The issue is -- where, or rather when, is this aquatic stage of human evolution supposed to fit? We have fossils, at least fragmentary ones, covering nearly all time since our divergence from chimpanzees (about 6 million years ago). There are some gaps of hundreds of thousands of years, but it seems quite unlkely that our ancestors would just happen to move into water and then return to land in such a short time without leaving fossils behind, especially since shallow waters are by far the best environment for fossil formation!
Living in coastal wetlands and areas rich of freshwater, using aquatic resources, sure. But for fully aquatic life, the evidence are not nearly sufficient -- as far as I'm aware, every clue of AAH can be explained from known mechanisms (thermoregulation, sexual selection, etc.) without it.
"Proponents of the ‘Aquatic Ape’ hypothesis" knew this is where you were going by paragraph two! This is what I love about Grey Goose Chronicles - nobody else even talks about this kind of thing.
Of course this begs the question: Is aquatic ape actually true? And let's be fair, it is a bit out there. But to my knowledge it's never been well enough investigated for anybody to say it's as ridiculous as biologists routinely dismiss it as being. Everybody just argues about whether it's parsimonious or not (see e.g. Langdon's Umbrella hypotheses and parsimony in human evolution) and then forgets about the whole thing.
I have concluded after much research and thought about Vernix that it’s part of our fascia. Some of it ends on top at birth but it’s part of the layers of skin and in a few weeks it’s all or almost all under all the layers and is the fascia. I’ve been interested in fascia since an illness required me to try fascia release which had a profound effect on me. It has some effect on everyone because it’s where many of our memories are stored at least traumatic memories but I think it’s much more. If you are dehydrated or damage a bit of fascia in your shoulder area it also can cause pain all over the body. So I think of it as the spirit made manifest in the physical body.
Your comment on the issue being understudied is spot on.
I believe most people are under the impression that we know far more than we do about these sorts of topics. There are so many fascinating questions to be understood about quite basic things about humans, and many more about other animals.
With regards to only human gestation and birth here are some open questions: what is underlying cause of preeclampsia, what triggers birth (especially premature birth), what are Braxton Hicks contractions doing, what causes amniotic band syndrome, and what is the origin of the cells that cause the vascular malformation commonly called strawberry anigomas.
Human babies and sea-lion pups=Alister Hardy. His name popped in my head before I'd even finished reading the headline.
How many boxes does your hypothesis tick; how many things does it explain; and how many questions does it answer vis other hypotheses? The AAH is a case in point.
"Experts" and "Academia" have pretty much worn out their welcome with me and a huge chunk of the population besides. I've lost count of the number of fields that are now seemingly entirely bereft of all logic; critical thinking; and the scientific method, and that simply resort to assertion when challenged.
> but most bizarrely the lipid composition of the vernix is identifiably different between males and females, a result which may arise from different hormone patterns in the baby.
And the baby hasn't even had a chance to decide which gender to identify with.
Thanks. I have never understood why the aquatic ape theory is so apparently universally dismissed, when the evidence seems quite compelling, to me, and the reasons for dismissal not so much. I would certainly hope it's not because the theories have been advanced generally by women, and use features of human females (and babies) specifically as much of the basis.
The aquatic ape hypothes is often dismissed because it's seen as unnecessary:
"[T]here is no evidence of anatomical or physiological adaptations that cannot be explained equally well without recourse to aquatic theories..."
Foley, R., & Lahr, M. M. (2014). The role of “the aquatic” in human evolution: constraining the aquatic ape hypothesis. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 23(2), 56-59.
I agree that the aquatic ape hypothesis is unnecessary, and I suspect that "aquatic features" in homo are really related to time spent around water rather than literally beneath it.
Yet parsimony isn't an absolute principle, and the story of human evolution is long and complex. Aeons of time lie in the murky depths of the past. Those who witnessed the debate between Out of Africa and Multiregionalism remember how, even though Out of Africa turned out to be essentially correct, the truth was really found between and beyond the two models. It seems to me that the same will turn out to be true for the pro and anti positions of the aquatic ape hypothesis, and the most sensible position here is one of open-mindedness and curiosity.
