‘A tale of two taxa’

Abstract

Phillip Tobias was intimately involved in the systematic analysis of two early hominin taxa, Zinjanthropus (now Paranthropus) boisei and Homo habilis. This paper compares and contrasts the way the fossil evidence for these taxa that has accumulated over the past half century has altered our perceptions of them. There is more consensus about the interpretation of P. boisei than there is about H. habilis. This may be because the former almost certainly belongs to a derived extinct hominin subclade.