Aquatic Ape Hypothesis and Today's Sleek People
Posted By Paul Kotik on 26 July 2005
"All that we did during the 70's, those were things that had to be done." Elaine seemed pensive, and a bit hesitant before continuing: ”But I am concerned that certain things have now gone too far, have gone to the opposite extreme. Where the girls' test scores were lower before, as things changed they increased and then surpassed the boys' test scores and are now, apparently, higher than the boys'. This is no less problematic. There is no reason to believe the boys are silly twits, just as there was, previously, no reason to suppose [glancing at Emma] we were less clever. Now the boys are demoralized. They think they cannot do well in school, and so they look about for something else to do, like be disruptive."
Whew.
Emma asked Elaine whether, all told, she thought things were better now. Elaine brightened. “Oh, yes. But as I say, we should be concerned that things have gone too far the other way. The men are confused."
Fair enough. I know I certainly am.
The Descent of Woman was, and is, a startling dissertation. The ‘standard theory’ of human origin was, as of 1972, the ‘Savannah Model’, in which the primate ancestors of humans were differentiated from the other apes by the unique selective pressures encountered while moving from the jungle to the open plain. The Savannah Model has withstood, in what is by now a rather diluted version, a relentless onslaught of troubling fossil discoveries and other new evidence. The aquatic ape hypothesis (now generally termed the ‘aquatic ape theory’, or AAT) proposes, alternatively, that the set of unique selective pressures applied to the ancestors of homo sapiens did their evolutionary business during a period of semi-aquatic existence which our ancestors lived through before returning to solid ground. In short, that unique among the primates, our ancestors were water-adapted.
Makes perfect sense to me, but maybe that'’s just the company I keep. Aquatic apes, the whole seething lot of them.
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