The dismissal is either from ideologues who don't want to believe it or from people who know enough about pattern-matching problems to recognize the errors. It's elegant in regards some of the evidence, but very much not in others. Better explanations than aquaticism exist for all the individual pieces of evidence, and as our author here points out we're usually looking at conservation of some earlier trait. For instance, zinc isotope analysis of ancient human and hominid teeth often show an all-meat diet - this makes sense of the fact that we are better at ketosis than other primates, but we also digest starch very well and at one point apparently ate so much fruit that we lost certain vitamin-c alleles. Why? Because those are all from different stages of our long prehistory.
Or take hairlessness, a key point for aquatic hypotheses - better analysis shows it evolved with bipedalism for sweating during persistence hunting on the savannah, and is downstream from being able to carry gourds of water (other animals can't carry water, and therefore can't benefit from evaporative cooling to our extent).
All of this is what we call 'the documentary effect' - documentary video (or any youtube video, really) is misleading by nature, is anti-information. Why? Because even if the creator is striving for balance, he or she can only present what is in his or her mind to present, and this will always just be a narrow slice of possible evidence and interpretation. Watch a video that claims X, X seems plausible. Watch another that claims anti-X, that will seem less plausible than if you'd watched them in the reverse order.
Many Native American tribes have no body hair, none whatsoever. I’m part of a tribe with this trait. It’s very interesting and I conclude we are from everywhere in the universe oh they do have a lot of hair on their head.
I think a lot of the hostility is just sexist. But there are also disciplinary specialist issues, where people trained to look at skeletal remains don’t think about fatty tissue or breathing.
Academia's unfairly dismissive of AAH in my opinion.
The issue is -- where, or rather when, is this aquatic stage of human evolution supposed to fit? We have fossils, at least fragmentary ones, covering nearly all time since our divergence from chimpanzees (about 6 million years ago). There are some gaps of hundreds of thousands of years, but it seems quite unlkely that our ancestors would just happen to move into water and then return to land in such a short time without leaving fossils behind, especially since shallow waters are by far the best environment for fossil formation!
Living in coastal wetlands and areas rich of freshwater, using aquatic resources, sure. But for fully aquatic life, the evidence are not nearly sufficient -- as far as I'm aware, every clue of AAH can be explained from known mechanisms (thermoregulation, sexual selection, etc.) without it.
"Proponents of the ‘Aquatic Ape’ hypothesis" knew this is where you were going by paragraph two! This is what I love about Grey Goose Chronicles - nobody else even talks about this kind of thing.
Of course this begs the question: Is aquatic ape actually true? And let's be fair, it is a bit out there. But to my knowledge it's never been well enough investigated for anybody to say it's as ridiculous as biologists routinely dismiss it as being. Everybody just argues about whether it's parsimonious or not (see e.g. Langdon's Umbrella hypotheses and parsimony in human evolution) and then forgets about the whole thing.
Thanks for posting this, Herbalist.
I have concluded after much research and thought about Vernix that it’s part of our fascia. Some of it ends on top at birth but it’s part of the layers of skin and in a few weeks it’s all or almost all under all the layers and is the fascia. I’ve been interested in fascia since an illness required me to try fascia release which had a profound effect on me. It has some effect on everyone because it’s where many of our memories are stored at least traumatic memories but I think it’s much more. If you are dehydrated or damage a bit of fascia in your shoulder area it also can cause pain all over the body. So I think of it as the spirit made manifest in the physical body.
Your comment on the issue being understudied is spot on.
I believe most people are under the impression that we know far more than we do about these sorts of topics. There are so many fascinating questions to be understood about quite basic things about humans, and many more about other animals.
With regards to only human gestation and birth here are some open questions: what is underlying cause of preeclampsia, what triggers birth (especially premature birth), what are Braxton Hicks contractions doing, what causes amniotic band syndrome, and what is the origin of the cells that cause the vascular malformation commonly called strawberry anigomas.
Human babies and sea-lion pups=Alister Hardy. His name popped in my head before I'd even finished reading the headline.
How many boxes does your hypothesis tick; how many things does it explain; and how many questions does it answer vis other hypotheses? The AAH is a case in point.
