Guest essay by Eric Worrall
High profile British Climate Advocate David Attenborough, who in 2015 was invited to the Whitehouse by President Obama to advise on climate issues, has come under fire for promoting a discredited “Aquatic Ape” theory.
Sorry David Attenborough, we didn’t evolve from ‘aquatic apes’ – here’s why
Occasionally in science there are theories that refuse to die despite the overwhelming evidence against them. The “aquatic ape hypothesis” is one of these, now championed by Sir David Attenborough in his recent BBC Radio 4 series The Waterside Ape.
The hypothesis suggests that everything from walking upright to our lack of hair, from holding our breath to eating shellfish could be because an aquatic phase in our ancestry. Since the theory was first suggested more than 55 years ago, huge advances have been made in the study of human evolution and our story is much more interesting and complicated than suggested by the catch-all aquatic ape hypothesis.
In 1960, marine biologist Alister Hardy published an article in New Scientist, titled: Was man more aquatic in the past? He re-told the familiar tale of the evolution of land animals from ancient fish, and then considered the return of various groups of reptiles, birds and mammals to an aquatic existence: ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, crocodiles, sea-snakes, penguins, whales, dolphins and porpoises, manatees and dugongs, and seals – as well as polar bears, otters and water voles, who hunt in water. Then he suggested that many of the unique characteristics of humans and their ancestors, marking them out as different from the other apes, could be explained as adaptations to spending time in water.
Hardy put forward all sorts of features which could be explained as “aquatic adaptations”: our swimming ability – and our enjoyment of it; loss of body hair, as well as an arrangement of body hair that he supposed may have reduced resistance in the water; curvy bodies; and the layer of fat under our skin. He even suggested that our ability to walk upright may have developed through wading, with the water helping to support body weight.
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All the suggested anatomical and physiological adaptations can be explained by other hypotheses, which fit much better with what we actually know about the ecology of ancient hominins. Hairlessness, for instance, is only a feature of fully aquatic mammals such as whales and dolphins. Semi-aquatic mammals such as otters and water voles are extremely furry. Sexual selection and adaptations to heat loss better explain our pattern of body hair. Sexual selection may also explain our body fat distribution, which differs between the sexes. Voluntary breath control is more likely to be related to speech than to diving.
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I’m open to the idea that early humans spent a lot of time living on beaches. Gathering shellfish is a very easy way to get a decent high protein meal – kids in my old hometown used to gather more shellfish than we could carry in a matter of minutes.
But suggesting humans went through a “Man from Atlantis” phase seems a bit far fetched. The truth is we are quite poorly adapted to water. Humans are slow swimmers. Our eyes don’t work well underwater. Thanks to our lack of waterproof fur, getting out of water even in the tropics is sometimes a rather chilly experience, until you dry off.
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And how slender are the threads connecting anything about human evolution! This is why there is so much contention about how it happened, why it happened and where it happened.
For me this article runs counter to the philosophy of this site. Articles here in have repeatedly attacked the CONSENSUS of AGW with hard data. To now attack David Attenborough with consensus around unproven (NO physical evidence) theories is hypocritical.
I kind of agree on your first point.
But call me cynical when media personalities and politicians mash up … what good can come of it?
Exactly. I think to debate is healthy but to deride the idea based on an article that is itself questionable is not what I expect of this site.
If there was money to be made from this silly idea, Sir David Attenborough would be demanding that those who disagree should be silenced.
The all american dream, dissolved in salty waters.
“only”? what about wallowers such as elephants and hippos
the difference between whales & otters can be explained by the climate when they shifted to water – if the climate was colder – fur was retained
anti-AAT is not a “settled science” – like AGW – it could go on for a long time
but – MORE IMPORTANTLY – this entire article is ad hominem – attorborough’s climate arguments should be confronted directly – not via a side-issue
Finger wrinkling points to human adaptation to water that apes lack. It strongly suggests human evolution has adapted to a great deal of time in water.
None of this precludes other evolutionary developments, such as heat dissipation on land. It simply demonstrates that one cannot rule out some aquatic component to human evolution.
