Last Edited: 05 Jun 2008
The Aquatic Primate
copyright © MM through MMX, by Wm. B. Steele
What is human, or humanlike? How do we define what it is to be human as opposed to being pongid? We can return step by step down the "evolutionary ladder" until we meet our common ancestor with the modern day chimpanzee. Somewhere on this "evolutionary ladder" we come to a point where one of our "apelike" ancestors is still more hominid than pongid. At this point we draw the line and consider this as the beginning of the hominid. There are at least four species of these early hominids and they are all of the genus Australopithecus (from Greek meaning "Southern Ape"; named in 1925 by Raymond Arthur Dart [1893-1998]). The Australopithecines were about the size of a chimpanzee but had a slighter build. This meant a greater "brain to brawn" ratio, but the hominine characteristic used to determine the Australopithecines from pongids was their bipedality (from Latin meaning "able to walk on two legs"). Hominid bipedality is more than walking on two legs. Kangaroos and ostriches are bipedal and live their lives on two legs. They do it with their hind limbs located at their center of gravity and their bodies held nearly parallel to the ground. The kangaroo has a heavy tail (counterweight) to get its center of gravity over its legs. It is the "S-curve" of the lower spine that allows hominids their characteristic upright bipedality, and the Australopithecines were at ease walking upright just as we are today. This implies the first advancement of humankind was biological in nature and was the development of upright bipedality. Upright bipedality is the first ability of Mankind and the "S-curved" spine is the first anatomical characteristic we use to define what is human. An entire Australopithecine skeleton was unearthed by Donald Johanson in 1974. It was a female and was named Lucy. Lucy had a brain that was chimpanzee size about one quarter the size of modern Mankind. Probably weighing about 70 pounds, she only stood 3 to 4 feet tall, and had feet nearly identical to modern man. Lucy is an example of Australopithecus afarensis, because Afars is the area of east-central Africa where she was discovered. Australopithecines evolved about 4,000,000 years ago, towards the beginning of the Pliocene Epoch.
The Aquatic Primate - The Homonid
Anthropologists
are not certain when hominids quit growing
thick fur, or why they developed an opposable thumb and the "S-curve" of the spine for
upright bipedality. I have a novel concept, an hypothesis, that may account for the
upright bipedality and the bare skin of Homo sapiens. Of course, the
reasons of their development is meaningless concerning the cause and course of
latter developments. There is a group
of monkeys that is currently undergoing the change to bipedality; an occurrence
that I have noticed but many others have not. They
live near a permanent water hole, calm river, or estuary. The trees that grow near the
pond drop fruit into the water, especially when the monkeys are shaking the
limbs of the tree as they climb for the fruit. Once the monkeys have cleaned the
tree of fruit, the ones that can wade farthest into the water and retrieve fruit
will eat more and have a better chance of survival. Wading is a bipedal
activity. The farther one of the monkeys can wade, the more protection
they gain from predators that will not swim for game. When accidentally
falling into the water from the fruit tree, upright bipedality increases the
monkey's ability to get out of the
water. I wonder
if baby chimpanzees can swim in the manner that infant Humans do? The ability to walk upright
and greater manual dexterity allows them to gather more food, avoid predators,
and survive drowning. Considering
hippos, elephants, and other amphibious mammals, I imagine
that fur would be a hindrance for life in and out of the water, and it was eventually lost
by the small pongid as it evolved upright bipedality in its aquatic environment. Chimpanzees use
twigs as tools for catching termites and sea otters use stones as
tools. No doubt that our little hominid could do at least these things as
well as using tree limbs and bones as clubs. Fish existed in the
larger bodies of water. Occasionally one would be caught and eaten,
increasing the advantage of bipedality and dexterity. A stick or bone could be
used to club some fish in evaporating ponds. Eventually a sharp stick or
bone would stab into one and start the use sharp sticks in the process
of spear fishing. Our hominids probably began the process of creating sharpened
sticks. Tool making in its most primitive form may have begun with
spear fishing tools. Created then is a small naked pongid with upright bipedality,
dexterous hands, and rudimentary tool making abilities. I have no doubt
that the evolution of the first hominid was the evolution of the first aquatic
primate.
As I finished the above, I read about
Kenyanthropus
platyops. A 3.5 million year old skeleton which has been
discovered in Kenya by Meave
Leaky, wife of Richard. It was discovered south of Afars in an area called Lake
Turkana. Many are claiming that the theories concerning the
ancestry of Mankind have been "thrown out" and the new discovery sets
science "on its ear". This of course shows a complete lack of
understanding concerning concept formation (to be discussed later), especially that of scientific
theory. The discovery simply adds to the currently accepted body of
knowledge, and lends more evidence to the theory of water being the birthplace of
our ancestors. My hypothesis states the ancestor of Homo
sapiens came from a huge body of water. It could have been at the end of
an ice age when sea levels rose and flooded forests. It may have occurred
in rising surface levels on a large lake, complex of lakes, or estuary located in
an area that was heavily over grown with forests full of pongids.
