Elaine Morgan - The way it was, or wishful thinking?

[mintogrubb]

Back in the good ol' days , when I was young, a woman called Elaine Morgan wrote a book challenging the scientific establishment of the day. She suggested that rather than being driven by the male's hunting behaviour, it was an existence on the sea shore that shaped our anatomy and behaviour as humans, and that female needs and drives had as much

Comments

[puf_almighty]

"Subcutaneous fat" is fat under the skin, as opposed to visceral fat, which is fat inside the guts. It's useful for insulation, and it's the kind of fat that sea mammals have. Hence it's correct to call a big fat person "blubbery" because it's the same as the blubber that whales or manatees have. This is why fat humans have lovehandles (bulges visible under the skin) but bears and such don't

[mintogrubb]

but it just seems like humans are so naturally not hydrodynamic that we'd gain little by it. Also the fossil record seems to have us developing more towards a plains critter than an aquatic one.The theory/hypothesis argues that were were more shoreline, lake and riverside waders than swimmers, so we therefore shed hair and developed the fatty deposits. most aquatic mammals like otters do have a tick pelt, but are much smaller than us. the polar bear is also cited, but the Arctic cold is very different from the African savannah. The fossil record itself has litle to say on soft tissues, and it is most of these 'soft tissues' that the theory uses for support, and they just don't show up in fossils

[hortensio]

This, I think, is more likely to convince people like me who currently support the theory than the outright ridicule that some people have indulged in -
"OMG! TEH CROCODILZ!!! LOL!"

Yeah, I go off the deep end with Elaine Morgan. This would be because some things actually are worthy of ridicule, and I don't have the energy, certainly not at work, to go through her fantasies point by point in order to convince you. Because she's making it all upFat is sexually dimorphic. This is significant

Elain Morgan is a joke, and her aquatic ape theory doesn't hold water

[concernedfather]

The 'Aquatic Ape' theory is just one theory of many that indulges too much in fantasy and unsupported speculation.

There are basic requirements a fledgling society needs to survive and thrive. These requirements are seen repeated in successful ancient societies all over the world, and only in part is location a factor.

Focusing on “…the sea shore that shaped our anatomy and behaviour as humans,”Of all the seashore societies that evolved throughout the ages, there are negligible anatomical differences between humans who evolved inland. The only recorded anatomical difference in humans that could possibly support “Elaine Morgan’s” aquatic ape theory, is a group of nomadic boat people living off the shores of Indonesia, whose underwater vision is 20% better than the rest of us

[dialogic]

Mods, please delete. This is off-topic.

[stardance]

It is not. It is a women-centric evolution theory brought up by a prominent feminist writer.

[dialogic]

The utterance "women-centric evolution theory" is not meaningful, as the utterance "triangle-centric geometric theory" is not meaningful. Or, perhaps, either is meaningful insofar as we might truthfully say, "There can be no such thing." I'm not sure what the semantic status is, but neither possibility is encouraging.

I think what you meant to say is that the aquatic ape theory is a crackpot theory of evolution brought up by a virtually unknown feminist author. Should we discuss any stupid idea that any nominal feminist has, in virtue of the idea spring from a feminist mind? Shouldn't the topic be at least discernibly about feminism or topics related to feminism?

I'm not saying that it's impossible to draw a connection between feminism and AAT--it's possible to draw a connection between feminism and virtually anything else--but the OP has not done so, nor does he seem to be interested in doing so.

[hortensio]

Please, you and everyone:

Homo sapiens.

That's capital H, lowercase s, and [though I don't go quite as crazy about this one] italicised, underlined, or otherwise set off from the body text.

No, really. You're not going to criticise the scientific establishment if you don't know the scientific establishment's name for your own species.

So far as I recall, no one ever came out and challenged this radical theory, it was simply ignored by the scientific establishment.

That would be because it's crap.

[moonlitdorian]

Aren't we technically a subspecies, "Homo sapiens sapiens?"

[hortensio]

No: the species to which man belongs is Homo sapiens. There's some fringe dispute about whether the Neandertals are also H. sapiens, in which case they would be subspecies H. sapiens neanderthalensis and we'd be H. sapiens sapiens. There's some dispute, also, about whether certain fossils typically labelled 'H. sapiens Grade I' or 'early anatomically modern H. sapiens' [there's some regional difference here] warrant classification in their own subspecies, in which case, again, the notion of insisting that we're H. sapiens sapiens makes sense.

In general parlance about humans, though, Homo sapiens is sufficient. [And consensus -mostly- has it that the Neandertals are Homo neanderthalensis, and that anatomically modern Homo sapiens specimens that crop up in the fossil record need no further splitting.]

...grah, my bottom line is that 'subspecies' requires 'species'; ours is H. sapiens.

[hortensio]

Ah, well, I forgot to mention that on the fringes there occasionally crops up someone who wants chimpanzees to be Homo troglodytes.

Actually Linnaeus called the chimpanzee Homo troglodytes. Early lay accounts of chimpanzees by Euro explorers call them, ahem, Negroes. Isn't taxonomy funz?

[hortensio]

and someone suggested that the presence of crocodiles off the African coast would render the whole thing impossible.

No. I suggested that you don't get to forget the crocodiles when you're making up your idyllic Eden. This would be one of the things you don't get to forget. There are many others. Elaine Morgan staggeringly manages to forget them all.

[ovariancyst]

And don't forget the Elephants. They lost their hair too, and they even have their own natural snorkel.

[bertro]

Otters, on the other hand, are still furry. They have no business being in the water.

[ovariancyst]

And then there's that fuckin' platypus...it's just disrespecting everyone.

[mintogrubb]

But otters are smaller, so they kept their fur where hippos and whales did not.

never mind, its the crocs and the sharks that have shot this one down...