was a single lower jawbone (mandible) found from a site called Pyrgos Vassilissis, northwest of Athens,[9][10] in southern Greece in 1944, "reportedly unearthed as the occupying German forces were building a wartime bunker".[11] The original finder, German paleontologist Bruno von Freyberg initially believed that it belonged to an extinct Old World monkey Mesopithecus, as he reported in 1951.[12][13] However, Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald realised that it was the tooth of an ape family and erected the scientific name Graecopithecus freybergi in 1972, after the discoverer.The partial fusion of the fourth premolar (P4) roots is an additional evidence that it is of a hominid, and the thick enamel resembles those of the human lineage (hominins).[3] In 1984, British palaeontologists Peter Andrews and Lawrence B. Martin classified Graecopithecus and Ouranopithecus as synonyms (same taxon) and treated them as members of the genus Sivapithecus.[14] This classification persisted for several years until additional Ouranopithecus fossils were discovered[18] including part of the skull in the 1990s[19] that indicated better distinction as different hominids.In 2017, an international team of palaeontologists led by Madelaine Böhme (Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen, Germany) published detailed reanalysis and new interpretation in the journal PLOS One.Until then, the precise date of Graecopithecus has not been resolved and usually inferred from geological data of materials related the fossils and surrounding areas that add to uncertainty in its evolutionary importance and relationship with other hominids.Tim White at the University of California, Berkeley, asserted that the study was merely an attempt "to resurrect Begun’s tired argument with a long-known crappy fossil, newly scanned.[34] They argued against Benoit and Thackeray write that they did not judge canine root derivation of Graecopithecus and Salehanthropus against each other, stating that the differences between them were within the range of sexual variation.