Scars of Evolution

Scars of Evolution - Broadcast 1

Two-part 'mini-series' on the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, narrated by David Attenborough broadcast in April 2005

Thanks to Christina Bjornstad for transcribing this.

David Attenborough: Here we talk about the rise of a dramatic theory of human evolution which for forty years have been challenging the status quo and in the words of one of its critics just refuses to lie down and die.

Elaine Morgan: I did a presentation in Oxford years ago and Richard Dawkins phoned up with his friend Douglas Adams.

?: I consistently denied it over the years. If anything is really true, it’s going to go through fire and hot water to get there. It would be lovely to confirm the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis because it’s such an interesting and fascinating idea. I think we have most of the evidence. Everything is there. It’s only what we need is the switch in the minds of the people. There is no real alternative anymore to the waterside theory.

Lynn Cox: .A lot of what you’re doing when you’re sprinting in cold water, you’re watching what is going on with your body. So a lot of the time I’m watching my hands trying to figure out if I’m holding my fingers together, because if they are splaying apart, that means that I’m not pulling water. But it also means that my brain is cooling down, and if that happens, I’m in the midst of hypothermia, which is really dangerous.

David Attenborough: Lynn Cox, a legend in the world of long distance swimming, recalling her historic swim from Alaska to Russia in 1987, across the Bering Strait. The water was barely 6 degrees above freezing. Lynn completed the historic swim in 2 hours and 6 minutes. What is perhaps more extraordinary is that she did it without a wet suit, without lanolin grease that channel swimmers typically cover themselves with to keep out the cold. But Lynn although exceptionally gifted in endurance swimming is not unique. Long distance swimming is a sport in which women are unusually well represented. Over the last hundred years women, such as Florence Chadwick, Penny Dean, and Alison Streeter and others have regularly held the world records outright. But it’s for men and women. It’s been suggested that it may be because women have a slightly thicker layer of body fat than men, making them more buoyant in the water as well as better insulated against the cold. Humans are truly remarkable animals able to achieve an incredible range of feats from swimming to Antarctica, to climbing Everest. But there are also things that we can’t do. It may sound obvious but we can’t fly for example, like birds and bats. We can’t hibernate, like bears and hedgehogs, and many other mammals. And then even though we can run fantastically long distances, our top speed is somewhat less than a rabbit. Most four footed animals will leave us for dust. But we can swim, and dive under water to considerable depths, holding our breath to upwards of 6, 7 8 minutes. For a largely land-based animal, this might seem a curious set of skills. Why and how did we acquire them? In these 2 programmes, we’ll be looking at a theory of human evolution that has confounded scientists and provoked continuing controversy for more than 40 years. It’s been called The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis.

Professor Phillip Tobias: Regrettably, the name is its own worst enemy, I believe. That’s what makes people laugh. Let’s just talk about water and human evolution.

DA: Professor Phillip Tobias of Witwatersrand University, has been a leading light of South African anthropology and fossil hunting for the last 50 years. In 1924, his professor and mentor, Raymond Dart unearthed a small humanoid skull which became known as the Taung Child. Although it took time to become accepted by the mainstream that discovery was to turn the story of human origins on its head. The earliest human ancestor was no longer from Java or Peking, or even Europe as previously suggested, but demonstrably from Africa.

PT: Dart’s discovery was of immense importance in switching the spotlight from Asia to Africa. The discoveries were found not along the coast particularly, but in the hinterland of Africa.

DA: Professor Leslie Aiello of University College London, former editor of the Journal of Human Evolution was raised like generations of anthropologists on the scenario established by Raymond Dart. By the 1960s it was accepted as orthodoxy that the earliest human ancestor had descended from the trees and moved out to exploit the wide rolling grasslands.

LA: What Dart could be said to have done is established the Savannah Hypothesis for human evolution. So you had a rather simple idea that early humans lived in open country. Apes lived in forested environment. And that’s gone through a number of changes. What many people forget is that there is a huge spectrum of environmental types in Africa. It’s not just totally open savannah like the Serengeti, and totally closed rainforest. There seems to be a mosaic or mixed environment.

DA: Books by Robert Ardrey and others fleshed out the story of how we became human. Perhaps the best selling of all was “The Naked Ape” by Desmond Morris. In which he gave a vivid plotted version of the ape into human transformation.

...The ancestors of the naked ape struck out, left the forest, and threw themselves into competition with the already efficiently adapted ground dwellers. With strong pressure on them to increase their prey-killing prowess, vital changes began to take place. They became more upright, faster, better runners, their hands became free from locomotion duties, strong efficient weapon holders. Their brains became more complex, brighter, quicker decision makers. A hunting ape. A killer ape was in the making.