"Experts" and "Academia" have pretty much worn out their welcome with me and a huge chunk of the population besides. I've lost count of the number of fields that are now seemingly entirely bereft of all logic; critical thinking; and the scientific method, and that simply resort to assertion when challenged.
> but most bizarrely the lipid composition of the vernix is identifiably different between males and females, a result which may arise from different hormone patterns in the baby.
And the baby hasn't even had a chance to decide which gender to identify with.
my take on AAH at https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/guilty-pleasures-of-an-aquatic-ape
Whether in the Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel, or Phrath, Man was made to wade~
Weird not to mention Elaine Morgan’s name and work at all in this post
BBC 4 had a wonderful fairly recent series about evidence for what is now called “waterside ape” continuing to emerge
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07w4y98
There is also a terrific series of YouTube talks
Will look for link
There is also this book
https://www.amazon.ca/Survival-Fattest-Human-Brain-Evolution/dp/9812561919
And the work of Erika Schagatay
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=bi_1Qj0AAAAJ&hl=en
Both give excellent talks in the series
I would say it is more correct to state this thesis is rejected by paleoanthropologists who work only with bones
Scholars outside of anthro who work on fat and breath — neither of which preserve in the fossil record — are not as zealously dismissive.
Thanks. I have never understood why the aquatic ape theory is so apparently universally dismissed, when the evidence seems quite compelling, to me, and the reasons for dismissal not so much. I would certainly hope it's not because the theories have been advanced generally by women, and use features of human females (and babies) specifically as much of the basis.
The aquatic ape hypothes is often dismissed because it's seen as unnecessary:
"[T]here is no evidence of anatomical or physiological adaptations that cannot be explained equally well without recourse to aquatic theories..."
Foley, R., & Lahr, M. M. (2014). The role of “the aquatic” in human evolution: constraining the aquatic ape hypothesis. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews, 23(2), 56-59.
I agree that the aquatic ape hypothesis is unnecessary, and I suspect that "aquatic features" in homo are really related to time spent around water rather than literally beneath it.
Yet parsimony isn't an absolute principle, and the story of human evolution is long and complex. Aeons of time lie in the murky depths of the past. Those who witnessed the debate between Out of Africa and Multiregionalism remember how, even though Out of Africa turned out to be essentially correct, the truth was really found between and beyond the two models. It seems to me that the same will turn out to be true for the pro and anti positions of the aquatic ape hypothesis, and the most sensible position here is one of open-mindedness and curiosity.
The dismissal is either from ideologues who don't want to believe it or from people who know enough about pattern-matching problems to recognize the errors. It's elegant in regards some of the evidence, but very much not in others. Better explanations than aquaticism exist for all the individual pieces of evidence, and as our author here points out we're usually looking at conservation of some earlier trait. For instance, zinc isotope analysis of ancient human and hominid teeth often show an all-meat diet - this makes sense of the fact that we are better at ketosis than other primates, but we also digest starch very well and at one point apparently ate so much fruit that we lost certain vitamin-c alleles. Why? Because those are all from different stages of our long prehistory.
Or take hairlessness, a key point for aquatic hypotheses - better analysis shows it evolved with bipedalism for sweating during persistence hunting on the savannah, and is downstream from being able to carry gourds of water (other animals can't carry water, and therefore can't benefit from evaporative cooling to our extent).
All of this is what we call 'the documentary effect' - documentary video (or any youtube video, really) is misleading by nature, is anti-information. Why? Because even if the creator is striving for balance, he or she can only present what is in his or her mind to present, and this will always just be a narrow slice of possible evidence and interpretation. Watch a video that claims X, X seems plausible. Watch another that claims anti-X, that will seem less plausible than if you'd watched them in the reverse order.
Many Native American tribes have no body hair, none whatsoever. I’m part of a tribe with this trait. It’s very interesting and I conclude we are from everywhere in the universe oh they do have a lot of hair on their head.
I think a lot of the hostility is just sexist. But there are also disciplinary specialist issues, where people trained to look at skeletal remains don’t think about fatty tissue or breathing.