Michael Odent on "Homo, the Marine Chimpanzee"

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Our skin delaminates upon prolonged exposure to water. How can we possibly be adapted to an aquatic life? The water was where we found food, and we happened to be smart enough to exploit it from the shore or in boats, or in short swims.
 
Daecon said:
What about if it were called "the riverside ape hypothesis" instead?
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Human aquaticism would've occured both in fresh and sea water, at different times during hominoid evolution. The exact timing is still being debated, but hominins would have had to feed on salt water fauna from East African seashores for Homo erectus to grow the first really large hominin brain from around 2mya and on. This at least several million years after they would've evolved bipedalism wading in shallow freshwaters of the African hinterland. Is a contemporary reasonable postulation.

The correct moniker now is Waterside Hypotheses of Human Evolution (hypotheses, in plural), which is much more to the point. It was Desmond Morris, not Alister Hardy, that coined the term "aquatic ape" in 1967 in his bestseller "The Naked Ape," where Morris briefly summarized Hardy's idea of what Hardy himself just labeled "was man more aquatic in the past" for a four page article from 1960. Apparently Morris' term "aquatic ape" makes all the ignants see dolphin apes, that's why they laugh. When Elaine Morgan took up the concept of human aquaticism in her book The Descent of Woman from 1972, she just used Morris' term.

Tiny, random human choices, that inadvertently spawn absolute hysteria, holding back a perfectly rational debate about a vital scientific topic for fuckin' decades.


This is the contemporary definition from 2011, which still doesn't differ significantly from Hardy's four lines from 1960 quoted above:

Waterside hypotheses of human evolution assert that selection from wading, swimming and diving and procurement of food from aquatic habitats have significantly affected the evolution of the lineage leading to Homo sapiens as distinct from that leading to Pan.
- Elaine Morgan and Algis Kuliukas, 2011​
 
spidergoat said:
Our skin delaminates upon prolonged exposure to water. How can we possibly be adapted to an aquatic life? The water was where we found food, and we happened to be smart enough to exploit it from the shore or in boats, or in short swims.
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Uhuh. Do that for at least two million years, possibly double or triple that, why wouldn't this ape evolve the exact traits of an otherwise aquatic nature we're yelling about in here?

https://www.nature.com/news/science-gets-a-grip-on-wrinkly-fingers-1.12175
 
spidergoat said:
Rainforests are also wet.
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*Sound of me groaning*

Not exactly to the point of needing to adapt traits analoguous to aquatic mammals and not to be seen in any other simian, living also in them wet rainforests.

The savannah scenario cannot credibly have been the habitat that solicited those changes to the hominin genotype. That old assumption has been dead for decades now. Which means that either we evolved along a completely different route from our nearest ape relatives in the exact same habitat as them, the jungle, leaving no descernable selective reason to ever evolve these very unique ape traits; or, we were subjected to much more water activity than them for cento millenia. That's the only perspective that solves the equation with no unnessecary assumptions. The world is no longer flat.
 
iceaura said:
Exactly. Its dismissal is a popularity consensus among scientists, not reasoned from evidence in good faith. That's what's disturbing about it.
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Ah. So you are one of those people who think that just because climate change is a "popularity consensus" among scientists, that it is not reasoned from evidence in good faith? Sorry, not a fan of such semantic tricks.
Why are you treating this as a political issue, with sides and so forth? Who is in charge of this "letting"? Are my posts irrational? Am I on a "side"?
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Because CEngelbrecht is treating it like a political issue - saying "his way or the highway", ridiculing anyone who dares object, blaming "the system" etc.

I don't know what side you are on; you haven't posted much on this topic.
There is no evidence of the early evolution of bipedalism and its major physiological modifications, breath control, the subcutaneous fat layer, smaller canines, opposable thumbs, dietary proclivities, probably fire and tool mastery, etc, in a savannah environment. None.
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And there is no hard evidence that requires the evolution of all those traits in an aquatic environment. None.

There is good evidence, however, that most of those traits evolved on land, in response to changes brought about by the increase in intelligence in humans.
 
billvon said:
Ah. So you are one of those people who think that just because climate change is a "popularity consensus" among scientists, that it is not reasoned from evidence in good faith? Sorry, not a fan of such semantic tricks.
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Okay, how is that not a fucking strawman?????????????????????

billvon said:
And there is no hard evidence that requires the evolution of all those traits in an aquatic environment. None.
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LOOK INTO A FUCKING MIRROR, SAPIENS!!!

billvon said:
There is good evidence, however, that most of those traits evolved on land, in response to changes brought about by the increase in intelligence in humans.
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Bullshit! Fucking bullshit! You're repeating and re-repeating a nonsensical fucking lie, that has been proven to be for decades. It's a god damned stupid mantra.
 
billvon said:
There are even more people who use cocaine. That is not an argument that cocaine shaped our evolution.
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Okay, enough. Go fuck yourself. You couldn't give a rats ass about true science. I'll leave you to stare yourself blind at your cave shadows.
 
CEngelbrecht said:
I have myself seen Greenlandic children bathe in the ocean during their short summers. So yeah. That's how strong the aquatic drive is in any human group.

greenland29.jpg


But the inuits have only been in the arctic for a few millenia. We're talking human aquaticism for two million years at least (or up to as much as 20, according to some).
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Huh? That is not in the ocean. That is a thermal pool. Why are you lying and deliberately being misleading?

CEngelbrecht said:
Okay, enough. Go fuck yourself. You couldn't give a rats ass about true science. I'll leave you to stare yourself blind at your cave shadows.
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And with that you are done.
 
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