There is no reason we should have skin wrinkling if we are solely land adapted. It is quite possible the somewhere over the past X million years we spend many, many generations with a very close relationship with water.
Maybe it is as simple as finger wrinkling allowing us to better hunt fish with our bare hands. The hunter with wrinkled fingers is better able to scoop fish out of the water than the hunter with smooth fingers.
I think part of the disagreement here is based upon the interpretation of “Aquatic”.
What I remember from “Descent of Woman” in the late ’70s, was that Man lived on land near water (fresh, brackish, and ocean) and found sustenance in that environment much easier than on the savanna.
I recall Morgan holding disdain for Morris’s “Tarzan” view of the great hunter of the grasslands because shellfish and crustaceans don’t fight back nearly as hard as the Great Cats, jackels, hyena, and antelope (the Gemsbuck and Sable are some of the most dangerous animals in Africa). Land animals would not have given man the chance to experiment with tools. On the other hand you have all day to open a clam, oyster, or crab. You get to learn to make tools. I accept this part of the argument “hook, line, and sinker.”
If Morgan and others mean “Aquatic” to mean that at some point Man and Woman gave birth in the water, slept in the water, went days without setting foot on land, well then I too would reject that hypothesis.
Geese, heron, egrets and swans are some birds that we call “aquatic”. They live and breed on land and forage in the water. It is in that sense I take the meaning. Man is no more aquatic than a egret.
I strongly disagree with Gabro on the distribution of bones and the likelihood of preservation and discovery of fossils in the near-shore environment. I am unaware of hominid bone finds from the Nile Delta. What is more likely?
A) That Hominids did not inhabit the Nile Delta.
B) That hominid bones have been buried, preserved, and remain hidden under dozens-hundreds of feet of delta sediment.
C) That hominid bones didn’t get preserved in that environment from wave-stream erosion and meandering rivers.
I believe it is a combination of B and C with A absurdly unlikely. Just look at the difficulty archeologist have had in locating Pi-Ramesses, perhaps one of the greatest cities of the Egyptian pharos built out of stone. It is hard to find bones if it is a difficult place to look for them under modern cities and towns and working farmland.
Let us also consider the fresh-water, lake shore and river bank environment. Fresh water lakes are a dangerous place to hang around. Hippos and crocks live in the water and every carnivore for miles comes to drink. It might be a decent place to set up ambush for game, but only after you have developed tools and skills.
No, the brackish estuaries, barrier island lagoons, and tidal flats would be safer places to forage than the savanna. The lack of fossil evidence doesn’t concern me in the slightest because as someone with geologic experience I can appreciate how difficult it is to find your car keys in the surf. If hominid bones would survive the coastal environment, then we should be tripping over fossil whale bone everywhere we look.
The hominid bones we have found are from the “planes that came back”. The more important bones in the story of Man are from environments where the what few bones would have survived are much harder to find.
You’re not disagreeing with me but with the facts. Ask any paleontologist which is a better depositional environment for the formation and preservation of fossils, a mixed woodland-grassland savanna or a shallow coastal zone. On the land, dead animals are almost always scavenged and their bones scattered and decayed before being covered up. It’s common to find them from these habitats in river and lake beds where the remains can be silted over, or under volcanic ash falls or sandstorms. In shallow seas however, preservation is not only more likely, but often much better, due to fine-grained sediments.
Australopiths did not inhabit the Nile Delta. It didn’t exist at their time. When the Med was a series of salt lakes after the closure of Gibraltar Strait, the paleo-Nile cut a deep canyon in order to reach the sea at such a low level. The Rhone shows the same sort of incision. Then, when the Strait opened up again and the Atlantic rushed in, the lower Nile was a bay all the way up to Aswan. It was during this period (the Pliocene Epoch) that Australophithecus evolved. Then sediment slowly filled in the deep Nile canyon, finally reaching the present delta.
Much of what we know about ape evolution in the Oligocene, which preceded the Miocene and Pliocene Epochs, comes from the Fayum Depression, which was then a swampy forest. Unlike dry forest, the ancient apes that died there had a good chance of being covered up and preserved before being eaten.
