Aquatic ape hypothesis makes sense to me.?

Question

After reading a book about above hypothosis it makes a lot of sense to me (I know that is not a reason for it to be true). Apparently more scientists are taking it seriously. What are the major objections to it and why has it been sidelined for so long.

Answer 1

There are no major objections for it but... there's no major support for it either. There aren't any fossils which would tend to support it. It's not "falsifiable." And, of course, we can't really go back into the past to observe what really happened.

It hasn't helped that some of its vocal proponents were fringers and nutcases.

Answer 2

All the reasons put forward for the hypothesis have other explanations or are selective in their interpretation. The hooded nose, for instance, is suited to a bi-pedal animal that breathes through its nose in the rain. Aquatic mammals tend to have their noses higher on the head.
The lack of hair is not characteristic of aquatic species. Whales and walruses and hippos, yes, but not seals, sealions, otters, platypuses, capaybaras etc. There are hairless non-aquatic species. There is no real space for the aquatic period in human evolution. Most human characteristics can be attributed to bipedalism rather than an aquatic period.

It is certain that most early humans lived near water, they had to. They would have used rivers, lakes and the sea as sources of food, it is easy to obtain and nutritious. Even so it is unlikely that we evolved characteristics for an aquatic existence. We are defenceless in water, cannot maintain body heat, and are ill equipped for swimming and hunting anything except shellfish - which are caught from the shore.

Answer 3

I like this rheory,.

The fact that young babies are perfectly at home in and underwater, with perfect breath control and the ability to see underwater this is instinctive, and has to be retort in older children.

We have subcutaneous fat like seals, other primates have
hair instead.

Females have fat filled breasts unlike any other primates making the nipple floart above the surface of the water to enable suckling in an aquatic enviroment

we are able to have sex in water with out damage to sperm or reproductive organs.


We have partialy webbed hands Ideal for swimming

We have a diving reflex

A diet rich in fish oils helped with the development of the brain and improved inteligence.

Any fossil evidence of these apes would be hard to find in the sea.

Answer 4

I would have to agree with emucompboy. The problem is that for most of the traits the AAT tries to explain better explanatory theories emerge. Just to give you a recent example, bipedalism, which is one of the human characteristics the AAT tries to account for, might actually have evolved in ancestral ape species as an adaptation for balancing on small flexible branches (cf. S.K.S Thorpe, R.L. Holder, R.H. Crompton "Origin of human bipedalism as an adaptation for locomotion on flexible branches," Science 316 (5829): 1328-1331).

Generally speaking, I think that the AAT is one of the theories about human evolution that stretch to explain certain characteristics of our species but fails to provide a truly reliable set of evidence supporting the theory. Or to say it more philosophically, like emucompboy, it is not a falsifiable theory.