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SUMMARY
The theory of a possible aquatic phase in human evolution was
first presented in 1942 by Max Westenhöffer in
Germany, it was also
independently conceived by Alister Hardy in 1929 and published by him in
1960. This chapter quotes Hardy’s reasons for delaying the publication,
describes the reception accorded to his ideas, and outline some subsequent
developments.
THE
BEGINNINGS
Alister Hardy first conceived the idea of a possible aquatic
phase in human evolution in 1929 on reading the following passage from Wood
Jones’s Mau’s Place Among the Mammals:
The
peculiar relation of the skin to the underlying superficial fascia is a very
real distinction, familiar enough to anyone who has repeatedly skinned both
human subjects and any other members of the primates. The bed of
subcutaneous fat adherent to the skin so conspicuous in man, is possibly
related to his apparent hair reduction, though it is difficult to see why,
if no other factor is invoked, there should be such a basal difference
between man and the Chimpanzee.
Hardy’s response was immediate. As a marine biologist, he was
more familiar with the skinning of sea mammals than of either human or non-
human primates. The phenomenon described by Wood Jones in connection with
human bodies reminded him irresistibly of his own first- hand experience of
the skin of various species of aquatic mammals in which a layer of
subcutaneous fat is the norm. He wondered whether in man also it might
initial1y have been an adaptation to a more aquatic way of life.
Other parallels between man and aquatic mammals soon sprang
to his mind, such as the naked skin, the relatively streamlined silhouette
of human beings compared with that of other primates, and the occasional
incidence of interdigital webbing. He reasoned that for a primate which
spent much of its time wading in water an erect posture would become
obligatory and, at the same time, easier to sustain without overbalancing.
The precision hand-grip and the unusual arrangement of hair tracts on the
human body much debated at the time) could have been acquired in the same
way.
He did not publish his ideas for over thirty years. His friends
warned him that if he publicly advocated such a bizarre theory it would
blight his career. They were probably right, At the end of his life he was
refreshingly candid about his reasons for keeping silent: ’I wanted to get a
good professorship; I wanted to be a Fellow of the Royal Society’, As it
turned out, long before he was ready to publish, a version of the hypothesis
appeared in print in Germany, as one. passage in a book entitled The Unique
Road to Man (Der Eigenweg des Menschen), written in 1942 by Max
Westenhöffer, a professor at the University of Berlin.
Westenhöffer’s account of the aquatic theory was that of a
man who had not made up his mind about it, He made no claim to be the
originator; neither did he credit anyone else with originating it. He
seemed, rather, to assume that it had been around for some time and that his
readers were likely to be familiar with it in general terms. It is quite
conceivable, since Hardy spoke of his ideas to some of his friends and
pupils in the interwar years, that speculation about it had already spread
father a field than Oxford, and had crossed to the Continent without being
traceable to any particular source.
Westenhöffer searched the literature of primate anatomy for
any reference to aquatic influence, and for species-specific features of
human anatomy which remained unaccounted for. He made no attempt to identify
the aquatic phase with any specific date, place or causative event. One of
the papers, written by G. L, Sera in 1924, hypothesises a very early aquatic
phase. Sera sought to account for some differences between Old World and New
World primates by suggesting that the ancestors of the platyrrhines had
undergone a period of aquatic development not shared by the catarrhines,
Westenhöffer’s general conclusion was that an aquatic experience at some
time or other was a promising hypothesis worthy of further consideration.
Unfortunately,
Westenhöffer’s book was published in the middle of the Second World War.
Europe had other things on its mind, and the usual channels for the exchange
of scientific ideas were silted op. By the time they ran c1ear again, the
heretical hypothesis had apparently been forgotten. Certainly Hardy knew
nothing of Westenhöffer; he died in 1’385 at the age of eighty-nine without
ever learning that he had been forestalled By 1960 he had achieved the aims
he had set his sights on: the Oxford professorship and the FRS, and a high
reputation as the author of authoritative works in his own field. He now
felt able to lower his guard sufficient1y to outline his theory to a local
sub-aqua club that He had been invited to address. A version of his speech
was communicated to the local press, and it appeared in garbled form under
sensational Headlines in the Sunday newspapers. Hardy published one article
and one radio lecture to clarify what he had actually said and believed.