In short, there is zero evidence in favor of an aquatic phase in human evolution. Surely our ancestors increasingly made use of aquatic resources as our brains got bigger, but the driving force behind our evolution was dealing with the drying conditions in the habitats in which we know our ancestors lived.
We were not originally big game hunters, but scavengers. Like chimps, our ancestors did hunt smaller game. But the Acheulean handax, which implement remained unchanged for about a million years, was a multi-purpose tool, one of the main uses of which was to crack open the long bones of Pleistocene megafauna. Evidence of this use abounds. OTOH, there is, again, not a single shred of evidence in favor of our having evolved as a result of a semi-aquatic existence. All the evidence in the world is against this baseless speculation, which can’t be dignified with the term “hypothesis”, since it’s totally anti-scientific.
There is indeed a paleo-Nile Delta, or at least a migrating stratagraphic sequence of deltas. As you point out, it is many (hundreds) of miles from its current location and in places under thousands of feet of sediment. Where it and the things buried in it have not been eroded, they are inaccessible.
Our current list of bone finding locations is not an unbiased random sampling of hominid settlements. There is a strong survivor’s bias and an accessibility bias. The implications of that sampling bias should be remembered in the analysis.
Stephen,
There is no bias. Every relevant region of Africa has been thoroughly prospected for Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene fauna. The fact that there are no hominids in the coastal strata is not an artifact. It is a taphonomic fact.
Sorry, but Morgan’s Homo aquaticus is a feminist myth, akin to the creationists’ myths. It is entirely without any actual physical support.
Please feel free to take it on blind faith like a young earth creationist, but there is no scientific basis for the conjecture whatsoever. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
Well now, Gabro, there you have me. If there are deep water whale bone fossils from the Pliocene and Pleistocene, we wouldn’t be unlikely to find them. Those strata do not outcrop anywhere today above water so those hypothetical fossils are unavailable.
Since we have found no such fossils, can we conclude whales did not die and leave their skeletons in deep water sediments in the past 5 million years?
(No.)
The above 7:01 pm was posted to the wrong reply point. It can be deleted.
“If hominid bones would survive the coastal environment, then we should be tripping over fossil whale bone everywhere we look.”
Of course considering that we all know how very common whale cadavers are on beaches.
Almost all whales die at sea, and it is in deep-water sediments that most whale-bones are found.
I was pointing out that we know that some whales die on the beach. But the fossil whale bones we know about don’t come from the beach. They are best preserved in deep water sediments. Whale bones on the beach are destroyed by wave action and are not preserved.
If whale bones on beaches are destroyed by wave action, how come that e. g. mollusc shells and bird bones that are vastly more fragile are preserved?
And incidentally bowhead whales, which are unusual in that they fairly frequently become hemmed in by ice and die in very shallow water are rather common in arctic beach deposits.
Stephen,
Fossil whalebones from the relevant time frames are not from deep ocean sediments.
We’re interested in Pliocene and early Pleistocene layers. Before commenting upon human evolution, it would be wise to study it.
Well now, Gabro, there you have me. If there are deep water whale bone fossils from the Pliocene and Pleistocene, we wouldn’t be unlikely to find them. Those strata do not outcrop anywhere today above water so those hypothetical fossils are unavailable.
Since we have found no such fossils, can we conclude whales did not die and leave their skeletons in deep water sediments in the past 5 million years?
(No.)
Skeptics won the AGW science debate long ago, but many of them still don’t understand why the truth isn’t catching on with the public. “Dangerous AGW” is ridiculous to those educated in the hard sciences; we know that CO2 rising by just one part in ten thousand isn’t enough to cause any measurable global warming, just like it hasn’t caused any of their other scary alarmist predictions.
But David Attenborough is a wonderful promoter of the “climate change” scare. With the BBC’s excellent video production experts and facilities, he can easily make up look like down, and he can make war look like peace, make ignorance look like strength, and… he can make natural climate variability look “vewy dangewuss”.
