Mention the 'aquatic ape
hypothesis' (AAH) to someone interested in human evolution and it is likely
that the first person they will think of is Elaine Morgan. It was Elaine
that picked the idea up in 1972 (twelve years after Hardy's request for
comments) out of a dark, and forgotten, corner of anthropology, dusted it
down, and thrust it into the public spotlight with her controversial book:
'The Descent of Woman'. And it was she that realised, considering the quite
astonishing paucity of an intellectual response from the field of
anthropology to the AAH-related questions her book posed, that actually
there probably really was something in this, after all. The result
was a further four books on the subject and over thirty years of dedicated
study and campaigning to promote the idea to people of a scientific
persuasion. Even today, at the age of eighty-six, she remains actively
engaged in the debates surrounding the AAH and regularly gives lectures on
the subject.
Elaine Floyd was born in November 1920, in Pontypridd, a Welsh mining town about
thirty miles north of Cardiff. It's a clichι to mention it but her working
class roots would shape her political orientation as much as her father's
atheism would shape her views on humanity and how it might have evolved. She
was an only child but had to win a scholarship in order to fund her higher
education which was spent studying the English language, specialising in
Etymology, at Oxford University during the war years. Ironically, a certain
Marine Biology professor was working there at exactly the same time,
Alister Hardy, but their paths did not cross, not at that time in any case./font>
Elaine, met her husband to be, Morien, through their mutual interest in left wing politics. They were both early members of the newly re-organised post-war Labour party and played their part in helping to bring Labour to a landslide victory in the first post-war election. Her husband was a secondary school French teacher and Elaine became, as was expected in those days, a house wife.
Always alert and inquisitive, her mind sought stimulation beyond that provided by the real challenges of bringing up children, cleaning the house and putting food on the table, and she began to use her masterful grasp of the English language in order to bring pleasure to other women in her situation and, through a happy coincidence, also bring in some extra cash too. She started writing romantic stories in women's magazines. Elaine clearly had talent and soon after the couple re-settled back in old South Wales she landed upon the opportunity to start writing dramas for a completely new medium that was just starting to take off: Television soap operas. Elaine wrote most of the episodes for Dr Findlay's Casebook, as well as several other plays and won several Emmy awards, the highest accolade possible for her.
Elaine and me at Mountain Ash, 2005
Elaine has always been on the left side of the political spectrum and she has always found herself campaigning for the underdog and the under privileged. So it was in the 1960s and early 1970s that she felt a natural orientation towards the women's rights movement. The naming of her book, 'The Descent of Woman', and its timing, controversially 100 years after Darwin's 'Descent of Man' says it all. The book was really all about how men had grabbed the territory of describing how 'Man' evolved as their own and she demanded a rethink. She made fun of the way that images of 'man the mighty hunter' returning from the kill to throw a few lumps of meat to the females that were most sexually appealing had actually become de rigueur in many models of human evolution. It was actually Desmond Morris' book 'The Naked Ape' published in 1967, which extolled this view extremely explicitly - even to the point of apparently postulating that the shape of women's' breasts might have evolved merely because it could have reminded an otherwise confused, sexually rampant male, to have intercourse face-to-face, instead of "doggy-style" - because, wait for it, the rounded pendulous breasts looked rather like a nice bottom, something he was used to 'going for!'
It is easy to poke fun as such sentiments today but Elaine broke the mould when she did so in 1972. The reaction to her ridicule did not win her many friends in anthropology, however. Surprisingly, even the large minority of female anthropologists, found it easier to attack her rather than see her as an ally. But in the midst of all that male-female controversy lay another storm about to blow. Morris' book did contain some extremely interesting thoughts and ideas, not least of which was the basis of it's title. Morris' first chapter was enthralling. There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes", he wrote. "One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens. Morris (1967:5) Describing how, as a zoologist by training, he would respond to such an odd set of features in other mammals... Staring at this strange specimen and puzzling over the significance of its unique features, the zoologist now has to start making comparisons. Where else is nudity at a premium? The other primates are no help, so it means looking further a field. A rapid survey of the whole range of the living mammals soon proves that they are remarkably attached to their protective, furry covering, and that very few of the 4,237 species in existence have seen fit to abandon it. After some more musings, Morris then concluded : At this point the zoologist is forced to the conclusion that either he is dealing with a burrowing or an aquatic mammal, ot there is something very odd, indeed unique, about the evolutionary history of the naked ape. Morris (1967:11)
This struck a chord with Elaine, as did Morris' later, extremely complementary references to Hardy's 'more aquatic' idea: Another, more ingenious theory is that, before he became a hunting ape, the original ground ape that had left the forests went through a long phase as an aquatic ape. He is envisaged as moving to the tropical sea-shores in search of food. There he will have found shellfish and other sea-shore creatures in comparative abundance, a food supply much richer and more attractive than that on the open plains. At first he will have groped around in the rock pools and the shallow water, but gradually he will have started to swim out to greater depths and dive for food. Morris (1967:29.) Perhaps here, we have the first reference to "aquatic ape", an unfortunate aide memoir which seems to have stuck.
Morris soon moved onto other things, like hunting men, gathering women and those bottom shaped breasts, but Elaine couldn't stop thinking about Hardy's idea. She thought the idea was so brilliant she wrote to Hardy personally and asked him about it, telling him that she was thinking of writing a book based on it.
