habiline

English

Etymology

From Homo habilis +‎ -ine.

Noun

habiline (plural habilines)

1. A specimen of the now extinct species Homo habilis.
   • 2009, Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Basic Books, page 4:

     By around 2.3 million years ago, the first tentative record emerges of a new species, a habiline. Habilines, still poorly understood, are the “missing link” between apes and humans.

Adjective

habiline (not comparable)

1. Of or pertaining to habilines.
   • 1985, Charles E. Oxnard, Humans, Apes and Chinese Fossils: New Implications for Human Evolution, Hong Kong University Press, page 7:

     Finally, new finds from Olduvai prompted Leakey, Tobias and Napier (1964) to recognize a new form, Homo habilis. Although the post-cranial elements of this find are no longer believed to be habiline, further finds[…]suggest that there is indeed a reality to this species.

   • 1995, Johan Matheus Gerardus van der Dennen, The Origin of War: The Evolution of a Male-Coalitional Reproductive Strategy, Origin Press, page 572:

     Sexual division of labor may be as old as the habiline hominids (H. habilis, ± 2.5 mya), who in all probability practiced a flexible subsistence strategy of "ecological opportunism optimized by tool use"[…].

Anagrams

• inhabile