The mouth-breathing public that swallows his sciencey programs without question is a big part of his audience. He’s so sincere that he must be telling the truth.
David Attenborough is Walter Cronkite 2.0 — avuncular, friendly, concerned, helpful, sincere, etc. How can the public not believe what he’s telling them? But… Attenborough has an agenda. He’s promoting a narrative that is unsupported by the real world.
Those in the climate alarmist movement understood early on how important public relations is when selling a Big Lie to the public. OTOH, scientific skeptics just assumed that it would be sufficient to be reasonable and logical, and then letting the scientific evidence demolish the alarmists’ “carbon” bogosity.
Nyet!! Emotions rule the public, not facts or evidence. Or rather, emotions trump all facts and evidence.
The sooner that skeptics find some friendly, likeable, authoritative spokespeople, the sooner we will make progress (and a busty young blonde might not be a bad idea either—so long as she’s got “Dr.” in front of her name). Drs. Lindzen and Curry are good examples. But we need more.
In the mean time, the BBC and Attenborough have the high ground WRT alarmist propaganda. Skeptics have some catching up to do.
Facts and evidence are fine, but they aren’t sufficient when dealing with the public.
Fully agreed, dbstealey, that Attenborough has had for some time now both feet firmly planted in promotion of this fraudulent cAGW hoax. I suspect he’s long harboured a personal ‘legacy’ issue wherein the forces that enable(d) his programme making (ie. the broadcast media and the behind-the-scenes ‘science’ from which he picks) have so purposefully gamed the message that he’s deliberately chosen not to sully a peerless reputation. A latter day shameless indoctrinator.
I enjoyed the schadenfreude but the article was basically an Ad Hominem. It is possible for people to be wrong about one thing and right about another. The discussion about the aquatic ape theory was really cool though.
It’s not a theory. It’s not an hypothesis. It’s pure BS.
Just as with man-made global warming, it’s vague for starters.
When and where exactly did this supposed phase of human evolution occur?
Please present all your evidence for this having happened there and then. Please state the results which could show this hypothesis false.
You can’t. Therefore, it’s not science but ideology.
i agree – i’ve been watching AAT for some time now – it fascinates me how ANGRY dissenters are – almost virulently angry – later i would run into the AGW debate – and found a familiar atmosphere –
science is actually accompanied by a lot of emotion
There are many highly qualified scientists working in relevant disciplines who are skeptical of the consensus on man-made climate change.
If you seriously believe that the aquatic ape conjecture has a shred of scientific credibility, please show me a single physical anthropologist or paleontologist working today who supports Elaine Morgan’s ideologically driven, scientifically baseless assertion. Just one.
I’m waiting.
Highly unlikely. We know that humans came out of Africa, so it follows that today’s black people of African descent are probably most closely related to our ancestors. These people are not good swimmers. If you don’t believe me, just look at the recent Olympic Games, or any earlier ones. You will not see a black contestant on any of the winners rostrums in any swimming event, yet they are outstanding in running events. People who can’t swim well but can run like hell did not descend from aquatic creatures. This was first pointed out to me by an alcoholic former lodger. Wisdom from the mouth of a drunk. Cheers.
to ‘ad absurdum’ your argument – there were no black gymnasts among leaders until a decade or so ago – and now look what’s happened – by your logic – that paucity was due to the fact that blacks (as closer to hominoid ancestors) weren’t good – at – gymnastics/acrobatics – really?!!
or maybe is was due to the social barriers – gymnastics and swimming requiring more monetary commitment than running
i hope you’re going to be comfortable with this piece of news out of Rio – http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2657245-olympic-swimming-2016-womens-100m-freestyle-medal-winners-times-and-results
this doesn’t deal with your “wisdom from a drunk” logic – eg – decendants from aquatics apes can NEVER become fast sprinters – black people are closer and should show more similarities to hominid ancestors (this logic is widely regarded as racist) – etc
Hey!! That guy drank like a fish! More proof of the AAT!
Most hunter gatherers and Agrarian communities can’t swim. Humans, like cats, don’t usually like the water.
