Comments on: Ancient Chimps or Tano Giants?

By: anthrosciguy

anthrosciguy — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:42:39 +0000

Let me correct a small error in doug’s response. The originator of the AAT/H was Alister Hardy, not Hrdy. Ordinarily I’d figure that was just a typo, but there is a Hrdy in human evolution circles, Dr. Sarah Balffer Hrdy, a primatologist. Alister Hardy was an excellent marine biologist with a penchant for being non-excellent when he stepped outside his field. That was the case with his “aquatic ape” idea (his formulation ignored much of what was known already at the time about human evolution and animal and human biology, and was even — oddly, I think — ignorant about marine-related biology like the deiving reflex) and was also the case with his spirtituality work, which tended toward heaping praise on known fakes. His actual work, dealing primarily with plankton, was fantastic and got him a knighthood.

By: dogu4

dogu4 — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 15:27:10 +0000

Jim, that is an awesome response and am delighted to get your perspective. It’s just what I’ve been waiting for. I’ve never had the opportunity to really discuss this with a real anthropologist (that would be physical or cultural?) before so I’ve bookmarked your site and will look forward to accessing your perspective on this subject. My interest in the subject, as I mentioned before, is not that I feel it’s necessary to think it’s the way Elaine Morgan does (I used the Dr title as an honorific only, but there are PhD holders who do ascribe to an alternative view, Dr Hardy, the concepts well known proponent). I enjoy exploring the world around me and that includes “going off trail”. I’m not attempting to get lost, but the process of discovery is rewarded with the enjoyment of learning new things and and gaining new appreciation for what knowledge we have. If a time machine were invented tomorrow that allowed us to watch the time-lapse development of human evolution, and it turned out to be just as the conventional model predicts, I’d have no problem with it, but wouldn’t it be surprising if there were no surprises? There are still contentious issues regarding human evolution (aside from the ID issue) within the field. I can’t speak for all outsiders, but my objective isn’t to cause the walls of science to crash down but I think there is some value to an unconventional perspective though one has to have a sense of proportion and realism to it, just as the those who are currently working in the field are occasionally closed-off to emerging ideas, seeing their role as one of protecting the accepted view, and serve the useful function of being the bulwark challenging un-substantiated claims or arguing for an alternative interpretation of the evidence. I’m sure anyone who’s versed in some of the history of human intellectual progress will recognize that the process begins with questioning and I’m eager to check-out your site. Thanks Jim.

By: dogu4

dogu4 — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 15:08:03 +0000

There has been interest in underwater research for some time but the technologies and their applications have been un-available. While many new approaches are emerging, it is so expensive and intensive in use of people and resources that it’s not as widely applied as it might be, and probably will be more in the future. Of course underwater archaeology, not exactly digging for fossils as we use the term, has been going on for some time and there’s a lot more to be done. There is a case of a late pleistocene cave whose entrance is only accessed from below sealevel along France’s Cote ‘Azure d’Azure. Some dredging was done in Southeast Alaska on a relatively shallow submerged bench which would seemingly been a good spot for early inhabitants. And the most promising of all could be the anaerobic environment’s preservation of un-measured, impossible to imagine, archaeological treasures which now reside on the bottom of the Black Sea. Again, not exactly paleontology, but with huge implications as towards our understanding of the pre-historic scene.

By: mystery_man

mystery_man — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 05:43:17 +0000

That is an interesting observation about the fossils, Dogu4. I wonder how many attempts have ever been made to do any sort of fossil dig in submerged environments? It truly seems as though it could be worth someone’s while to try it.

By: dogu4

dogu4 — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 18:58:54 +0000

I wonder if webbing isn’t a recessive trait that a lot of primate (and other terrestrial vertebrate) populations carry, surfacing infrequently, and becoming more frequently expressed when conditions favor its owners’ success as a line of descent. Who knows where the primate line may have gone, but primates have been so successful on land and in trees, it’s hard to believe more primates wouldn’t have adapted to semi-aquatic lives. We base almost all of what we know about early primates from fossils which we almost always find in the fortunate erosion train lying exposed in necessarily arid, sparsely covered exposures. Primate populations that were adapted for the coastal mangrove type ecosystem over the last several million years would be below sea-level these days with the post-glacial rise in sealevels experienced worldwide at the beginning of the holocene. Not great for discovering fossils…sorta like the guy who’s looking for his keys under the street light cuz he can see better there… Nature is biased. I think there are some great secrets just a couple hundred feet submerged along the coastlines.

