habiline
habiline noun: a specimen of the now extinct species Homo habilis.
Noun
habiline (plural habilines)
- A specimen of the now extinct species Homo habilis.
- 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.2009, Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, Basic Books, page 4
Adjective
habiline (not comparable)
- Of or pertaining to habilines.
- 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.1985, Charles E. Oxnard, Humans, Apes and Chinese Fossils: New Implications for Human Evolution, Hong Kong University Press, page 7
- 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"[…].1995, Johan Matheus Gerardus van der Dennen, The Origin of War: The Evolution of a Male-Coalitional Reproductive Strategy, Origin Press, page 572
Forms of habiline
| plural | habilines |
|---|
Origin of habiline
From Homo habilis + -ine.
Questions about habiline
- What does habiline mean?
- Habiline means a specimen of the now extinct species Homo habilis.
- What part of speech is habiline?
- Habiline can be a noun or an adjective.
- What is the plural of habiline?
- The plural of habiline is habilines.
Words near habiline in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: habiline (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “habiline.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/habiline. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.