Our ears are also poorly adapted to water, they frequently get infected with water clogging and don’t deal well with depth.
Also , water dwelling mammals tend to be bulkier, such as hippos, hominids got progressively taller and more lithe, including HOmo sapien.
I still like Alan G’s idea of defending myself against a lion. I would much rather do it in three feet of water than on land.
Baboons live on land, yet somehow manage to coexist with lions.
baboons & lions coexisting –
https://www.google.com/search?q=baboon+eaten+by+lion&safe=strict&biw=1440&bih=794&espv=2&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjrgp_4_ZvPAhVU-GMKHYk5BvMQsAQIKA&dpr=1
Exactly!
Yep, and before too many folks commit further to the continued error, its a small ‘s’ internationally recognised as ‘sapiens’. The family is capital, as in H, and the subjective is small case as in species differentiation, ie Homo habilis.
Anyway, top marks to ‘gabro’ for some serious insight. Shame you cant tell us your real papers.
Oops, that’s a genus…! Anyway, Dr. Tim Ball knocks the cAGW out the proverbiable warmist hat:
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=tim+ball+global+warming&&view=detail&mid=6FF5DB7949F1E7A577846FF5DB7949F1E7A57784&rvsmid=27BD25A6C03AD983438127BD25A6C03AD9834381&fsscr=0&FORM=VDFSRV
Hey, dontcha love vodafone connexion…
David Attenborough has been on television since we first got one back in the 1950’s. Any attempt to discredit him is futile.
Good grief: so much certainty, so little evidence. Conjecture piled upon conjecture piled upon conjecture: that’s all this is, on both sides.
And that being so, try to show each other some respect: neither side knows “the truth.”
Actually, having read the detailed “Aquatic Ape” theory books, I find the theory “explains a lot”. Moreover, I find discussions of it, misrepresent it — to make it sound “stupid”.
The AA Nay Sayers sound a lot like Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming due to CO2 proponents who ignore facts and logic to protect their long held beliefs.
The Science Isn’t Settled.
Lots of times I have dreamed that I could breathe underwater. Maybe that’s some kind of race memory.
Or maybe I just watched Man from Atlantis too much when I was a kid.
I’ve dreamed I can levitate. Combine that with the fact that our ancestors lived in the trees, and it becomes obvious they could fly. 🙂
Sorry, but please give me arguments why humans are NOT aquatic apes. The ones mentioned above are rather poor.
– Our eyes are adapted to under water sight. Just look at the Komen people in Thayland.
– We are excellent swimmers, by birth.
– We walk upright because of wading in the shallow waters. You don’t need to be a speed swimmer to do that.
– Do you think water is aways chilly? Apart from your mitochondrial dysfunction; Just look at what mister Wim Hofman is doing. He teaches people how to swim in ice water, without gasping, in a matter of minutes. Just relax and take a dive.
– Why not consider that the ability of holding your breath lead to the ability to speak?
Please give me arguments, so I can refute them. While you’re busy, please provide an alternative theory as well. Thanks!
I’d never heard of Attenborough’s program before. But I recall reading in one of Ivan Sanderson’s books about cryptozoology that he had personally seen giant bones in the Aleutian Islands during WWII that were ape-like, but far too massive, in his opinion, to have been viable except with the support of water. He speculated that the owners had lived in shallow shore waters.
My earliest memories of dreams were ones where I could fly, through some simple artifice. Either a paper grocery bag, or a mercury ion thruster powered snow ski (yep, seriously), I could fly at will, anywhere, any time. I’ve only actually piloted an airplane once, and only for about 30 seconds. It scared me.
I shared these thoughts with an acquaintance, Eric Lindbergh – grandson of Charles Lindbergh, and a pilot in his own right. He, too, could recall dreams in his childhood of flying. We chewed on this train of thougt for some time, but could come up with no plausible explanation for the phenomenon. It never occurred to us that we might be descendants of birds.
Humans also have nostrils that point downwards. Great for sinking into the water.
Unless you are Gabro, who’s nostrils are a pair of forward facing holes like all the apes have.