Etymology gorillas

Etymology

The word “gorilla” comes from the history of Hanno the Navigator (c. 500 BC), a Carthaginian explorer on an expedition to the west African coast to the area that later became Sierra Leone.[5][6] Members of the expedition encountered “savage people,

the greater part of whom were women, whose bodies were hairy, and whom our interpreters called Gorillae”.[7][8] It is unknown whether what the explorers encountered were what we now call gorillas, another species of ape or monkeys, or humans.[9] Skins

of gorillai women, brought back by Hanno, are reputed to have been kept at Carthage until Rome destroyed the city 350 years later at the end of the Punic Wars, 146 BC.

The American physician and missionary Thomas Staughton Savage and naturalist Jeffries Wyman first described the western gorilla (they called

it Troglodytes gorilla) in 1847 from specimens obtained in Liberia.[10] The name was derived from Ancient Greek Γόριλλαι (gorillai) ‘tribe of hairy women’,[11] described by Hanno.