DA: The story of the killer ape and how we stood up and became mighty hunters, spearing game across the plains of Africa found a ready and eager audience. Perhaps it was the endless procession of war in the 20^th century from the first and second world wars and then Korea and Vietnam that made the idea of the highly aggressive male going out to kill for the survival of his troop all too believable. Certainly Raymond Dart very much the alpha male anthropologist by the dawn of the 1960s was keen to complete this picture of Man the ruthless carnivore. As he demonstrated in a television documentary of the period.

RD: The australopithecines particularly liked the lower jaw of animals that had long canine teeth, because these could be used as formidable weapons. And you can see how with a weapon like this, they could gouge out the eyes of any animal and even this primitive hyena jaw could rip up a belly

DA: A nice, simple, if rather bloodthirsty story. Although even 40 years later, it’s still the basic account of early humans, commonly told in schools, it gradually became apparent, through the 80s and 90s, that the story was a bit oversimplified. We didn’t head out from the forests and make a completely new life on the open plain. And we didn’t make a simple switch from grazing on fruit to chasing down big game and eating their meat. Most significantly. The evidence that something was wrong in the story, came from the very fossil beds in South Africa where Raymond Dart had found the Taung child’s skull and set the savannah hare running. Phillip Tobias had been a student of Dart’s and he had spent decades helping to fill out the standard account of our early ancestors as hunters on the plain, as had many other academics working in the developing field of paleoanthropology. But by 1995, the doubts were overwhelming.

PT: Just 10 years ago, to a large London Audience, with a histrionic gesture I said, “The Savannah Hypothesis is no more! Open that window and throw it out!…..and other South African sites and East African ones; these early hominids were all accompanied by woodland and forest species of plants and animals. Of course if savannah is eliminated as a primary cause of selective advantage of going on two legs, then we are back to square one.”

DA: Or not quite. There was an alternative account of how humans had come to be so different from their ape cousins and it had been around for more than 30 years. It offered a single dramatic explanation for a large array of physical characteristics that distinguished us from all the other apes: our bipedal locomotion on 2 legs, our strange hairlessness, our layer of fat just beneath the skin, big brain and unique language skills, as well as a host of other features including the curious paradox that our noses are very large but our sense of smell is comparatively poor. But in establishment circles the alternative explanation was regarded as too bizarre and too radically different from the accepted savannah story to be taken seriously. By why was it regarded as bizarre pseudoscience, and why did mainstream hostility continue for nearly 40 years. It was back in the late ‘60s, that a young woman from the Welsh valleys named Elaine Morgan, an award winning playwright and journalist came to read Desmond Morris’s “Naked Ape” soon after it came out in 1967. Her initial reaction was one of simple irritation. She was a young wife and mother and experienced in the trials of combining a career with raising her family. But the Naked Ape’s description of the place of the female in the transition from ape to human struck her as all wrong.

EM: I started out of pure irritation with people like Robert Ardrey and Desmond Morris, not because of what they said. Because they were only saying the same as all the scientists were saying , but they were popularizing it. I wasn’t a scientist, it was the popular version I was reading. I thought that they were being very male centered and I thought it didn’t work, and I disliked the way the female, everything about the female was accounted for because of her need to suck up to the men to give her a bit of meat. I thought, you wouldn’t have a whole species evolving such extraordinary lines to benefit the male, unless it was also at least not disadvantageous to the female. I thought of those things being disadvantageous to females. Imagine these Mighty hunters racing across after the game and getting very hot and sweaty, so they shed their fur. So she’s got to shed hers. But she’s not doing any racing. She’s staying there getting cold in the plains. The babies have nothing to cling to, she’s lost her fur. I thought this was very maladaptive. Evolution doesn’t work like that. There must be another explanation.

DA: So Elaine Morgan read the Naked Ape again. And this time she was struck by three short paragraphs on page 29. Desmond Morris had briefly described another more ingenious theory, that before he became a hunting ape, the original ground ape, as he left the forest, went through a long phase as an aquatic ape. When she contacted Morris to ask more about this ingenious theory, she learned that it had originally been put forward by a …Marine biologist, Sir Alister Hardy in an article in the New Scientist in 1960. The article was simply titled “Was Man More Aquatic in the Past.” Hardy in turn had been influenced by the anatomical observations of professor Wood Jones 30 years earlier regarding the peculiarity of fat tightly bonded to the skin that humans have and other primates lack.

Quoting Hardy: I read this in 1929. I had recently returned from an Antarctic expedition where the layers of blubber of whales, seals, and penguins was such a feature of these examples of aquatic life. Such layers of fat are found in other water animals as well. And at once I thought perhaps man had been aquatic too.

