Aquatic Ape Hypothesis and Today's Sleek People
Posted By Paul Kotik on 26 July 2005
Elaine Morgan was amused. She smiled benignly at us, as if we were naughty schoolchildren.
“How can it be, “ I had asked, “That the current issue of one of America's most widely-read science magazines has managed to print a survey of the current state of play in the origin-of-man game without making a single reference to the aquatic ape hypothesis or to Elaine Morgan?"
This seemed quite remarkable to me. It had, after all, been over 30 years since the hypothesis had gained wide exposure with Elaine’s publication of The Descent of Woman, over 40 years since Sir Alistir Hardy’s startling lecture to the British Sub-Aqua Club, and 60 years since Max Westenhofe broached the idea to the German –speaking world.
The proposition is that the primate ancestors of homo sapiens transited and adapted to an aquatic existence, an evolutionary phase shaped by water, to which we owe certain of our singular anatomical and physiological characteristics.
For us, it's pretty sweet: freedivers are descended from......freedivers ?
Elaine, plainly relishing the lunch of Dover sole we’d (along with contributor Emma Farrell) treated ourselves to at London’s Paddington Hilton, had answered variants of this question many, many, oh-so- many times before.
“I have”, she intoned, patiently, “been waiting thirty years for someone, one of these scientists, to publish a serious, reasoned rebuttal supported by fact, but so far that has not happened.”
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