Since he was a man who inspired
affection as well as respect, academic scholars adopted what they saw as the
kindest and most British way of dealing with an embarrassing situation: they
behaved as if he had not spoken or, at least, as if no one had happened to
be listening at the time. Among many who were in all of her respects his
staunchest admirers this attitude never wavered, so that when he died his
obituaries praised him for many things but conspired to ignore his aquatic
’indiscretion’. This has promulgated the myth in some quarters that Hardy
had propounded the whole thing as an impish practical joke which some
misguided people were naive enough to take seriously. However, in the last
year of his life he was interviewed about the subject on film* and he made
it absolutely clear that he regarded his hypothesis as revolutionary, and
significant, and entirely valid.
I first came across Hardy’s theory on reading a brief reference to
it in 1970 in Desmond Morris’s book The Naked Ape, and vainly searched
through books and journals on evolution for further information or
commentary about it, Apparently for ten years it had been silently sinking
into oblivion. I therefore wrote to Hardy saying that I intended to write a
book about it. He knew nothing about me, and I did not conceal that I had no
qualifications for entering the arena of her than my conviction that he was
right. So my letter came to him as, in his own words, ‘a bit of a shock’,
since he had never relinquished the idea of one day writing at greater
length on the subject himself.
However, he responded with characteristic generosity. On 26
October 1970, he wrote:
Yes, of course you must go
ahead and do so with my enthusiastic blessing. I hope it will be a great
success. As it is turning out, it may well be the best arrangement from any
point of view, You will be interesting – I hope and think exciting – the
general public in the idea, and... preparing a wider public for my more
zoological and anatomica1 treatment of the subject than I might otherwise
expect. Press on with it as hard as you can, although I am in no hurry to
publish quickly and my chapters are not written – just lot s of notes.
I did not meet Hardy or discuss
the contents of my book with him – or with any of her scientist – until
after it was published in 1972 under the title of The Descent of Woman. It
featured some additional arguments which Hardy had not considered. Some of
them – for example, the regression of the olfactory lobe and vendor-ventral
copulation – had already occurred to Westenhöffer and were mentioned in his
book (of which I knew nothing until Jurgen Hinrichs-Röhrig drew any
attention
to it in 1986). Other arguments, based on weeping and voluntary
breath control, were new.
Whatever the book’s merits or demerits, it performed one vital
service: it attached enough attention to ensure that the aquatic theory
would this time have a greater chance of remaining on the agenda of
evolutionary theorists, It was translated into ten languages and blew the
spores of the idea all round the world; they germinated in the minds of the
young and receptive and of many who were already convinced that there was
something missing in the conventional scenario of the emergence of man.
THE HYPOTHETICAL AQUATIC MODE OF LIFE
For those interested in the history of this idea, the original documents
are not always easy to retrieve. I therefore reprinted Hardy’s papers on the
subject in full in The Aquatic Ape (Morgan, 1982), and I append herewith a
translation of the relevant passage from Westenhöffer’s book.
The postulation of an aquatic mode of life during an early
stage of human evolution is a tenable hypothesis, for which further inquiry
may produce additional supporting evidence.
The shape of the human foot, broadening towards the front,
could indicate a paludine habitat, especially when we note the observations
of Mr O. Abel in his Palaeobiology (Stuttgart, 1912, pp. 229 – 30) where he
discusses the secondary plantigradism of certain fossilised bog animals, for
instance Mesodon and Coryphodon, whose footprint shows a remarkable
similarity to that of humans, For such a mammal, moreover, a move to an
aquatic environment would mean that powerful teeth would become unnecessary
due to the relative softness of the available food resources.