By: mystery_man

mystery_man — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 17:35:40 +0000

I have even heard that the slight webbing on our hands is thought of in some circles as a sort of vestige of an adaptation to a semi aquatic environment. This is all enthralling informaton on a theory that I hadn’t known very much about until corresponding about it here. Thank you Kittenz and Dogu4 for the information you have provided. As I said before, I come from a background where this sort of theory was never taken very seriously and thus I had never really had a good opportuninty to look into it much. But on further inspection, this all seems remarkably plausible. Dogu4’s points about the intertidal zone being ideal for humans and our ability to use tools, as well as the dental structure of human teeth are undeniably intrigueing. If we had developed a good, solid use of our hands and tool using, then it might make more sense to remain in the intertidal zone where the rescources could be utilized while at the same time not requiring us to give up the obvious evolutionary advantage of our hands not to mention the technological advances that had been made as a direct result of those adaptations. In that case, it would make little evolutionary sense to make the full jump into a wholly aquatic lifestyle. Since you have started me thinking about this subject, I find myself thinking that some of the best candidates for a fully aquatic primate would be those that broke off from the line of humans before the advantages of fully opposable thumbs and tool using had asserted themselves. If these primates happened to adapt to life in the sea at the expense of fully utilizing their hands, then they could very well have developed into a fully aquatic species. Just a thought. Although I am still somewhat enamored of the savahnna theory of human evoltuion, I am most certainly interested in learning more about ths Aquatic Ape Theory. It has definately gotten me thinking.

By: dogu4

dogu4 — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 16:24:52 +0000

I’m totally with you on that, Kittenz, and have been since first looking into the hypothesis.

One really interesting bit of evidence that is sometimes mentioned, though not used as persuasively as it could be, is regarding dental morphology. The teeth of humans instantly identify ‘em as primates, for a number of reasons (structure, morphology, pattern/sequence), but one thing that further identifies human teeth as opposed to most other primates) are the rounded molars suitable for grinding. Baboons, and all sorts of other primates have molars for grinding, but what are they grinding? Baboons and most other terrestrial primates focus on tough fibrous roots, grasses, and nuts, ets and the molars in these species reflect their function perfectly, with their molars having higher crowns which presumably are used to not just grind but to also cut the tough fiberous kinds of food for which they are adapted. Humans however don’t have the cutting edge on their molars, and a couple of other primates reflect this too: crab eating macaques and some rhesus monkeys have very human looking molars…in the animal world I’ve only been able to identify one other critter that has the look of human molars; the sea otter. Compare it by looking at not only the primates I mentioned, but compare this otter’s teeth with river otters…the carnasial-like characteristics typical of nearly all members of the carivora family are gone from the sea otter and in its place are rounded molars ideally suited for a generalized diet of mollusks and crustaceans. This site has a nice gallery of skulls which show this clearly.

One animal which also feeds by crushing shells in its jaws, though not shown in the above collection, is the walrus. I frequently have access to walrus teeth as I use them in carvings that I create (fossil walrus from Savunga, properly collected, as legal ivory) and while the teeth are of course not like human, or even sea otter, they too share the bulbous polished grinding surfaces. I’ve also run across illustrations of ancient shark teeth with likewise fed on mussels and other shelled mollusks and of course, the rounded polished surfaces are recognizable there. Oh, and giganto? I am aware that electronmicroscopic scans of the surface of these few samples show some similar wear patterns with pandas (micro-phytoliths), but again we see these rounded grinding surfaces which not surprisingly function pretty well for smashing the shoots and culms of bamboo.

Teeth…I can’t say whether a leopard changes its spots but it and all its kind reveal a lot about themselves by their teeth…and they’ve long been valued for revealing the un-deniable evolutionary history of their owners.

By: kittenz

kittenz — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 06:56:04 +0000

I’ve read several rebuttals of the aquatic ape theory and none of the rebuttals is as plausible to me as the teory itself. Even the fact that we humans today enthusiastically turn to bodies of water for recreational activities bolsters the belief in the possibility that our species is actually a semi-aquatic one. Perhaps a quest for water is even the spark that ignited namadic behavior in our species: as the plains of Africa became more and more arid, ancient hominids began moving from place to place to be near substantial bodies of water.

