A fourth genus, Atlanthropus, was used for the North African material and a fifth, Telanthropus, was introduced to accommodate a H. erectus-like mandible, SK 15, recovered from Member 2 at Swartkrans in southern Africa.
Until its taxonomy was rationalized, the two main regional subsets of what we now know as H. erectus were attributed to three genera: two of them, Pithecanthropus and Meganthropus, were from Java, and one, Sinanthropus, from China. A fourth genus, Atlanthropus, was used for the North African material and a fifth, Telanthropus, was introduced to accommodate a H. erectus-like mandible, SK 15, recovered from Member 2 at Swartkrans in southern Africa. Franz Weidenreich25 was the first to suggest that the genus Pithecanthropus should be subsumed into Homo, and in the same paper he proposed that fossils recovered from what was then called Choukoutien (now called Zhoukoudian), which were initially assigned to Sinanthropus pekinensis,26 should also be transferred to H. erectus. Subsequently the hypodigms of Meganthropus,27 Atlanthropus 28 and Telanthropus 29 were transferred to Homo as H. erectus, but a recent analysis of the occlusal morphology of specimens assigned to Meganthropus palaeojavanicus, conventionally considered a junior synonym of H. erectus, suggests that they are more likely hominid and not hominin.30