The fact that man lacks hair – but probably was hairy at some
earlier stage – suggests an analogy with the relative absence of hair in
water mammals whale, sea-cow, hippopotamus), especially since so far there
is no other plausible exp1anation. Another indication is the subcutaneous
layer of fat in humans; its capacity for expansion appears to predate human
civilization The so-called Venus statuettes, dating back to the Stone Age,
support this assumption. The hitherto unsolved problem concerning
pigmentation in humans may be related to this problem; rather than loss of
pigment in the white races, the re may have been increased pigmentation in
coloured ones, corresponding to the post-natal increase in pigmentation in
children of all races.
In his latest book On the Significance of the Ear Muscle, Mr
B. Henneberg also proposes an aquatic mode of life in the prehuman primate.
He assumes that this ancestral hominid featured a contractile form of the
ear muscle, with the anthelix tragus and antitragus) differing in shape from
that of Homo, and that this origina1 form was subsequently lost during the
transition to life on land. It is still easily possible to reproduce the
original form in children by artificial means, and the original feature has
in fact been observed in one living newborn baby. In his famous work
Physiology of Movement [Philadelphia, 1949], Duchenne shows that electrical
stimulation of the tragus and antitragus muscles in human beings is capable
of closing the entrance of the ear, which is why he calls the two muscles
’constrictor conchae sup. and inf,’.
Man shares with the water mammals the regression of the
olfactory organ, the bulbus and lobus olfactorius which, according to A.
Kappera and Count Haller, is connected with a certain development in the
conformation of the brain, not found in the macrosomatic animals,
As further evidence of an earlier aquatic way of living for
man, one could also point to the existence of mucous glands in small benign
tumours in the skin of man’s back which the Prague pathologist Schickel has
investigated and which, in the absence of any other possible explanation,
with reference to fish and frogs, he has called atavistic. Such mucous
glands have survived as the normal condition in the hippopotamus as a
physiological adaptation to its aquatic environment, while in humans they
appear under pathological conditions about which little is understood.
To this can be added the not particularly rare web-like skin
formation on the hand and toes seen also in Potamogale, the otter shrew),
and the direction of the body hair towards the elbow on the lower arm in
human beings and anthropoids, as well as in other apes and quadrupeds. The
usual explanation, that the direction of the hairs functions as protection
against rain when the arms are placed over the head, is too na7ve to be
correct. Apart from the fact that the head does not even get covered, the
water then would be conducted forward from the elbow between the hairs of
the upper arm and thereby directly to the skin of the armpit and chest,
which would hardly be advantageous, Even if this direction of the hairs were
peculiar to man, I would see it as not insignificant support for my aquatic
hypothesis, since such a direction of the hairs on the lower arm during
swimming stretching the arms forward) would have been useful,
This summary should not be concluded without some reference
to the ideas of the anthropologist, G. I.. Sera, in Naples. He takes the
view that the form and development of the Adam’s apple, the shortness of the
outer auditory passage, the form of the musculus glutaeocruralis (m.
tenuisaimus), some characteristics of the female genitals, the formation of
the kidneys, the form and development of the nasal cartilage, and the form
of the ear muscle may constitute evidence of a possible aquatic phase in the
evolution of the platyrrhine New World primates. And finally, I would point
out that man’s way of mating is also the standard method among water mammals
such as beavers, cetaceans and sirenians. The aquatic theory remains an open
question. But such hypotheses, which at first sound so improbable, should at
least serve as a stimulus to further research, on the principle that a good
detective follows up the least promising clues as well as those which seem
to point to a simple solution,
* Water Babies. Golden Dolphin
Productions, 21-3 McLaren Street, New Sydney 2060, Australia.
REFERENCES
Hardy, A., 1960, Was man more aquatic in the past? New Scientist, 7,
642-5.
Morgan, E., 1972, The Descent of Woman (London: Souvenir Press).
Morgan, E., 1982, The Aquatic Aye (London; Souvenir Press).
Morris, D., 1967, The Naked Ape (London: Jonathan Cape).
Sera, G. L.1938 Archivo Zoologico Italiano, Vol. 25.
Westenhöffer, M., 1942, Der Eigenweg des Menschen (Berlin: W. Mannstaede &
Co.).
Wood Jones, F., 1929, Man’s Place Among the Mammals (London: Edward Arnold).
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