guilty pleasures of an aquatic ape, Elaine Morgan and a scientific noyau
The first on a series of books I enjoyed reading long ago. A list of this will be found at Reading guilty pleasures.
I read Elaine Morgan's 1972 Descent of Woman and then 1982 The Aquatic Ape in the mid to late 80s when “man the hunter’ was, well at least to me, moribund as an idea, and so that intellectual context and contest was a little lost to me. So I read it, not so much without that framing, but with a mental shrug as a 20s something reader of feminism: Desmond Morris? The Naked Ape? Whatever.
I am not going to unpack the details of the idea of the aquaticism of our ancestors as a strong hypothesis, which Elaine Morgan collected from Desmond Morris' teacher Alister Hardy. Wikipedia has it covered (wikipedia is a good example of a working noyau BTW). What is surprising to me, when doing a quick internet reprise, is that the contest is back.
What I liked about these books, as an avid reader of science ficton, is that it dealt with human evolution and took an idea of a period of natural selection in a watery environment and ran with it. That there was a suite of human physical characterisitcs that make us somewhat pre-adapted for extracting resources from a marine environment is very interesting (subcutaneous fat is a big one for me).
However, and this was true of some of the dating even in the 70s, the suite of characteristics put together in the hypothesis did not arise at the same time, and much later we know several of these characteristics were separated by tens of thousands of years.
The story Morgan put together just did not hold. But it was a good story to think about, a good way to consider possible pathwways of human revolution, and I loved that. I probably would have loved it more as an actual science fiction novel but the market the publishers were looking to tap was that post ‘man the hunter’ stuff.
It would make a great backstory for, Joan Slonczewski’s 1987 novel A Door into Ocean. And maybe it is…
Compare this to a book also from the 70s, Stan Gooch's 1977 The Neanderthal Question.
I read this sometime in the late 90s in a hardcover that was an ex-library copy. I loaned it to Julie Gough once but I think it is maybe in the barn. I cannot remember any of the details of this book (I’ll internet it later) (maybe never) except it argued for a kinder view of them as being not so, well, Neanderthal, and we may have lived alongside them and had cultural exchanges.
So, given the last decade of discoveries of ancient populations by way of their DNA in current human populations, and not just Neandertal for out-of-Africa populations, we could call it prescient, while Morgan’s book is not considered in such terms. Interestingly Stan Gooch doesn’t have the continuing presence that Elaine Morgan’s has.
The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis has garnered, in the internet age a bit of a following, and there has been some rather harsh, I feel, put downs of the work, or least it’s supporters, because of that haywire support.
Here is one by Alice Roberts, of whom I am a fan, and Mark Maslin:
Sorry David Attenborough, we didn’t evolve from ‘aquatic apes’ – here’s why.
Yes I am a fan of David Attenborough too, though I missed his efforts on the subject when it came out (2019).
I’ll also put a link to a response to that criticism here but not from the haywire crew who take Elaine Morgan’s work verbatim, but the weaker idea of waterside survival being critical in our human history of bottlenecks.
I think this is closer to the mark, if only because I live in in lutruwita | Tasmania and know that the human populations here, since before the last ice age, as early leaders of modern Homo out of Africa, used litoral resources as a major part of their energy intake, despite the waters being very cold (but therefore rich in food resources).
Everyone loves the idea of a beach, that access to two distinct resource rich environments, right next to each other. Barbecued lobster anyone?
Aquatic ape. Living the dream.
"Pre-adaption" is a process that is likely to have been important in a suite of "aquatic ape" characteristics that have arisen at different times and places, which allow survival at a particular time and disaster, or just a period or epoches of bad seasons.
We are lucky we can 'umbrella' them into a hypothesis, weak or strong. The same goes for 'man the hunter', we are lucky we can umbrella it into a hypothesis.
In particular, the biggest pre-adaption, that none of the wet-and-dry contestants mention, was the ability to learn as a group and exploit new resources.
No 'expansion' without that, this was critical, and not any consciousness self-raising flower of individual genius. No, sorry folks, it was meetings that made us human and gave us modernity not some strike of genetic genius.
It also 'does not fossilise" except in the taphonomy of our human social histories as a palimpsest of why-we-shoulds and their arenas of noyaux in the landscapes we nurture and world in.
Remember the bones themselves are capture the fossil of movement of a life at the moement of death. The life lived does not fossilise per se.
To answer this the question of the noyaux, which the aquatic ape here examples as a scientific contest, we will have to take a long hard look at ourselves.
Elaine Morgan. --
The Descent of Woman. London: Souvenir Press, 1972.
The Aquatic Ape: A Theory of Human Evolution ; Foreword by Sir Alister Hardy. London: Souvenir Press, 1982.
Dunbar, Robin et al. “The Naked Ape at 50: ‘Its Central Claim Has Surely Stood the Test of Time ‘.” The Observer 24 Sept. 2017. The Guardian. Web. 27 Oct. 2024.
Joan Slonczewski. A Door into Ocean. London: Women’s Press, 1987
Stan Gooch. The Neanderthal Question. London: Wildwood House, 1977.
Roberts, Alice, and Mark Maslin. “Sorry David Attenborough, We Didn’t Evolve from ‘Aquatic Apes’ – Here’s Why.” The Conversation. N.p., 16 Sept. 2016. Web. 27 Oct. 2024. http://theconversation.com/sorry-david-attenborough-we-didnt-evolve-from-aquatic-apes-heres-why-65570
“A Reply to Alice Roberts and Mark Maslin: Our Ancestors May Indeed Have Evolved at the Shoreline – and Here Is Why...” [12 signaturies] 27 Oct. 2024. https://aquatic-human-ancestor.org/evidence/waterside-ape-bbc-r4-response-to-critics.html
Wikipedia & other links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquatic_ape_hypothesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alister_Hardy
https://biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/slonc.htm