By: dogu4

dogu4 — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 18:42:14 +0000

MysteryMan…I’m not so sure that some sort of semi-sapient primate hasn’t become fully aquatic, or at least as aquatic as sea-otters or even polar bears (they are considered marine mammals officially, y’know. Again I refer to the legendary Kushtakah or Steller’s Sea-ape. After reading Farley Mowat’s “Sea of Slaughter” you might appreciate the notion that quite a few species un-recorded by the late-arriving early biologists and naturalists, such as they were, could have escaped detection prior to their extirpation. And as for primates adapting to the sea…well, human evolutionary history isn’t over yet. Certainly technology has made us effectively marine mammals as well as flying mammals for the time being, and I shudder to think of the magnitude of change which would have to occur for humans to once again be subject to the forces of natural selection to anything like the degree that we once were not all that long ago. The sea, after all represents a far larger habitat and offers more potential for a population naturally thriving and proliferating with its DNA into the future, but the most productive and sustaining habitat on the planet, bar none, whether you’re in the tropics or the southern-most tip of South America, is without question, the inter-tidal zone. The ocean itself buffers its climate and twice daily the tides refresh the zone with everything from plankton to dead whales. There is almost nothing that would naturally wash up on the beach that we can’t eat (red tide, dynoflagellates carrying Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning, excepted) or use to survive and thrive. And the ability to travel on, in or under the water opens a possible transportation that at the very least favors a generally well adapted (but not super specialized), genetically diverse population facing unfavorable changes, and opening up more habitats, each leading to a slightly different crucible, a slightly different laboratory, in which to test the forces of evolution carried out as populations are being selected, adapted, finely tuning their innate behaviors to their unique situations. So, the reason I think our kind of human beings didn’t go to the sea isn’t because the resources weren’t just the right kind (and as I said before, I kinda think we might have at sometime in hominid’s evolutionary history) but rather our ability to make things with our hands, technology, provided our kind of ape with an advantage that wouldn’t be very practical, and therefore not likely to be selected, for populations who were adapted and therefore focused on living only in the water instead of living on the beach’s transitional zones where fire, stone tools, carrying baskets, and dry shelter make survival sense and represent a supremely advantageous step-up over out would-be competitors. So, in a sense it was our adaptation to life in the inter-tidal zones that lead to our being so adaptable to living on land, though we have to be intelligent in our use of technology to maintain the link to the sea (we need water, salt, iodine, and a high fat high protien diet…just like in seafood).

It seems to me that the reason we are so endeared to the savannah model of human evolution is because we find the fossils themselves out on the savannah and when we look around we see troupes of baboons, social primates, existing just as we might have. The fact that the preservation of the fossils themselves was something of a fluke (ash fall, flash flood, predator’s cache or midden) should indicate that it might not represent the typical surroundings, and I agree with Dr Hrdy and Morgan that our genetic adaptations make more sense in a quasi-aquatic environment. I think anyone who’s ever lived along an ocean beach realizes just how ideal it is to us…too bad we don’t find fossils of primates very often there. One reason we find fossils in the dry flat expanse of the eroded olduvai region and other semi-arid places like these savannahs would be because little fragments of fossils are lying all around and our brains are very good at holographically identifying tiny clues and comparing ‘em to our search image which we’ve got mapped in our heads. Those gigantopithecus jaws, found after being dragged into porcupine dens so long ago…no one thinks that Gigantopithecus actually lived deep in limestone caves. The geology of the East African Rift region has long had a geology conducive to the formation of sagger lakes and it was the lakes, not the savannah conditions per se, which I think facilitated the formation of fossils such as we find there now.

Ratz..another long post…can’t help that I find myself with too much time with provocative subjects and interesting correspondents.

By: mystery_man

mystery_man — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 09:22:52 +0000

Kittenz and Dogu5, I appreciate the information you have provided on the aquatic ape theory and the theory that humans may well be partially adapted to water. In my experience, the theory has never been given any serious consideration and I think this is unfortunate because the line of reasoning is solid and worth looking into, I feel. Having been trained in old school zoology and biology, most of the reactions of those around me to these ideas have been exactly as you would imagine them to be, which is scoffing. I suppose at one point, I would have scoffed a bit too, but my views on this have changed somewhat. I don’t believe there to be anything in this theory that would directly contradict anything that is known about zoology and evolution. For me, if the points of a theory are valid, then they are worth something and not to be dismissed out of hand.
To me, the idea that humans became at least semi aquatic has a lot of sensible reasoning and evidence. It could be that humans never fully evolved to be aquatic because the environment did not key for it in the end and we stopped short of going down the road to becoming fully aquatic. This leads to the exciting possibility that there could have been some sort of speciation that continued from those early starts at an aquatic life and these new species could have branched off to adapt to a fully aquatic ecology. In that sense, there could have been aquatic primates that are either extinct already or still live into modern days. It would certainly explain some bizzarre marine cryptids I have heard of. It is fascintating to think about. I find myself wondering if fossil evidence of anything like this will pop up down the line.