Professor Chris Stringer is famous all over the world for his insightful work into the so called "Out of Africa II" theory - which argues that fully modern Homo sapiens emerged from Africa very recently (less than 200,000 years ago) and replaced all other hominines that already lived in Europe, Asia and Australasia as they did.

Less well known is Chris Stringer's tacit support of (or at least openness to) the wading origins theory of bipedalism. He co-authored a student text book on Human Origins. In which a sidebar about the aquatic ape hypothesis was written in an unusually open (as opposed to the more common dismissive) way.

Stringer, Christopher. B. (1976).
Before Adam; The First True Men; Man's Migrations. In F. Clapham (ed.) The Rise of Man. Sampson Low: London, pp. 52-79

In another publication ...

Stringer, Christopher. B. (1997).
Discussion. RSA Journal. November/December. p 115.

...he wrote “If our ancestors did go into the water, that would force them to walk upright.”

At Birkbeck College (London) at the end of 2000 I went to hear Chris speak about his Out of Africa Theory. At the end end of a very interesting talk, which considered the possibility of a coastal route for the exodus of modern Homo sapiens out of Africa around 150,000 years ago he stopped and responded to general questions from the audience.

I asked him "I have a question about your proposed coastal route out of Africa. Considering the fact that we swim so much better than chimpanzees, do you think that this swimming ability is derived and that if so do you think this ability evolved during this African exodus?"

Chris seem to twig straight away where I was coming from and delivered the expected cautious but unambiguous refutation of the AAH that anyone would do in his position today. Then, to my astonishment and elation he added words to the effect "... but if you are looking for something that might have resulted from an exposure to water how about the way we move around? How about wading?"

Phillip Tobias is probably the most well known paleoanthropologist in the world and has been around longer than most.

Earlier in his career he was one of the main proponents of the so-called savannah theory - the model that humans evolved on the grasslands of Africa - but in recent years he has come to reconsider this line and has been taking the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis far more seriously than most of his peers.

At a recent meeting in London he apparently went further than ever in suggesting that the paleoanthropology owed Elaine Morgan "an apology" and that when it came to the savannah theory they had simply got it wrong and that, from that perspective, they were "back to square one."

In his recent paper "Water and Human Evolution" he re-iterates his openness to the idea. Although advocates of the AAH still await some kind of endorsement his new position has been sufficiently ambiguous to unnerve those paleoanthropologists with more orthodox inclinations.

At UCL, for instance, his recent public statements have been met with derision.

Sir David Attenborough needs no introduction. His voice is famous all over the English-speaking world as one of reason, intelligence and inspiration whilst narrating wild-life scenes of all types of living creatures.

One of his latest narrations, for that of the BBC program "Gorilla" which showed the western lowland gorillas behaviour in and around the water of Mbeli Bai, he asked the rhetorical question, whilst the viewer watched a gorilla wade through the water up to his waist, was this how man first began walking?