DA: Later in the article, Hardy ventured that a shore-based environment might also help explain man’s upright posture and bipedal locomotion.

Hardy: My thesis is a branch of this primitive ape stock was forced by competition from life in the trees to feed on the seashore and to hunt for food: shellfish, sea urchins, etc., in the shallow waters of the coast, wading about, at first paddling and toddling along the shores and shallows, hunting for shellfish, man gradually went further and further into deeper water, resting with his feet on the bottom, and his head out of the surface. In fact, standing erect with the water supporting his weight. It seems to me likely that man learned to stand erect first in the water and then as his balance improved he found he became better equipped for standing up on the shore when he came out. And indeed also for running. He would naturally have to return to the beach to sleep and to get water to drink. Actually I imagine him to have spent at least half his time on land. My thesis is of course mere speculation. An hypothesis to be discussed and tested against further lines of evidence.

DA: Hardy wrote the New Scientist article because of a furor he had caused a month earlier. For 30 years Hardy had sat on his aquatic ape idea because he knew it would impede his academic career and he wanted to make it to the top. But by 1960, he had made it to the top. So where was the harm. As Elaine Morgan explains:

EM: He never went public until the time came when he was a professor and he was a fellow of the Royal Society and he was getting older and so…But even then he was invited to go and talk to a sub aqua club and he thought well you know I can give them a little slant on it and nobody will ever hear about it only these people here in this room. But there was a reporter sitting in that little room, who heard this odd stuff and took it straight to Fleet Street and all the Sunday papers, “Oxford professor said man is a sea ape and the balloon went up, and he got back to Oxford and Wilford La Row Clark was stunned. “Do not do that again! Because you are exposing the whole profession to ridicule.” And I wrote to him and asked whether it would be all right if I wrote this book quoting his theory. His first reaction was “I’m thinking that I might write it up myself.” Then I got another letter saying “I’ve talked to my publisher about it, and he thinks it would be good idea if a more popular version came out in advance you know to pave the way for it. So go ahead with my blessing.” So I did. I went ahead with his blessing. But his never came out. He was an outsider to the extent it was marine biology not anthropology so they had that against him.

DA: One might think it odd that an eminent marine biologist, fellow of the Royal Society, would be barred as an outsider for venturing some observations about human evolution. But academic boundaries are fiercely patrolled. And if Hardy was regarded as beyond the pale, what of Elaine Morgan? She wasn’t an anthropologist, indeed she wasn’t even a scientist, but she was a brilliant writer, with an Oxford degree in English and most of all and indefatigably inquiring mind. So she wrote her book in the form of an account from the female point of view. What might have happened to make us human. And it was an instant success. So much so that in 1972 she was invited on a publicity tour of the United States, appearing on television and radio chat shows across the continent to talk about the proposal of an aquatic phase in human evolution. And what did Sir Alister Hardy make of it?

EM: I rang him up to say that my book had been accepted and he said, “What’s it called?” And I said it’s called, “The Descent of Woman.” Long silence. Then he said," The What?!” Because to him the water had no connection with it at all. Anyway, it did come out and he was sent a complimentary copy. He sent me a telegram in New York, saying “Brilliant!” And of course he wrote a forward to the next book I wrote.

DA: But a best-selling book is one thing. Academic acceptance quite another. It was still 20 years before Phillip Tobias would stand up to declare the Savannah Theory dead. And professional anthropologists liked the idea of the aquatic ape even less coming from Elaine Morgan than they had when it came from Mr. Hardy. It didn’t matter that she had researched the subject in great depth and had added a number of other human characteristics to Hardy’s original 3 or so that would seem to point to an aquatic and shore based past. If anything the accumulation of further detail that she had painstakingly carried out made the anthropologists dig their heels in all the more firmly

EM: The scientific reaction was bitter anger and contempt. It was very hard on them. I wasn’t qualified. She doesn’t even know that when you write Homo sapiens, it’s got to have a capital letter and a small letter and be in italics. And she talks once about canines and she means dogs being canines, how stupid can she get? But I had some very nice experiences since then. Donald Dennett invited me over to go to Tufts University in Boston. People from Harvard came to it and I got a very very good reception.

DD I brought her over to give a talk at Tufts, the only time I’ve met her. And in a packed hall she entranced everybody and absolute pushed one anthropologist over the brink and he responded with emotional declarations that were really in the end hilarious. And she handled them very deftly as if she had planted him in the audience. It was a stunning demonstration of the sort of irrational hostility that she engenders and she parried it brilliantly. The audience was in her pocket.