Hominids lived at the edges of the water and in the trees above it. They waded into
water for food and protection. The environment changed, and possibly
predators evolved to feed upon the small aquatic primates. Perhaps the
waters receded and began to dry, and the aquatic primates would occasionally
wander back onto the plains surrounding the waters. The hominids were
forced to venture more often away from the water and back onto the
land. Hominids were restricted to living near water and most often these excursions failed, but one obviously has lasted until
today. The Nile River or one of its prehistoric forebears, is probably the
water supply directing the first hominid migrations. If anthropologists would concentrate on finding the body(ies) of water
that existed between 6 and 3 million years ago, central to the current body of
fossil findings, we will probably uncover large numbers of fossilized hominid skeletons
from the corpses that aggregated in the shallow waters and were covered in mud
and silt. These fossils may have been destroyed by scavengers, or perhaps
they are located just off of the coastline in the shallows of the ocean or a
lake. Other primates do not have the tear glands of the aquatic
primate. The mammals that do are the otters and the seals. This
along with upright bipedality, opposable thumbs, the swimming behavior of
infants, the loss of body hair, and a brain that requires a food source of
higher quality than plant life; leaves only one possible explanation —
Hominids are an aquatic primate. Anthropologists will eventually accept
this in the future. Were I an Anthropologist, it would be the discovery of
evidence in support of this hypothesis, that would drive my research.
There is no other mechanism which would lead to the evolution of upright
bipedality. The Gorilla and the Baboon are examples of primate evolution
directly to land.
Australopithecus and Kenyanthropus began about 4 million and lived until about 1 million years ago.
After writing the above; I was made aware that there was a previous suggestion put forward about Human evolution through a water phase. Alister Hardy suggested it in 1960. It was reject immediately and with little consideration. The hypothesis was later joined by Elaine Morgan who writes:
...
"Alister Hardy's suggestion in 1960 that it might have
been a much wetter one was intuitively and almost unanimously rejected. Primates
were said to have an innate fear of water which many humans share, and the
fossils of early hominids were found far inland, in arid sites on the African
plains. Above all . Hardy's ideas were felt to be unnecessary. There was a tacit
assumption that the main ape/human differences had been adequately accounted for
in terms of a move by some populations of the last common ancestor from the
forest to the savanna, and that any details still unexplained were well on the
way to being solved."
"That was a misconception. Consensus on the reasons for the
emergence of the most salient distinguishing features of Homo - such as
bipedalism, loss of body hair, subcutaneous fat, and the power of speech - is no
nearer today than it was in Darwin's lifetime."
...
"Nearly forty years after Hardy published his idea,, though Professor
Tobias has called for a new paradigm to replace the savanna one and Professor
Dennett has publicly queried why the aquatic hypothesis continues to be rejected
out of hand, no professional journal has published an objective appraisal of its
claims or invited a debate on the subject. The arguments against it have tended
to be in general terms, representing it as vague and unparsimonious, and a
typical example of the kind of pseudo-scientific fringe theory which is often
dreamed up by laymen, tailored to appeal to disaffected minorities, and/or
claiming to solve an unrealistically wide swathe of the mysteries of life, the
universe, and everything.
"In fact it was conceived twice, independently, both times by professional
scientists (Professor Max Westenhofer of the University of Berlin and Professor
Sir Alister Hardy, D.Sc., F.R.S. of Oxford). It is as void of political
implications as the Third Law of Thermodynamics; and it seeks to explain a
cluster of anomalous species-specific human physical anomalies hitherto not
satisfactorily accounted for. It is not wildly unrealistic to explore the
possibility that some common factor may have been involved in all of them. As
the first person after Hardy to publish anything in support of his idea, I
hasten to admit that my first contribution was not of a kind likely to inspire
confidence. ...
"As for vagueness, the theory makes no claim to be specific about times and
places. The onset of an aquatic phase, if it contributed to the separation
between ape and human lineages, could not have been later than 5-6mya There is
nothing in the fossil record either to confirm or to disprove the possibility of
an aquatic or semi-aquatic or flooded-forest habitat for the earliest hominids.
Taphonomic bias may or may not be the only reason why hominid fossils are
usually found in conjunction with remains of aquatic species, and their skeletal
anatomy is no more capable of unambiguously determining how much time they spent
in the water than how much time they still spent in the trees. It is frequently
pointed out that the different features cited above – naked skin, bipedalism,
the fat layer, the respiratory changes – may not all have evolved at the same
time. That is quite true. In the case of speech, it seems likely that millions
of years may have elapsed between the acquiring of conscious breath control and
the use of that asset for purposes of communication. The other features too may
have emerged serially – the bipedalism before the nakedness, and so on. But.
significantly, it has not proved any easier to produce convincing non-aquatic
explanations of any of them merely by postulating that they may have arisen at
long intervals and for different reasons.
"The charge of lack of parsimony is based on the null hypothesis: that
since we know the common ancestors lived in the trees and their human
descendants today live on the land, it is obligatory to conclude that they moved
from trees to land with no intervening stage. Such rules of thumb can be useful
aids to clear thinking, other things being equal. But if too slavishly adhered
to they can hamper the imagination and cause speculation to get permanently
bogged down in dead-end lines of enquiry.
"The savanna scenario is defunct; the mosaic scenario has produced no new
insights; the aquatic theory is to many unacceptable. This position has led to
the tentative suggestion that the human anomalies may not be niche-related at
all, but merely the result of genetic drift, like the slightly varying pattern
of stripes on different species of zebra. This is not comparing like with like.
Apes and humans are genetically no further apart than horses and zebras, or
populations of the same species of gopher found on opposite sides of the
Colorado canyon and indistinguishable to the naked eye. But in humans that
slight difference is accompanied by a series of phenetic modifications of a
degree and diversity unknown in any other instance of comparable genetic
relatedness. That seems to indicate that human ancestors at one time occupied a
niche which was not only different from that of the apes, but strikingly
different.
"Conclusion
Hardy's aquatic hypothesis, although highly speculative, is
based on Darwinian assumptions.. It outlines a scenario which could conceivably
account for a number of hitherto unexplained human characteristics. Attempts to
depict it as on a par with pseudo-scientific fringe fantasies are
misconceived."
I obviously agree with Alister Hardy's suggestion.
