Did an Ape Return to the Water?
Returning to the Water
Land animals quite commonly return to the water just as birds sometimes become flightless. Herr Hauff’s ichthyosaur evolved from an ancestor that returned to the water over 200 million years ago. In the last 80 million years mammals have often entered the water, found it comfortable and stayed.
The cetaceans, the whales and dolphins, were the first to do it. Little rat-like creatures like all mammals then, they sought to avoid the terrors of the dinosaurs by hiding in the water of river estuaries. It was safer, they stayed and gradually adapted to their new surroundings. The buoyancy and safety afforded by the water allowed them to grow bigger and eventually take to the open sea, especially after the great carnivorous sea dinosaurs had all died. Today, they are supremely adapted to the aquatic environment. But occasionally a throwback will reveal something more of the original land mammal.
Some hoofed mammals paddled into the water 50 million years ago to become the dugongs and manatees. About 25 million years ago, a bear-like creature took to the water to evolve into sea lions and at the same time some dog-like mammals immersed themselves to become today’s seals. More recently we have seen otters of the stoat family adapt to the water, beavers (a rodent), the hippopotamus only 5 million years ago. And… a certain ape?
Although most zoological orders can boast some representative that has fully adapted to water, the order of primates cannot.
Sir Alister Hardy proposed to change that by suggesting in 1960 that many of man’s peculiar features could be explained if an ancestor had adapted to an aquatic or semiaquatic life for a few million years before emerging again equipped to conquer the world. Hardy’s theory, though gaining adherents, is not regarded as respectable in most anthropological quarters but, if an ape did submerge, there was a very good reason and a likely place for it to happen. More of this toward the end of the chapter.
A few million years in the water give us convincing explanations of otherwise untypical and inexplicable human characteristics, including some of the those we have been looking at. Why are we bipedal? Why are we naked? Why do we have a layer of subcutaneous fat? Why do we possess the diving reflex? Why can young human babies swim before they can walk? What triggered off speech?
Algis Kuliukas, New Scientist, 2000, wrote:
Forty years after Alister Hardy first published his idea in your pages (17 March 1960, p 642), we are again considering the idea that water played a far greater role in our past than previously thought. Why then, has the scientific world paid so little attention to such a plausible theory?
I see it like this. We are far better swimmers than our nearest relative the chimpanzee. We have a cluster of physical traits that may or may not be aquatic. There are two reasons for this. First, the traits are aquatic adaptations, in which case it’s time for the kind of shift in thinking that the eminent palaeoanthropologist Phillip Tobias was talking about.
Secondly, the traits are not aquatic at all, in which case the orthodox theories will have to explain our ability to swim and other physical traits better than they have done so far.
Related posts:
- The Aquatic Ape Elaine Morgan presents an excellent case for an aquatic phase...
- Where and When was the Human Aquatic Period Where and when did the ape become aquatic?...
- Less Specialised Examples of Convergence The general features of animals, in common or similar environments,...
- Aquatic brain food allowed evolution of human intelligence Scientists now know what may have helped fuel the evolution...
- The Diving Reflex The diving reflex is an adaptation for, er… diving, something...
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