Elaine Morgan: Did we evolve from aquatic apes?

The long held theory for human evolution goes something similar to: our ancestors stood up, (possibly to gather fruit from bushes, or to have freed their hands to carry food or babies), walked out of the forests into the savannah where our legs then lengthened making us supreme distance runners as we lost almost all of our hair to keep us cool in the open grasslands of Eastern Equatorial Africa.

But recently, more and more proponents of an alternate theory, the theory of a semi-aquatic ancestor to humans, are speaking out, including; philosopher/darwinist Dan Dannett, Naturalist/Anthropologist Sir David Attenborough, and Zoologist Desmond Morris.

However possibly the biggest bulldog of the theory is most likely it’s shortest.  Elaine Morgan a writer, feminist, scientific theorist and octagenarian, presents here in this Ted.com video, and whith humor and ease expounds not only on the finer points of her theory, but also on the nature of science and the politics that shape it.

Some of the finer points of a semi-aquatic ancestry: Elaine begins by noting that at the paleontological level more and more digging at early hominin sites is bringing up fossils from that time period not of savannah wildlife, but plants and animals common to aquatic habitats.  On the phenotypic front (or physical. A phenotype is a physical manifestation of a gene. I.E. eye color, hair, number of limbs and so forth), Elaine makes note that every mammal that is alive and hairless today had an ancestor that was conditioned for the water (elephants, hippopotamus, manatee and dolphins are all mentioned). Furthermore humans, unlike any other apes, have a layer of fat under their skin, which is shared in common with other aquatic mammals like seals and whales (also humans as we have all seen can grow momumentally obese, which is physically impossible for any of the other great apes to do, but the build up of blubber in aquatic mammals is a common feature). She goes further to say that a prime factor in human speech is our capability to consciously control our breath, and the only other animals alive that are capable of that same feat are the diving mammals (whales, dolphins, seals) and diving birds (penguins, puffins).

Going on, she points out that though the other great apes can walk upright for short periods of time, all of them always do whenever walking in water. Below is a beautiful, short clip from Life of Mammals with David Attenborough.  The 5min clip has Attenborough walking side by side in marshy water with chimpanzees and offers a candid, startlingly convincing view of what our early beginnings may have been like.

David Attenborough: Chimps Walking Upright (Of course, Attenborough’s explanation will do much more justice than I ever could, this clip works perfectly as a compliment to Elaine Morgans talk and is worth watching in itself).

The talk ends discussing the politics of chance in science.  The aquatic-ape theory has been shut out of academia and schools of scientific theory by long established heads of the field for much longer than the 30 years that Elaine Morgan has been working on it, and brings to light the often times over political, close minded thinking so characterstic of fundamental dogma that is more closely associated with religion, rearing it’s head in the hall of objective thought (she likens it to a priesthood, and quickly makes reference to Richard Dawkins and his suggestion that the best way to treat a priesthood is to refuse to give it all the excessive reverence it’s been trained to recieve and learn to rock the boat and make some noise).

Her broader message is that science isn’t decided via headcount or popularity contest, but by facts and evidence.  Science is a constantly mutable, changing element itself, and history has shown us that it has been and will continue to be so indefinitely.  There is no ruling body of science that exists outside of the burden of proof and evidence, and everything is up for review (Stephen Jay Gould would famously rerun experiments that he found to give slighted racist results in the field of Anthropology, and would routinely retest and correct the tampered data).  Whether Elaine Morgan is correct is and she would agree should be up for debate, but whether it deserves the chance to be so, should not be.

(Excuse the long winded post, but as an Anthropology major this warranted a bit of explanation and time. Enjoy the video(s)).