prehuman
/priːˈhjuːmən
/adjective
Relating to or denoting the time before the appearance of human beings, especially the evolutionary stage immediately preceding the development of modern humans: our prehuman ancestors...
- Prominent and distinctive in this profile are the nose and the well-defined chin separating modern humans both from prehuman ancestors and from other, contemporary primates.
- However, the growing persuasiveness of the idea that human history was of much shorter duration than prehuman history presented serious imaginative problems for natural philosophers and illustrators alike.
- His actual origin goes back not to Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden… but to more primitive races of men, and then to prehuman ancestors, and in the end to the earliest forms of life upon the earth.
noun
A precursor of the human species.Within less than 200 pages he tells a coherent tale including both pertinent detail and amusing anecdote covering the period from Neanderthal prehumans to the present....
- The Australopithecenes and other prehumans had relatively large faces in proportion to the size of their heads, whereas modern humans have proportionally smaller faces and larger braincases filled with larger brains.
- Hoberg's team did DNA studies that gave more evidence for the idea that prehumans acquired these tapeworms before cattle and swine were domesticated about 10,000 years ago.