protohumann.adj.

1899 Amer. Anthropologist 1 769 On the question when and where this Pliocene proto-human became the Pleistocene precursors, Mr Keane is a little obscure.

1954 W. La Barre Human Animal iv. 83 The linearity of man, his relative hairlessness, his clothing, and his culture-based carnivorousness suggest that the proto-humans, like the anthropoids, were warm-climate-adapted animals.

1994 W. Maples & M. Browning Dead Men do tell Tales i. 15 I still have an old 8 mm home movie of the event, in which Leakey climbs the side of the gorge, scratching his bottom unselfconsciously, as any of the australopithecine protohumans might have done, in this same gorge, several million years earlier.

1899 Amer. Anthropologist 1 424 An indefinite number of confluent currents coming up from proto-human sources to successively merge in the great stream of living humanity.

1954 L. C. Eiseley in W. L. Thomas Current Anthropol. 69/1 We have..stumbled into the world of essentially cultureless or almost cultureless proto-human types which are diverse in form because they represent evolution still at work upon the parts of the body.

1971 R. M. Keesing & F. M. Keesing New Perspectives Cultural Anthropol. 45 Sharing must be viewed as a crucial protohuman innovation.

1995 New Scientist 11 Mar. 38/2 In other words, the Oldowan tools were made by a primitive hunter-gatherer society that was certainly protohuman.