DA: Dan Dennett is professor of philosophy at Tufts University, Boston. He’s also the author of a number of highly acclaimed books on aspects of evolution including “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” in which he touched on the curious reluctance of scientists to engage seriously with the aquatic ape hypothesis either to embrace it or to refute it.

DD: If I were one of the chief architects and defenders of an established theory in any field and a grandmotherly journalist were to propose the idea that the theory was wrong I would be a little unsettled and it would be hard to maintain my cool. I’ve seen level headed calm serious scientists get quite flabbergasted and unable to express themselves in their discomfort with the aquatic ape theory. I’m really surprised in a way that there hasn’t been the right sort of measured and sober response. If there has been, I haven’t been able to find it.

DA: Professor Graham Richards of the British Psychological Society was similarly intrigued by the failure of the scientific establishment to address the aquatic ape with due seriousness. The fact that Alister Hardy and especially Elaine Morgan were both outsiders to the field of paleoanthropology had clearly provoked not just a prudent scientific caution but something more visceral, even jealousy.

……One of the reason I think for early hostility to it was purely a feeling that well why didn’t one of us come up with that. If it were true, one of us would have come up with it first. It was kind of incredulity, that this outsider could produce this theory which seemed to pull so many threads together. But there was also a feeling that they were all glancing around the room feeling, “well I can’t personally think of the knock down argument, but surely one of you can. Which one of has got the knock down argument?” It gradually became apparent that none of them had a knock down argument, so there is this rhetoric, “Oh she’s cobbled together a kind of collage if different ……..” which is exactly what scientific theories are supposed to do. Why was Newton’s theory of gravity so important? Because it integrated everything from why the moon went round the earth to why apples fall. The key thing of a good scientific theory is that is does this linking job on a lot of phenomenon hitherto thought to be unrelated. And whatever the long term merits of the theory are judged to be it certainly did that.

DA: Conscious of the accusations that she wasn’t a scientist, Elaine Morgan went on to write 4 more books on the subject of humanity’s aquatic past. Each, as she says, more prefaced than the last. Providing notes, referencing every citation, dotting it's and crossing is. And increasingly laudatory reviews and from ever more august journals, from the British Medical Journal:

BMJ: Elaine Morgan seems to have succeeded where professionals have failed. She’s made a genuine contribution to evolutionary theory which synthesizes research from all range of scientific disciplines.

DA: From the Annals of Human Biology:

AHB: My views about her latest book and what she was trying to achieve by writing it changed completely while I was reading it. It deserves to be read seriously.

DA: And an enthusiastic review from the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 1990 ended with the tolling of a warning bell:

RAI: The cost of conceding to Morgan would be a paleological crisis as profound as that of the earth scientists when adjusting to the equally impossible idea of floating continents.

DA: The reviewer was referring to the theory of Alfred Wegener that the continents of the earth are drifting apart. As a meteorologist Wegener was also a classic outsider and his theory was roundly ridiculed and rejected by geologists for over 30 years. But when the submarine research in the 1960s finely proved that the Atlantic sea floor really was spreading apart, hostility faded and Wagener's Plate Tectonics became the accepted paradigm. So, what of the aquatic ape? Will it too finally be endorsed as a paradigm account of how we became human? For 30 years anthropologist have maintained closed ranks and either ignored it, denounced it bizarre, or said simply there’s no testable evidence. No equivalent to the spreading sea floor. But now it would appear, the missing evidence is finally appearing and in next week’s programme, we will look at some of the evidence and see where it leads. Meanwhile the mainstream anthropology view of where humans really grew up is moving hesitantly down to the seashore. If not in a headlong rush. At least with the gingerly placing of a toe in the water. Indeed, in much the same way one might say that those earliest ancestral apes probably did too when first arriving at the coast.

Leslie Aiello: If we’re talking humans using aquatic resources, shellfish, fishing, it would be seashore, lakeshore environments. There’s every reason to believe that at specific phases throughout out evolutionary history. But if you’re talking about myself believing the aquatic hypothesis. I would say I only believe the aquatic hypothesis if I could define exactly when the evolutionary period. I can see we were using aquatic resources and how our anatomy or behavior would have been molded or reflected by that. But you know there is no one aquatic hypothesis. It depends what you mean by semi-aquatic, having one tow in the water.

EM: When Raymond Dart said I found this skull and I think it’s not quite a chimp’s, it took 30 years before they believed him. And Wegener said “I think the continents move” Rubbish! Shouted down in Harvard. Thirty years later, yes he was right! So I thought, I’ll give it 30 years. Well now we have 32.