Sir Alister Clavering Hardy FRS stunned the world of paleoanthropology into a prolonged silence that persists to this day when, in 1960, he gave a speech at the British Sub-Aqua club in Brighton. It was at this meeting that he broke thirty years of self-imposed silence and decided to publicise his long held and growing belief that humans may have had a more aquatic past.
Hardy was a marine biologist born in England the East Midlands city of Nottingham in 1896. He was educated at Oxford and in 1921 he was appointed assistant naturalist at the Fisheries Laboratory in Lowestoft where he started the work on the life stages of the herring and - for which he would gain most of his professional respect - their dependence on zooplankton.
He was the zoologist on The Discovery expedition to the Antarctic and, as well as studying zooplankton and their relationship with whales he also became very familiar with the anatomy of marine mammals.
It was this background that led him, in 1930, to wonder if man had had a more aquatic past after reading Wood Jones' "Man's Place amongst the Mammals." The author was postulating why in humans fat pulls away with the skin whereas with almost all terrestrial mammals is does not. In one of those famous 'eureka' moments Hardy's brain twigged it. "I know why - it's blubber!"

Unfortunately the notion that man might have evolved from a more aquatic mammal was even less popular in 1930 than it is today and, being a marine biologist with little grounding in human evolution and having set his sights on a long and successful career path he decided to keep the theory "in the dark".

He was Professor of Zoology at the University of Hull (1928-1942) achieving FRS status in 1940 but apparently was not aware that around this time the same idea of a more aquatic past was independently arrived at by the German scientist Max Westenhőffer, who was the first to publish such an account in 1942 "Der eigenweg des menschen" (The road to man.)

After a brief spell in Aberdeen he became Linacre Professor of Zoology in Oxford between 1945 and 1961, becoming knighted in 1957. It was only when he was approaching retirement that Hardy decided to go public on his "fantastic" theory. There was such an outcry in the popular press that Hardy was compelled to write up his theory in a more scientific journal - New Scientist.

The response was underwhelming and apart from a few positive letters of reply in the pages the official response was to ignore it. Desmond Morris mentioned his idea in The Naked Ape in 1967 but if Elaine Morgan had not picked up on it and been so determined to pursue the issue we might never have heard of the idea today.

By the time he died, in 1985, he had still not received any recognition for his ingenious theory and even today the world of paleoanthropology remains unable to give any proper scientific argument as to why the theory is flawed.

Hardy's other (probably his biggest) interest was in the area of religious and telepathic experiences. In the forward he wrote in Elaine Morgan's (1990) book the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis, he explained why he hadn't written a book on the subject himself by stating that "I have been fully immersed in research into other features of man's nature that I have felt to be even more important than his aquatic past. This has been the subject of my last two books." His approach was scientific. He wanted to compile a database of people's religious experiences so that he might try to determine if there were common properties amongst them. His work led to the founding of the Alister Hardy Trust which continues to investigate these matters to this day. (see http://www.alisterhardytrust.org.uk/)

Atheists will probably not be very impressed with this phase of his career, but even if that is true it really should not deflect from the importance of his earlier work in marine biology and his quite brilliant idea about human evolution.

Note the word.... "MORE"!

See a PDF scan of the actual original article here....

"Was Man More Aquatic in the Past?" New Scientist. 17th March 1960
 

Sir Alister Hardy FRS