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

[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.

Even so, I found a pretty extensive refutation here
http://www.aquaticape.org/

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!"

But yeah, kudos goes to you for making an intelligent and serious response - it's a welcome change from what I was expecting from some quarters.

[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 up.

Fat is sexually dimorphic. This is significant.

Fat serves purposes other than insulation/temperature/padding, people. Jesus Christ, it's stored energy. Did the whole 'fat burning', calorie-counting, waistline-slimming universe pass you by? OMG WE NEEDED THE INSULATION... no, no, no. Insulation explains exactly nothing about why fat deposits in women seem to have something to do with, like, puberty; and baby fat seems to be correlated most with ...

... brain growth! Brains require loads and loads of energy. They guzzle worse than an SUV. An increase in brain size, and ours has been substantial, requires noshies from somewhere.

I could go on. There's really very little in the aquatic ape business to take seriously.

See, Elaine Morgan has an excellent point that the hypotheses about human evolution tend to be centred in some mythical whatsit about the male. To the point that it has been batted around that the females developed bipedal locomotion ages later than the males, because the females hung out in trees with teh babiez all day while the males hunted or beat themselves on the chest or something. Palaeoanthropology is brilliant at generating its own stupid.

But she should have left it there, instead of going on to make shit up. It's not about university degrees or anything like that; she just completely ignores everything that the scientific establishment has found. I mean, yeah, sure, soft tissue rarely crops up in the fossil record, but just because you have a pet theory about soft tissue doesn't mean you get to IGNORE THE FOSSIL RECORD.

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.

The reason these boat people aren’t used to support the “aquatic ape theory” is because these anatomical changes are isolated to one specific seashore society, and is not common to all seashore societies; thus, the evolution of these boat people more supports the theory of “male's hunting behaviour,” The better hunters were able to support society, got the mates, and their children thrived, thus these men with the better hunting ability due to superior underwater vision passed on this straight.

This is repeated all over the world in every animal. The genetic traits directly related to survival were the traits that shaped the evolution of animals.

Elaine Morgan was joke and the “Aquatic Ape Theory” doesn’t hold water.