Aquatic primates (that means: human beings)

Technological-industrial culture had a hard time dismantling the biblical patriarchal paradigm about the origin of the human species. Years of misinformation and religious authoritarianism created a culture without a critical spirit that strongly resisted letting itself be replaced.

The new paradigm, which finally supplanted it, was also deeply authoritarian. The "popes" of the technological-industrial aristocracy defined their dogmas and entrenched themselves to defend them by all means within their reach. Those who did not agree or disagree with the "receipt" theories were or are considered heretical, ignored, ridiculed, and finally, excommunicated from their positions and excluded in the distribution of research funds.

The theory about human evolution, a key element of the prevailing scientific paradigm, is no exception to this procedure.

Several decades ago. the scientific authorities decreed that the species originated in the African savannas. For this they produced numerous arguments, including several hundreds of bone fossil fragments and some tools.

The "savanna" origin of human primates became an article of faith without practically anyone daring to contradict it.

Actually, since the 1930s there was someone who dared. It was an English biologist named Allister Hardy who pointed out the contradictions of the "Savannah Theory" and proposed an alternative vision: human beings had developed as such at an amphibious stage of their evolution1,2.

In 1960, after almost thirty years of preaching, The New Scientist agreed to publish an article by Hardy entitled: "Was man more aquatic in the past?" (March, 1960, ppp. 642-645).

More than ten years passed without anyone daring to mention the matter.

Only in 1972 a new work was published that developed in depth the concepts of Hardy, carried out by a talented Welsh writer.

Her name was Elaine Morgan and her work "The Descent of the Woman" (The Descento of Woman). The title was a play on words contradicting the famous Darwinian book called "The Ascent of Man" (The Ascent of Man).

Morgan's book was totally ignored by the scientific "establishment." However, despite this, it did not go unnoticed by many people and gradually became a "best seller".

Ten years later, Mrs. Morgan published another book extending the subject: "The Aquatic Monkey" (The Aquatic Ape, 1982). Then followed "The Scars of Evolution", "The Aquatic Monot, Fact or Fiction" (The Aquatic Ape: Fact or Fiction, 1991). "The Descent of the Child" (The Descent of the Child, 1994) and "The Aquatic Monkey Hypothesis" (The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, 1997).

All the works of Elaine Morgan had great success in the public. Thirty years later it is very difficult to ignore the persistent writer, who also became an expert in paleo-anthropology.

The arguments of the "Aquatic Monkey Theory" are blunt.

Humans are very different from animals in the savannah and, on the other hand, we have many affinities with amphibious mammals.

Like marine mammals, we have very little hair on the body, we have 10 times more fat than other primates, and even more at birth. Unlike the common fat in other apes, ours is subcutaneous fat that is part of the skin and detaches with it. It is the type "white fat" (white fat) that does not provide immediate energy and serves rather as thermal insulation and to help float (as in aquatic mammals). For brain development we require certain substances that are only found in fish and shellfish (for example, eicosnoic acid).

Dilapidate our inner water through sweat (large number of sweat glands) and salty tears (nonexistent in the other primates), we practice frontal sex, such as seals and cetaceans; we can hold our breath for several minutes (which does not happen in no other ape), and we swam instinctively at birth.

On the other hand, our specific diseases and parasites require aquatic phases to develop, and the bipedalism that characterizes us (which is not found in any other animal of saban, or in any primate, except us) is easily explained if we imagine an existence in the shallow waters of the sea or lake shore.

One of our weak points is, even today, the spine, which must withstand the weight of the body erected in terrestrial conditions.

In the original aquatic conditions that weight decreases considerably, and the effort required to keep it erect is much less.

Thee and many other arguments show that Hardy’s and Morgan’s approach to the origin of humankind is plausible and difficult to contradict. However, the popes of the anthropological science still resist making much more difficult to advance in the understanding of our evolution as species.