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

[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.