The word “gorilla” comes from the history of Hanno the Navigator, an explorer on an expedition on the west African coast to the area that later became Sierra Leone. They encountered “a savage people, the greater part of whom were women, whose bodies were hairy, and who our interpreters called Gorillae.” The word was then later used as the species name, though it is unknown whether what these ancient Carthaginians encountered were truly gorillas, another species of ape or monkeys, or humans.