The name is a reference to Pan, the Greek god of nature and wilderness.
The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature adopted Pan as the only official name of the genus in 1895. Troglodytes was not available, as it had been given as the name of a genus of wren ( Troglodytidae) in 1809. The genus name Pan was first introduced by Lorenz Oken in 1816.Īn alternative Theranthropus was suggested by Brookes 1828 and Chimpansee by Voigt 1831. Linnaeus 1758 had already used Homo troglodytes for a hypothetical mixture of human and orang utan. Blumenbach first used it in his De generis humani varietate nativa liber (" on the natural varieties of the human genus") in 1776, The species name troglodytes is a reference to the Troglodytae (literally "cave-goers"), an African people described by Greco-Roman geographers. The common chimpanzee was named Simia troglodytes by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1776. The colloquialism "chimp" was most likely coined some time in the late 1870s. The spelling Chimpanzee is found in a 1758 supplement to Chamber's Cyclopædia. (apparently from a Bantu language, reportedly modern Vili (Civili), a Zone H Bantu language, has the comparable ci-mpenzi ). The first use of the name "Chimpanze" is recorded in The London Magazine in 1738, glossed as meaning "Mockman" in a language of "the Angolans" The two Pan species split only about one million years ago. Chimpanzees are the only known members of the subtribe Panina. Chimpanzees are the closest living relatives to humans, being members of the tribe Hominini (along with extinct species of subtribe Hominina). Chimpanzees split from the human branch of the family about four to six million years ago.