R D Martin suggests “there might have been a close association between increasing locomotor sophistication and increase in brain size in primate evolution”. Yet in stepping down from a three dimensional life in the trees to a two dimensional life on the plains, surely opportunities for movement were lost, and with it locomotor sophistication would have been decreased. But if the ape first took to the water thus retaining a sense of the vertical while requiring the development of entirely new locomotor skills, Martin’s suggestion would have more validity.
Animals that take to water often have unusually large brain:body ratios. The talapoin monkey of Gabon is one of the few primates to have taken to water and it has a large brain:body ratio.
Stimulated in the trees, stimulated anew by the transition to water, stimulated again by a whole host of new experiences on moving permanently to the land, the human brain became sophisticated enough to develop, not only locomotor skills but speech, advanced toolmaking and a complex social life that might have had the biggest effect of all. Elaine Morgan concludes:
Many other primates have moved from the trees to the open plains, and in no single one of them has that move produced any of the changes that caused the ancestors of Homo sapiens to diverge so dramatically from all his nearest relatives.
Submergence convergence provides a more convincing explanation. That is the theory of the aquatic ape in a nutshell. It is not based on fossil evidence. Coastal waters and lowland swamps are not particularly conducive to fossilization. Sharks, crocodiles and crabs would see to that. It is entirely deduced from structural convergence as a plausible explanation of the peculiarities of our species of ape—and the coincidence of suitable geological events.
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