There are tons of folk tales about creatures that are half ape and half human. This might be the being that spawned those stories! When fossils of this creature were discovered in 1959, it was called Zinjanthropus boisei. The classification was later amended to Paranthropus boisei,but it retained the world anthropus, which means ape-human.
This species lived around 1.5 million years ago and is one of the earliest hominin species. The fossil record is from Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia.
Images from The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans, published by Yale University Press. Photographs copyright c 2007 by Viktor Deak. Photographs reproduced with permission of Viktor Deak and Yale University Press.