Hardy wrote back informing her that he intended to write a book on the subject himself soon, but then, after consultation with his agent, wrote back informing her that he had been advised that it might be better if someone less well known wrote a book on the subject first. Thus Hardy gave Morgan the green light to make the AAH her own, not that she needed it.
Morgan, Elaine (1972). The Descent of Woman.
Souvenir Press (London)
"So, you just wrote this book?" Was
the response of Elaine's agent, someone more used to reading rather lighter
works from his client than this, on reading the finished manuscript. He saw
it's appeal straight away and new it would be the great popular success it
turned out to be.
It is a much criticised work, even today, because it was not as well
researched and as academically oriented as scientists would normally expect
or demand. It made a few assertions that, perhaps with hindsight, went a
little too far (like the salty tears for excreting salt water idea). But
even reading it now, it retains a sharp wit and poignancy much of which is
still relevant today. And, even more to the point here, it clearly shows
that Elaine, like Hardy before her, was not postulating any great
'primate seal', truly aquatic phase in human evolution.
At the highest point of their period of aquatic adaptation the ancestral hominids, though never as fully marine as the dolphins or sirenians, would probably have been capable of crossing wide stretches of water under their own steam; and without postulating that at such an early stage of their evolution they became boat builders, it is highly possible that they would have been aware of some of the uses of a floating log. Morgan (1972:133)
This is hardly an argument for a mermaid.
Having written the book, she thought that would be the end of it. After no-one had responded she honestly thought that the field of anthropology didn't think the idea was worth the trouble of a reply (she was right about that...) because they knew a simple fact, that she had just overlooked, as to why it was wrong (...but not about that.)
If it had not been for a certain American policeman, called Chuck Milliken, who kept pestering her about when her next book was coming out, it might have been the end of the story. What Chuck did was to actually write to several senior paleoanthropologists in American universities about Morgan's book, asking them what they thought about it. Milliken sent her copies of their replies and, upon reading then, Elaine began to realise that, actually, they did not have any magic answer as to why it was wrong, after all. They dismissed her and her credentials but had almost no good counter point to the idea itself. This lit a fire in her that drove her for the next thirty years to continue to battle against a particularly distressing mixture of stone walling and hostility from the authorities. She improved her scholarliness, revised some of the ideas a little in places and, in book after book, asked and asked again more awkward questions about human evolutions that the orthodox, exclusively terrestrial and/or arboreal, model os our evolution could not answer but that some form of AAH might.
Morgan, Elaine (1977). Falling Apart - The Rise and
Fall of Urban Civilization
Stein and Day (New York)
This is a book on a very different subject, indicating that in the mid 1970s, Elaine Morgan was certainly not, yet, committed to the AAH as her "main thing". It's look at city life, how it evolved and how it causes economic problems for the rest of the world. This is, in Elaine's own words, "the one we don't talk about."
Morgan, Elaine (1982). The Aquatic Ape Theory.
Souvenir Press (London)
This was a much more scholarly account of Hardy's ideas. It included a very generous preface from Hardy himself and was the first book specifically on the subject. Before 1997 it was the best book to read on the subject and is still essential reading to anyone interested in the idea.
Morgan, Elaine (1990). The Scars of Evolution.
Oxford University Press (Oxford)
This book looked at the same idea from the angle of aspects of human biology which are a little hard to explain. Influenced by Marc Verhaegen here, Elaine looked at such peculiar topics as hernias and varicose veins produced from a switch to bipedalism and greater adiposity.
Morgan, Elaine (1994). The Descent of the Child.
Penguin Books (London)
This, beautiful in my opinion, account of human evolution from the point of view of the child really opens ones eyes to the even looking at our evolution from the point of view of men and women is not enough. What about the child?, asks Elaine, reminding us that as most deaths occur in early life then factors effecting natural selection there are perhaps even more important than in adults.
Morgan, Elaine (1997). The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis.
Souvenir Press (London)
The best of her works, academically at least, is undoubtedly this one. In it Morgan attempts, and I believe, succeeds to answer her critics. She reaches a level of academic authority that belies her lack of training in anthropology. If any piece of work has ever justified an honorary degree it is this. But, of course, none was forthcoming, at least not from university that spoke her language.
This book should been the reading list of anyone who wants to study human evolution, even, perhaps especially, those who are naturally sceptical about the AAH.
Elaine still campaigns for the AAH to be taken more seriously today but, truth be known, she's moved on now to bigger things. Her last book, published in 2005 was still about human evolution but the dreaded 'a' word is nowhere to be seen in it.
Morgan, Elaine (2005). Pinker's List.
Souvenir Press (London)
In Pinker's list, Elaine takes on what she perceives as the 'Scientific Right Wing', people like Stephen Pinker who have come close to suggesting that biological determinism is almost a proven fact. My view is that in his latest book, 'The Blank Slate', Pinker falls short of that accusation. It seems to me that he is, instead, trying to counter the old notion that children are empty vessels that can be filled by education and parental influence and hence moulded into anything we can construct an environment. To me he's arguing that it's actually 50:50: Half environment, half genetics. Elaine basically argues the same thing, but from the other side of the fence. Pinker seems worried that it has been too left wing in the past. Morgan seems worried that it might drift too far right in the future. Both, in my view, are correct at the moment.
Algis Kuliukas
February 2006
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