I posted about the Aquatic Ape hypothesis some time ago. Now I’ve had a comment from Jim Moore, who is not impressed:
I’ve been looking at the evidence used by “aquatic ape” supporters, including Elaine Morgan, for about 10 years now, and the reason it isn’t better known is not because Morgan is not a professional. It is because she uses bogus “facts” as evidence, alters quotes and conclusions from good scientists to make them say the opposite of what they actually said, and generally does a bad job of it. And she’s the best of the proponents of the idea.
He has a website “Aquatic Ape Theory: Sink or Swim”, devoted to a sceptical look at the theory. A very sceptical look.
Coincidentally, Roger Deakin mentioned the very same theory in an article in the Times on Saturday on the atavistic pleasure of swimming:
It may be that swimming really is our natural condition, that we evolved as primates through a sea change. The marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy’s theory, published in 1960, was elaborated by Elaine Morgan in The Descent of Woman. They believed we spent ten million years of the Pliocene era of world drought evolving into uprightness as semi-aquatic waders and swimmers in the sea shallows and on the beaches of Africa. Hardy discovered that if you put a swimmer into a water tunnel, the hydrodynamic pattern coincides exactly with the natural streamlining of body hairs. We also differ from the rest of the apes in being hairless, like dolphins, and having an insulating layer of subcutaneous fat.
Our instinct to migrate to the beach, love of seafood, the warm south, and our natural affinity with whales, dolphins, otters and water-rats all look like convincing evidence to me, too. But then, as a swimmer, maybe I’m just biased.
Seems like it’s entered into the realms of myth.
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